wefalck

Sorry for the belated thank you for your kind words ! ********************************************* Block-making 2 Somehow it seems to be always two steps ahead and then at least one step back … apart from the actual manufacturing problems, I somehow loose about 30% of the originally made blocks somewhere along the road. They jump of the tweezers and other tools … and the bakelite being light and elastic they jump far away and never seem to stay on the bench or in my apron … I was not really entirely satisfied with the blocks I had turned out so far and tried out different variants of the above method over the past few weeks. Perhaps my improvised mill from a broken 0.2 mm drill was not sharp enough, anyway, the milled slots had a tendency to break out. I got myself from China (a lot cheaper than from European sources, where companies would have charged me for the shipping alone the amount of money that I paid for the item) a proper 0.2 mm end-mill, but the same happened. This is probably due to the fact that this kind of bakelite has a layered structure inherited from the paper that is used in its fabrication. Perhaps it would have been better to cut the block perpendicular to the layering. Cutting the grooves for the copper-wire straps I tried out a method that has been shown on various fora, namely saw cuts along the full length of the block to simulate the grooves for the sheave and then to drill a hole for the rope. The rest of the procedure was as above. Drilling the blocks with a 0.2 mm drill A problem was also cutting off the blocks from the billet. Somehow my method was tedious and at least about one in five blocks ended up flying around the workshop to be never found again. Not very efficient. So, I built a tiny gadget for the saw table of my lathe along the lines of the cross-cutting slides used on table-saws. This clamps the billet and the cut off block securely during the cutting and allows to locate the saw-cut precisely. A miniature cross-cutting slide for cutting off blocks from the billet It is a piece of rectangular aluminium 8 mm x 6 mm into which a recess is milled at the bottom so that it fits over the saw table and is guided parallel to it. Then a step is milled into the front, over which a 6 mm x 6 mm brass angle fits to serve as down-hold. The angle is guided by two pins that have been hard-soldered into it. Two screws (I have added a second one since taking the pictures) push the angle down onto the workpiece. The saw slot was cut in situ with the 0.2 mm wide saw-blade that I am going to use with the gadget. Now I can cut off the blocks safely and quickly without the risk of losing them. The cross-cutting slide used on the watchmakers lathe saw-table After separating, the blocks are shaped and rounded off individually using an abrasive wheel in the handheld drill. Earlier attempts with a small homemade tumbler were not successful, as the blocks are too small, too light, to few and the material too hard. Doing the rounding off in the hand-held vice works quite well. All the previous methods were aimed to efficiently round off the entrance to the borehole in order to simulate the sheave and thus to make the rope enter and leave tangentially to the sheave. In order to achieve this now, the rounding-off has to be done manually. Not so easy as the bore is only 0.2 mm. For diameters above 0.25 mm I purchased a diamond-studded round fret-saw blade, but this is the smallest diameter on the market. After some head-scratching I fashioned a micro-chisel from a broken fretsaw-blade, which is held in a pin-vice for the time being (have to make a graver handle). With the chisel the groove is rounded into the bore, while the rough block is held in the hand-vice that I have adapted for the purpose. The groove for the ‘iron’ straps were filed with a miniature (1 mm x 1 mm x 1mm) triangular file. Brass insert-jaws in the hand-vice, fashioned to hold blocks during manipulations The next challenge was the external strapping with a hook at the end. In theory, the straps are strips of flat iron bar. While it was possible to flatten the copper wire that I was going to use in controlled way, the material broke easily and it was difficult to place the flat sections before twisting the ends together to form the hooks. Therefore, a practical concession needed to be made and the straps were going to be round. The next issue was to hold the block while attaching the strap. I made a special clamp from Novotex for the third-hand, but it did not hold the block securely enough. In the end it occurred to me that also the hand-held vice could be used, while clamping it into a larger vice. Still the overall operation is very delicate. Finally, the tail end of the strap is cautiously bent into a hook. However, the copper wire is too soft to serve as a hook and also the structure of the two twisted ends is too obvious. Therefore, the hook was covered in a drop of soft-solder, which stiffens it and covers up to some extent the twisted structure. In addition, the back of the hook was somewhat flattened to better simulate the shape of a real hook. Overall, this is turned out to be a very time-consuming procedure and I reckon, that it takes me upward of an hour per block, adding up all the different steps, notwithstanding that they are made in small batches. That’s ok for a small ship, but would be out of question for a larger sailing ship. I am still not entirely happy with the fact that the blocks and in particular the hooks are not as uniform as I would have wished them to be. The lighter 2 mm blocks and the darker 1.6 mm long double blocks (they will be eventually all painted white) To be continued ....

