wefalck

Well, Gustave Caillebotte became kind of a 'professional' in the area. He was successful in competitions, both on the Seine and off the coast. He designed his own boats, but hired a professional boat-builder and set up a yard to have them built. I don't think they used real silk sails on these boats, though Caillebotte might have had access to all sorts of fabrics, as his family's business was in fabrics. Sewn fabric sails are probably appropriate at this large scale. There is the silk that is used to cover the wings of model airplanes ('silk-span') or the fabrics used for silk-screen printing. This fabric is quite cheap actually. Not so easy to sew, but possible with a good machine. I have done it in the past with silk-paper backing to avoid distortion in the sewing-machine.

... these were supposed to be songs without word

In a German forum there is currently a discussion going on about classical draughtsmenship versus CAD. Somehow I have been leaning towards CAD early on, but have the feeling that certain elements would be quicker and easier using hand-tools - or perhaps I don't have the right CAD-tools. Still, there is this southing haptic experience of sitting at the drawing-board. I still have an A0-board that can be raised and tilted, together with the machine and all the draughting tools ... Will be watching this space !

Good start and the fairing sander is something I should make a mental note of. I seem to remember, I think from some magazine Article, that Bruno Orsel made a very elaborate metal framing device to produce the laminated frames. Reminded me of of the devices the Thonet factory used to make their bent-wood chairs (the 'classical' bistrot-chairs). I gather you will need a lot of clamps or something to keep the laminae bent in two directions, while settling.

In metal-working so-called 'engineers parallels' are used to raise work in a vice. These are either solid, ground steel-prisms or sort of short lengths of wavy steel sheets. They always come in pairs, ground to exactly the same height. There is also a height-adjustable variant, kind of two connected wedges. A cheap alternative are sections of drill-rod of different diameter and cut to the length of the vice. Drill-rod is ground to specific tolerances, so the diameter is constant, at least for our purposes. For narrow work-pieces use a single one, for wider work-pieces one in front of each vice-jaw. Yet another alternative are 'keys' that are used to 'key' say a gear-wheel onto a shaft. They come in a wide variety of sizes and are ground to certain tolerances, as they have to fit into the key-ways of given tolerances. As a mass-product the are quite cheap and I have pairs of different sizes for my miniature vices. As the jaws in the above vice are made interchangable, one can jaws of different height and perhaps different profile, say to clamp round work. Many engineers vices also have a rabbet cut into the edge of each jaw, so that thin, flat stock can be clamped without parallels.

There is a coloured drawing in the NMM, Greenwich, that shows the greenhouse arrangemnts in the great cabin. As I saw this in an exhibition in the 1970s, I don't remember though, whether it shows any skylights. I would search for BOUNTY on their Web-site.

As much as I admire McCaffery’s work, his insistence on using ‘permanent’ materials on about every second page in his book becomes tedious after a while. When it comes to the survival of artefacts, it is always a combination of factors and materials choices is but one of them. Storage conditions are of equal importance. Even brief periods of unsuitable conditions by accident can permanently damage a piece that has otherwise been kept under perfect conditions. Even changes from one set of conditions to another one, which both could be benign in themselves, can cause permanent damage. Most private homes do not offer the stable conditions one would find in the better museums.

Thanks again gentlemen ! Being myopic, there was a time, when I could just take off my glasses and didn't need to bother with any magnifying devices. Long gone. I am slowly moving on to stronger equipment. I have 2x magnifying safety glasses (which gives me together with my own 4.5 myopy a good magnification). Occassionally, I am using optivisors, but do not like them too much due to the short working distance. Some years ago I bought a set of magnifying telesopes as used by surgeons, but never really used them, because here the working distance is to large - they are meant to work standing over a patient, not for sitting at a work-bench. And then I got the stereo-microscope, which now that I adjusted it properly really like for working with the milling machine. It took the fear off of drilling 0.2 mm holes and you can properly watch what happens when milling tiny parts.

The good old 2nd Law of Thermodynamics gets us all and everything - sooner or later

There was a time, when I very much advocated, what Chapelle wrote and the requirements imposed in this respect by museums on the materials used in models they commissioned. However, there are practical limitations. Museums usually commission models at 1/48 or 1/50 and sometimes at 1/96 or 1/100 for larger, modern ships. So the ideas on materials to be used or not apply to those scales. If you are working in miniature scales and on more modern ships wood for instance is just not feasible, because you cannot cut it as thin as required. On could work with brass only and solder (lead-free of course), but this may also not practical for complex building units. So materials, such as styrene can be a practical alternative. So it is a trade-off between thicknesses of available materials, the surface texture, the workability and the long-term stability. In my current project I am trying to use long-term stable materials, but there are features, that just cannot be made with them (or my capabilities). I have models that made the half-way mark to 100 years and they show no visible deterioration. Some styrene may have become brittle, but as long as you handle it with care, it is ok. I even still use 'new' thin styrene sheet that I remember having bought in a London model shop in 1973 or so. I have seen intact samples of acrylic glass in museums that came of WW2 aircraft canopies. So, we do have 50 years more experience with these synthetic materials than Chapelle had. I think also, that acrylic paints will have quite a good survival rate, because acrylic molecules are quite stable. The pigment may be another question. As Bob said above, it may be a question of the original quality. I would trust in this respect more the manufacturers, who also or originally made paints for artists, than perhaps the ones that came more recently into the market and cater mainly for our community. Ok, everyone could cut corners, without the customer really knowing.

