wefalck

As I am working in 1:160 and 1:87 scales, I need to look into really small sizes, say between 1 mm and 3 mm long maximum. A 0.1 mm positioning accuracy wouldn't be good enough. Blocks of 2.5 mm and above a can make using traditional methods. A year ago I bought a cheapo laser-cutter and that also needs a lot of trial and error to get the right settings for a particular set of parts. I don't need these for my current project, but in another project I will need deadeyes of about 2 mm diameter and will probably make these in layers of paper cut out with the laser-cutter. But this will be pushing it. With 1.5 mm long block I did not have the desired succes so far, at least not with double-blocks. I'll keep trying ... That's why I always keep an eye on 3D-printing developments.

Yes, it seems that home 3D printing has come a long way in the last few years. And as always with new technology, unit prices come done, as it becomes more and more mainstream. Peter, I am wondering, whether you have already tried printing blocks and what the smallest sizes would have been ?

Looks impressive ! But I was wondering, why stem, keel, and sternpost were left in natural wood colour ? They surely would have also been painted in the white bottom concoction.

That's why I did not suggest this, though there are 'archival' ink-jet inks on the market. However, one can, of course, draw the pattern on the computer, laser-print it onto decal sheet, and then 'number-paint' the respective fields.

I would rather use some solvent-based (not acrylic !) fast-drying varnish. This has the advantage, that with a drop of the respective thinner (or acetone probably) you can loosen the knots again should further adjustment become necessary. With PVA glue or acrylic varnish you might need to cut everything away, if it is not right.

I gather there are several alternative ways to make life easier: - paint the pattern onto strips of thin paper that has been cut to shape to exactly fit the strake on which it will be placed; the paper then can be cemented onto the wood using shellac - paint the pattern onto water-slide transfer sheet shaped as above - prepare strips of water-slide transfer cut these to size and place them as appropriate - can work also with strips of painted paper.

Perhaps you should try to get hold of a copy of David MacGregor's plans after which the kit was developed, I assume. Small images of the plans are in his book 'Fast Sailing Ships', together with a an artistic 3D rendering. I vaguely remember that there is also a contemporary(?) model in the Aberdeen Maritime Museum.

I draw the layout of the shrouds and ratlines on a piece of cardboard in 1:1 scale to be put behind the shrouds when working on the ratlines. In this way you can detect immediately any distortion or irregularities. Clove hitches are easy to do with two tweezers. I do a sort of variant of the clove hitch at the outward shrouds, so that the ratline returns on itself - on the prototype the ratline has an eye spliced into each end that would be stiched to the shroud. This method looks quite convincing in smaller scales and is fast.

Ooops, didn't look at this part of MSW for a week and this neat little project progressed already that far ! By accident I just got a copy of Scott (1985) The Galway Hooker, but the parcel in which it came together with some other books is still in 'COVID quarantine' (we leave non-urgent things for several weeks in case it has been touched by an infected person ...). I will follow this project now.

Perhaps in Europe there were clearer and shorter 'fronts', where a barrage makes sense. Putting balloons around all those islands would have been a job for 'Christo' ...

Are the cask natural wood or painted white ? If they are painted white, you could make a black-and-white styrene sandwich and turn this to shape on the drill. Otherwise it would be a wood-black styrene sandwich. It shouldn‘t be too difficult to reduce the wood or white styrene section with as small file so that the black sheets stand a tad proud. Because of the conical shape, the bands would be curved, rather than straight. One could construct on a sheet of paper an enlarged version and reduce it on a copier to scale, to be cut out and painted black. Or do the whole operation in a drawing software and print it.

We all make mistakes like this ... particularly, as we get older and don‘t remember what we did before

I have a colleague in Germany (retired engineer with a good pension and no family), who got himself a Formlabs 3 printer, which I think set him back by some 6500 €, but it quite amazing what he is turning out after only a short learning period. The main hurdle - apart from the money, is being sufficiently CAD-savvy. He used AutoCAD in his job, so he knows what he is doing. A lot of the stuff he prints he has actually professionally cast in brass - the company get the models and he gets one set of brass parts for free, while the company sells them to other customers. The brass parts seem to need very little clean-up.