Isn't there any ratchet mechanism on the windlass or is it not finished yet ?

Ochre is a pigment widely used on ships of all times. Unfortunately, ochre is a complex mineral with varying properties depending on the source and its further treatment/refinement. Basically it is an iron-oxyhydroxide (FeOOH), but can be mixed with magnetite (Fe3O4), colloidal iron-hydroxide (Fe(OH)3), iron carbonate (FeCO3), and various other impurities, such as manganese compounds. In practice, the colour of natural occurences can vary from pale yellow to a blueish dark red. The more mineral water it contains, the paler the yellow and the less (in general) the more orange-red it appears. By heating it, one can make it deep red. Given this variability and the cost of refinement, since the middle of the 19th century the better quality is synthesised by precipating it from an iron solution, but the temperature variation still is there. In addition, ochre is rarely used by itself as pigment in paint preparation, but often diluted with some cheap white pigment - which changes it tint, particularly, if the pigment changes the pH of the paint, as e.g. ground limestone would do. The kind of binder used and any addition of driers will also change the tint of a paint - and glossy surface looks different from a satin or wheathered one ...

Just to add to Bob's comments: I have been using Vallejo et al. acrylic paints pre-diluted for airbrushing in such pens. As they come in bottles with pipettes, they are easy to adminster to the pens. Both, a curse and a blessing is the fact that acrylics dry very fast. So frequent cleaning of the pen is required, but that is easy. The typical draughting sets usually also include such pen-inserts for the various compasses, which could also be useful for making your own decals in this way. Earlier this year I also was able to buy cheaply one of those old-time gadgets with which one can generate broken lines - the pen is lifted and lowered by a toothed wheel as you run it along your ruler. Thought it might come handy for exactly that purpose or for generating rivet lines using a tailor-made toothed wheel and acrylic gel ... in fact the pens might come useful for generating welding seams as well, though I had not need yet to try this out.

Vallejo has been around catering for artists for a long time, so I think they know what they are doing. I use their Model Air range also for brush-painting, when washes are required or the build of thin layers of paint - obviates the need for dilution. However, I am working on small models only, so the higher price for less pigment is irrelevant. I don't think colour-matching to some historical prototype is really relevant in our realm, as we mostly don't actually know what colours exactly were used and how the respective paints were mixed up from what components. So this is all rather speculative the further you go back in history, particularly in the time before the 1920s, when the first attempts at standardisation were made.

Where did you see the masculine form ? In fact, the 'La' is not a grammatical article here, but part of the ship's name in French. In Germanic languages we typically do not use the article in ship names, at least not in this kind of name, hence we tend to drop it from French names.

To make matters a bit more complicated: in the old days waterlines often were not laid out along the line that you would have, when the hull rests in the water; rather they were slightly raised at the bow and stern. This was done for three reasons, it gives the hull a more 'dynamic' look, it also visually cancels out any 'hogging' of the hull due to older age, and finally it counteracts the visual impression that the waterline is bent downwards at the ends, when comparing it to the upsweep of wales and the sheer-line. The craftsmen of old (the sign-makers and coach-painters in particular) used very long-haired brushes to draw lines. Some modern car- and motorcycle painters still use this technique of 'lining', which requires a lot of practice. There are also specialist tools for this, which basically consist of wheel onto which paint is dispensed from a reservoir. The tools are popular among model railway and steam-engine builders, where lining occurs frequently. A further option are waterslide transfers again from the realm of model railway enthusiasts. They do straight lines in various widths and colours. For white lines one may cut these also from 'decal' sheets with a white background - or paint the transparent ones in the desired colour and cut them to width afterwards.