Wonderful work - but we don't expect anything less from this corner Without wanting to offend you in case it was hand-work, I hazard the guess that they were 3D-printed in wax and then cast in metal ?

This is why warships were preferably moored at a buoy - easier to control who comes and goes and what they carry.

Ahh, yes, that is a nice 'thread'. I am not looking at that forum very often, so I forgot about it.

Iron materials (cast iron, steel, wrought iron, etc.) had to be kept under paint for obvious reasons ... In the Prussian/German navy muzzle-loading guns were scraped bright and then washed with vinegar resulting in a light surface rust consisting or iron-oxyhydroxides and iron-acetates. This 'rust' was solidified by rubbing the barrels with lineseed oil, effectively creating in situ a brownish oil-paint. The procedure was repeated from time to time and in between the barrels were washed and then rubbed again with lineseed oil. The inside of the barrel was kept bright. When breech-loaders were adopted in the early 1860s this practice was discontinued, as the vinegar would deteriorate the machined surfaces on the barrel and the lock. The brownish colour of the muzzle-loaders then was mimicked by painting the barrels in brown oil-paint. From the 1890s on, when warships became grey, it was paint over everything that did not need to be bright for mechanical reasons. The mechanical machine guns, such as the Hotchkiss and Gatling revolving guns and mitraillieuses by Nordenfeldt and Palmcrantz were other examples of bright metal until the 1890s. In the case of e.g. Hotchkiss revolving gun the frame was cast bronze and left bright, the housing of the mechanism was cast-iron and painted, while the barrels were blued in good gun-smith tradition. Mounting brackets and other details were also bronze and kept bright. In the 1890s all that disappeared under paint.

According to my mid-19th to early 20th century textbooks on ship construction, there are many different types of rivets, depending on the location and the type of ship. There is a big difference also between naval ships, where tax payers' money didn't seem to matter too much and appearance was important, and commercial ships that had to generate a return on investment. Below is image of SS ROBIN in London and one can clearly see the rivetting on the hul: On naval ships and above the waterline, often countersunk rivets (as noted by Dr PR) were used on the hull. These would be basically invisible on a model no matter what scale. Countersunk rivets require a certain thickness of plating in order to be safe, so on the thinner superstructure plating you would have to use the typical dome-shaped rivets. Initially, when iron-shipuilding was a new technology, engineers tended to err on the safe side (though the technology as such was developed for boiler construction much ealier). As the decades progress and materials testing technology was developed, such as machines to test the tensile strength of rivets, they became more confident and rivets and their heads could be made smaller. However, the choice of rivets and rivetting was not an engineers whim, but prescribed from a certain time on by the ship classification and underwriters' societies, such as Lloyds of London, Bureau Veritas, or the Germanic Lloyd. On structural elemens and plating the aspects of rivets may also slightly vary depending on which side you are looking at. Below is an image of a German gun-boat built in 1876. Photographs show that hull on the outside was perfectly smooth, but you can clearly see the round rivet heads on the inside of the bulwark plating, the reinforcement strips behind seams, and the stanchions rivetted together from plate:

Acrylic gel would be an alternative to white glue. It shrinks less. Hand-placing the dots in regular patterns would be challenge - at least for my hands. I have contemplated making a sort of crude version of ink-jet printer for this: a syringe that squeezes a defined amount of gel onto the surface by moving the plunger forward with a kind lead-screw. The material to be 'rivetted' would need to by mounted on a x-y-table for positioning. In this way and using ink-jet printer decal-sheets one could make one's own customised rivet decals. On my on-going project I have pre-marked the rivet points on the gun-carriage with the laser-cutter, when I cut the parts from thick paper. These slight depressions catch the acrylic gel and allowed me to create reasonably regular rivetting patterns.

Depending on type of ship and era, there may have been quite a bit of bright metal-work on real ships. Metal was left bright, where it would have been impractical to cover it in paint, because the paint would have been worn off by e.g. ropes. At other places the paint would impair the function, e.g. on breech-loading guns. And at other places it had purely decorative function, say on yachts. So it would be historically correct to show bright metal, where it was bright metal on the prototype. Keeping the metal bright was a way to keep crews occupied, particularly on navy ships. Keeping metal bright on a model is not so easy, as brass and copper tarnish quickly. The classical way is to brush it with what is called zapon-varnish.