The common disposable scalpel blades are not meant for wrenching, i.e. side-forces, they are meant for straight downward cuts in the plane of blade. Swann-Morton and similar suppliers also make 'post-mortem' blades that are thicker and hence stronger, but I think they are more expensive and not so easy to find on ebay etc. In the old days at least they made pretty heavy scalpels. My father trained as a medical doctor in the late 1930s/early 1940s and I inherited from him a set of heavy anatomical/post-mortem scalpels with nice ebony handles. The blades can be honed very sharp. It is always useful to make oneself aware of what happens, when you cut something with a knife-edge tool: you basically drive a wedge into the material in question. The thinner the wedge, the easier it is to drive it in. To drive the wedge in, you have to displace material. The tougher the material, the more difficult it is obviously to displace it. And here comes our impatience into play: we want to remove as much as possible with a single cut. But the tougher the material, the thinner the shaving etc. should be. Removing the material in layers/steps is often the answer to flexing blades - it makes wrenching the blade unnecessary. Thinking strategically into which direction the material needs to be displaced also allows you to make relieving cuts first.

Thank you very much to all of you for the friendly comments ! I don't remember for sure, but I probably coated the bare metal in zapon-varnish. This is the varnish that is commonly used to prevent the tarnishing of silver and brass objects.

Thanks. I knew about these kits - I think they were marketed also under other brands, but never got into this. Was tempted though at some stage, but found them rather big. Still looking for a 54 mm kit with German mid-15th century gothic fluted armour and the so-called 'Schallern'-type helmet, as kann be seen in the Wallace-collection in London or the Kunsthistorische Museum in Vienna. This type of helmet was the inspiration for the WWI German steel-helmet and later for a certain Star Wars-character. Got a small collection of source-books on medieval amour to inform the modelling.

I build this in the early 1990s on the basis of a kit by Friulmodel (https://friulmodel.hu/termek/mp-5-knight-hospitaller-c-1150/). The helmet was still good for around 1200, but the shield had to be changed to the more modern, rounded triangular form of the time. The chain-mail and helmet is the bare white-metal, polished, while the coat was painted with the airbrush in acrylics. Details were added with a brush in acrylics and oil. The background is modelled after the Chorin-monastery not far from Berlin. The bricks and stonework are shaped and engraved from plaster of Paris and painted.

Incidentally, this appears to be a sailor's model and when I interpret the jumble on the second picture correctly, the model was rigged as a 5-masted ship, not barque. There seems to be also an anachronism, as on the model the shrouds are rigged with dead-eyes, but at that time bottle-screws would have been used. For all ships French I would turn to the Association des Amis du Musée de la Marine in Paris (https://www.aamm.fr). They are usually helpful and also have English-speakers. Arguably the best source on early 20th rigging of steel ships is this (albeit in German): MIDDENDORF, F.L. (1903): Bemastung und Takelung der Schiffe.- 401 p., Kassel (reprint 1977 by Horst Hamecher). The Author was responsible for the design of inter alia PREUSSEN.

It would be difficult to know what materials and techniques the Vickers-Armstrong model-workshop used, if the model was actually made in-house and not contracted out to professional modell-building workshop. However, I would first consult textbooks on paints and paintfinished published around that time. They give recipes, list raw materials and application techniques. Raw materials at these times often went by 'common' names and 'trivial' names for chemical compounds that sometimes are not so easy to identify today. However, there are encyclpedias/dictionaries that explain these to the interested public or the commercial people of the time. Such books can be now downloaded from the Internet in many cases. I am not so acquainted with the English-language literature on this subject, so I cannot point to specific works. This is a time, when people began to experiment more frequently with man-made materials ('plastics' in the widest sense) and this can occur as construction materials and as binders in paints as well. However, these 'plastics' were not normally derived from mineral oil, but rather from organic raw materials. Celluloid and bakelite come to mind, as examples, but there are also casein-based raw materials. The post WWI period also has seen an increasing use of synthetic dyes and pigments in addition to the traditional mineral and organic ones. There is also an abundant literature on conservation and restoration issues and techniques, either in the form of textbooks or scientific articles in journals or as contributions to symposia etc. Certain individuals or museums have specialised in particular aspects, such as metal or wood conservation, or paint restoration. Obviously, the big maritime and technical museums around the world face the same problems and might be prepared to provide advice or can at least direct you to the right sources of information.

According to my German 1878 textbook on (naval) boatbuilding, the diagonal planking was up to 30% lighter, than a carvel-planked boat and even more so for a lap-strake built one. However, building costs were higher and they are also more difficult to repair. The diagonal-carvel system (as in this example) was used particularly, when the hull was to be (partially) varnished on the outside, rather than painted all over. A tropical hardwood was preferred for the inner planking to better resist rotting - it would have been very difficult to replace inner planking without essentially dismantling half of the boat. The model is coming on nicely. It's a pity that not much of the inner diagonal strakes will be visible at the end.

Good Luck !

If the spindle has an outside thread, as some have, you can also try to find an ER collet chuck to screw on. Collets run much more concentric than jacobs-chucks. Apart from the Morse-taper issue, another issue might be that the rpms are just not high enough for cleanly milling wood.

The original manufacturers of acrylic glass (Plexiglas) recommend using water as a lubricant. However, with such thin rod it is not really needed. Just use the finest piercing saw blade you can get and don't work too fast. Scoring and snapping-off is also a procedure recommended by the manufacturers. Works for rods and sheets up to about 3 mm thickness.

Got this kit in 1977, but dumped almost everything except for the hull. The hull (and the awfull deck) are vacuum-formed styrene, if I remember correctly, so if you keep the deck, the two parts should cement together with the usual styrene cement. If the parts are ABS, you would use a standard 'contact' cement, the kind that you apply to one side, let it almost dry and then bring the two parts together. You don't say, where you are based, so there is probably no point referring to any brand of cement. As I said, I dumped the deck-part at that time and made a new deck from a sheet of ABS that was carefully fitted to the inside of the hull. It was cemented in place with some little wooden blocks that were cemented into the hull first. All glueing was done with contact cement. I 'planked' the deck with paper-backed self-adhesive wood-veneer. The deck-houses and hatches were built up from sheets of ABS also covered in this kind of wood veneer. Not sure, whether I would do this again, but it lasted very well until today. I then glued bullwark stanchions to the inside of the hull. With the hull stabilised like this, I half-filled it with Plaster of Paris to give weight, trimmed off the horizontal part of vacuum-formed hull and added a wooden capping rail. Incidentally, this was my first model that was built from scratch except for the hull, because I just wasn't happy with what the kit provided.

Dumont indeed is one of the brands to go to. I have a small arsenal of watchmakers tweezers and also various biological ones that I inherited from my father. He had also a very good dentist one, but that got lost in a house move unfortunately. Tweezers is one thing I would hesitate buying on-line. One really need to see how well they close. Good quality ones then will last for ever, if not mistreated or dropped to the floor. I've been using my favourite one for over 30 years on a daily basis. BTW, don't junk your cheapo ones, use them, when you have to hold hot stuff, e.g. during soldering, as this my draw the temper from your good ones and you don't want to do that ...

Actually, the 'tarred' bilge looks very convincing ... the rest is coming on nicely too.