Nice to see a project here on this Ancre monograph. I had the opportunity to see the original (I mean the model) LOUISE at the big model exhibition organised by the Association des Amis du Musée de la Marine (AAMM) in Rochefort in October 2018. A splendid model. I have completed a few months ago a manuscript for a three part series of articles on 'Boating on the Seine in the Age of Impressionism' for the German quarterly Das LOGBUCH. The first part is with the printers. The third part on sailing will appear in autumn. As a matter of fact, I live about 12 km away from Argenteuil ... The Bassin d'Argenteuil is not the part upstream of the railway bridge of Argenteuil, but the stretch of the river below, reaching down to Bougival, where the weir is located that created the bassin. The area between Argenteuil and Bezons has been quite industrialised already at the time in question. After all, this is where the Caillebotte family made their money, which allowed Gustave and his brother to live the life of gentlemen of leisure (though the Caillebottes still looked after their business), leaving behind a signifcant cultural footprint in sailing (Gustave was a founding member of the French sailing club), painting and art collection (Gustave's collection was the seed to what is now the Musée d'Orsay in Paris), and philately (the Caillebotte collection became after their sale by the brothers the core of the philately department of the British Museum in London). Chatou was one of the focal points of the rowing and sailing activities on the Seine. Remember Renoir's 'Lunch of the Rowers' / 'Dejeuner des canotiers' ? It was painted there on the balcony of the Maison Fournaise, a popular restaurant. Today, there is a museum in part of the building. Next door to it, there is the boat-house of the Association Sequana (https://sequana.org/), which has 'clipper' and a copy of one of the boats Caillebotte designed, had built in his own yard, and sailed on the river. I am looking forward to the development of this project !

These tablets were/are(?) very common in engineering and science contexts. In art and illustration they probably have now been replaced by iPads that are available in larger sizes for such pruposes. Designers of animations for films and computer games also used such graphics tablets. I got a cheapo one, but then found out that I couldn't get the driver for it on my Mac ... now I am using my iPad with the stylo for drawing. Some of the tablets could also be used for digitsing purposes. You put your graphics or whatever onto the tablet and then trace it with the pen. Today I would scan the item, put the image into one layer and then trace it in another layer.

That makes you appreciate the skills of 'real' boatbuilders, I guess. I gather you marked out the various plank width around the main beam (didn't bother to go back in the log to check) ? I am asking this, because I have the feeling that your planks should already begin to be wider in the middle, so that the planks do not become to wide once you are getting to the chine. Looking down the planks run sweet and easy, but when you look sideways, I feel that you might be getting too many planks at the stem. Or you will have to work with stealers around the chine. Stealers would be an obvious geometric solution, but not so ideal from a strength point of view. The chine will be an area with a lot of stress, the boat may bump against the jetty, the nets will run against it etc. etc.

Are you sure, you got your numbers right re. the ballast ? If all the ballast was water, you would need a volume of 650 dm^3 / 30 / 30 / 30 = 24 cm^3 at 1:30 scale or 24 g. Granit or gneiss, the predominant rocks in your part of the world, would have a bulk density of around 2.7 g/cm^3, which reduces to something like 2 g/cm^3 or less for loose rock. In other words you would need about 12 cm^3 space for the balast in the model.

Of course I also had one of those wooden toy sets. Otherwise I am not sure what came first. Probably the the Märklin construction set (the German version of Meccano), which did have a screw-driver and a spanner. Otherwise, when I was about seven or eight so my dad got fed up with me sneaking to his tool cabinet and I got a boxed tool-set for Christmas. I still have it and use some of the tools regularly, such as the fret- and hack-saw for instance. That means some 57 years of use. When we had to clear out my parents' house a few years ago, I took many of my das's old tools and some that originally even belonged to his dad in his navy times, I believe. Some of the tools look, as if they came out of set my father got, when he was a boy.

This has nothing to do with the actual subject of the thread, but I would second Allan's point. You may use copyrighted material in an 'educational' context in the sense that you can use images etc. in a lecture. Giving the slides in electronic format or as hand-outs to your students or pupils could be borderline, but is accepted practice. In order to use copyrighted material in formal publications (journals, books) requires the permission of the authors or the copyright-holders. I have been repeatedly in the bizarre situation wanting to re-use some graphics I drew for reports when being an UN staffer many years ago, that I had to ask the UN organisation for permission to do so. Although reading through posts may be educational, an Internet-forum is not an educational undertaking in the sense of the copyright. I guess using occasionally small snippets from graphics in a book etc. to illustrate a point would in most cases not violate the copyright and the economic interests of the copyright holder. At least not to a degree that would justify legal action. One could indeed argue that it may raise interest in obtaining (legally) the whole publication. The above applies to original artwork and other material that can be copyrighted. There is a bit of grey zone for material on which in principle the copyright has expired because the original copyright holder has been deceased for a certain minimum period that varies from country to country. Here in Europe it is 70 years and in the US 90 years I believe. Museums and archives holding these items may claim to have the copyright, because they have an economic interest in selling copies or licenses to use these copies.

... what did people do in those dark pre-Internet ages - experiment You didn't say, what the thickness of the material in question is, so answers can only be guesses. Clipping pieces off is likely to distort/squash the wood, so I would not clip too close, but leave perhaps half a millimetre standing and then sand it flush. Same with a cut-off disc, stay safely away and sand flush afterwards.

Have you ever sawn acrylic glass or styrene ?