I litterally spent the last six months trying to solve exactly this problem. For my current project I need only 1.6 mm and 2.0 mm long double outside iron-strapped blocks in a shape appropriate for the later 19th century, but I meant to develop a procedure with which I can make larger number of reasonably uniform blocks down to 1 mm length. There were originally two main criteria: a) avoid drilling numerous tiny holes down to 0.1 mm diameter and b) ensure that the rope runs out tangentially from the block and doesn't stick out radially with a sharp kink. Many years ago it occurred to me that one could etch the shells and sheaves from brass sheet (using surface etching) as parts that can be folded up and then soldered together. Unfortunately, at the moment I am not set up for etching anymore, so this idea was not practical. Since I bought a small laser-cutter about two and a half years ago, I attemped to adapt the above idea and cut the pieces from Canson-paper. Cutting the parts as such went well, but the precise alignment of the tiny flecks of paper proved impossible and the holes for the rope tended to fill up with the lacquer I used for laminating. Being paper (albeit soaked in lacquer) the blocks could not really be sanded - particularly holding them for the purpose was just not feasible. After numerous attempts with different configurations for building the blocks from layers I gave up. I also attempted a variant of the above using brass sheaves and making only the shell from paper. However, turning 0.6 mm brass sheaves of 0.2 mm or less thickness did not work even on my watchmakers lathe, at least not in quantities. I tried the method of building up layers from styrene sheet and using brass sheaves. While styrene sands better than paper, the problems of holding and making the sheaves remain. For an earlier model I had tried to mill and drill blocks from brass or perspex rod. Perspex is easy to machine, but thin parts are very brittle. Brass can be machined to intricate shapes, but drilling multiple 0.2 mm holes into brass is a challenge and may result in many broken drills ... In the end I reverted back to a miniaturisation of the traditional method of shaping blocks in a row from strips sawn to the outside dimension. However, I am not using wood, because the grain, even in boxwood, causes problems at these small dimensions. I prefer to use brown bakelite as used in electronics and electrical applications. Bakelite can be a bit brittle, but machines and polishes well. The procedure I finally arrived at is (based on the capacity of my micro-milling vice, I working with batches of eight blocks) for a 1.5 mm block: 1- Cut strips that are a tad wider than the blocks are long from bakelite sheet of suitable thickness (here 1 mm) 2 - Mount strips into the milling vice so that 0.15 mm deep grooves for the sheaves can cut with a 0.2 mm circular saw blade 3- Repeat from the other side 4- Re-orient the milling vice so that at one end, in suitable distance from the edge, 0.2 mm holes can be drilled through the grooves 5- Re-position the strip, so that the grooves for the strap can be milled into the top- and bottom-ends with a conical burr 6- Rough-shape the block by milling off the corners with the same conical burr 7- Take the strip back to the circular saw and cut off the individual blocks 8- Hold the block in a pin-vice that has a recession milled in and round-off with a rubberised abrasive wheel in the hand-held drill 9- Round-off the groove into the drill-hole using a tiny graver fashioned from a piece of 0.2 mm thick piercing saw blade (for holes above 0.25 mm diameter also diamond-studded piercing saws wires are available that can be used for this) The blocks are now ready for the external strap. I tried the strapping with flattened copper-wire, but this proofed to be too flimsy and broke all the time. In the end I used the round wire, although this is not quite correct - there are limitations. Basically, I loope the wire around the block and then drilled the two ends together. For blocks that have an eye at one end, the eye was first formed with very fine tweezers and the wire then looped around the block as before. The block was held in the same adapted pin-vice as above. A collection of blocks and the special pin-vice to hold them This is how far I got. The next step will be forming the hooks and stiffening them with solder. Otherwise the wire is too soft. Earlier stages of these tries are illustrated in my current building log:

Very clean work, as usual. Are these doors stamped or soldered together from two layers ?

No. The yoke was used when rowing and under sail. Locking the rudder would make it rather hard to steer the boat with the oars and it is very tiring for the rowers, when they constantly have to adjust the speed or force to make small corrections of the course. This is done by one or two 'helmsmen' at the rudder pendants according to the commands by the NCO or officer in charge of the boat.

On the yoke vs. tiller: I had a look in my old textbooks on naval boats, but there they state that cutters may use a yoke for steering and it is not very wide. I gather, when being rowed, sharper turns can be achieved by rowing on one side only, while under sail, the driver placed far aft, yawl-fashion would aid the steering by either hauling it more or less taught, so changing the tendency of the boat going into the wind or otherwise. Thus the rudder would only be needed for small corrections of the course.

Nice work on the flags. And I agree that printing on thin paper is probably more successful. I usually then repaint with acrylics, as the the printer inks may not be very lightfast. Also liked the 'engineering' approach to the grapnels. Not so simple to recreate these simple fire-welded units. The flags made me curious, as they have as the main motive the colours of Aragon (the red and yellow stripes), which also appears in the flags and coats-of-arms of Catalonia, Barcelona, Valencia, Spain in general, and various others. Its a long story dating back to the Counts/Kings of Aragon, who sort of spread to the coastal zone of Eastern Spain and SE France as the Reconquista progressed. A bit of the history and the flags can be read here in German/English: https://www.flaggenlexikon.de/ffrkprov_dt.htm. It appears that your flag was created only in 1999 for the then newly created 'region' of Provençe-Cote-d'Azur (the French administration assembled a number of the Départements created after the French Revolution into larger units of certain economic and cultural coherence over the past 20 years or so, to some degree re-establishing the ancient feudal-political units that the revolution intended to break up).