It seems that only the technology that uses UV-curing resins is good enough for our purposes, but that involves messing around with volumes of monomer, which is not so nice. Prices have come down dramatically, but you are still talking a couple of thousand Pounds, Euros, US Dollars ...

Dear Pat and Keith, the etchings were the result of my foray into that field in about 2008. I tried to develop for myself the technique as a sort of ad hoc process, i.e. you draw a few parts and then go away and do the etching, as you would go to the lathe or milling machine. Not having a 'wet laboratory', I tried to reduce the volume of liquids involved to a minimum and worked in plastic film-containers (still have a good supply from my intensive slide-photography days, before I went fully digital in 2009). In consequence, the 'frets' were the size of two large stamps the maximum. I found the idea of contracting out the production of the masks and of the etching difficult to organise, because one has to fill an A5 or even A4 sheet to make it cost-wise viable. This means that you really have to have a very good idea of all the parts and their exact sizes. Which in turn means that the project has to be fully designed, before you start making any chips or swarf. That's probably fine, when you work from commercial model-builders drawings, but is difficult, when you are trying to interpret some contemporary drawings and images as you are going along. Perhaps I should have done it like this ... The more or less round rivets and the 'draft' along the raised edges are probably a (wellcome) artifact of my etching method. The sheet to be etched is agitated by moving it vertically in the film container or rotating it. This results in a predominantly lateral flow of the etching solution, which leads to quite a bit of 'underetching' underneath the photoresist. In the commercial process of spray etching, the solution is sprayed vertically onto the sheet to prevent exactly that underetching, resulting in much sharper and vertical edges. I gave up etching (for the time being), because the main problem was to obtain films with sufficiently dense blackening with neither my laser-printer nor my ink-jet printer. Given the small sizes of the parts, this was difficult to correct. If you make printed circuit boards, you can easily touch up your lines and areas with a permanent marker, but here I was really pushing it to the edge of the technology. I was thinking of giving it a try again by coating the sheet metal in black paint and then burning it away with the laser-engraver. Should work for single-side etching, but my little cheapo laser-engraver has no facility to sufficiently precise (say within a 1/50th of a mm) register a piece, once you have flipped it over.

In theory you can buy this cloth-backed abrasive in all sorts of configurations and sizes: from 1 inch wide up in rolls to the normal size sheets, from 40 grit to 2000 grit, I think.

I don't really have any experience with drum sanders and don't really need one for my current projects - however, I would be a bit concerned for the motor life with the open commutator. Dust can accumulate in the motor very quickly. I gather the life-time of the abrasive paper also depends on how much thickness you take off by pass. If the drum gets too hot, you may rip out more easily the grains. So there will be RRMs, feed rate and thickness per pass to consider.

Thanks, gentlemen ! Bedford, that's why I like those 'Victorian' warships. They were certainly utilitarian, but camouflage and grey all over was not an issue. There was a lot of varnished wood and polished brass/bronze to add visual interest (and keep sailors occupied with maintenance) and to give captains and bo'suns something to be proud of.

Nice to see another project in 1:160 scale What fascinates me about US American subjects is that they stylistically look rather different from what the same subject would (have) looked like in Europe. There seems to be also more wood involved in the construction or at least in the cladding. Here the grain elevators would have been mostly open and not clad, perhaps also to have less wind resistance. But then New York winters can be much colder than our winters say in Hamburg. I'll be watching the progress. One of the projects I have in the drawer is a floating crane from the 1880s, for which I have drawings. It was originally hand operated, but I would add a small steam donkey engine. Or a small steam dredger - lots of mechanical parts on them.

Further work on the hull The bulwark in the aft part of the hull is supported by a number of stanchions that were cut from sheet metal and rivetted together. The looks for these stanchions is reasonably well documented on a number of photographs. The aft part of a WESPE-Class-Boat (Lavverenz, 1900) The stanchions I had drawn already years ago and depicted the rivetting by surface-etching. The material is 0.1 mm thick nickel silver. They were made in double as mirror images and soft-soldered together in pairs with soldering paste so that the rivetting appears on both sides. Etched and soldered together stanchions (they are about 5.5 mm high) The location of the stanchions was marked on the bulwark before this was put into place by thermo-transfer of a drawing, i.e. a laserprinter printout was ironed on. The stanchions were cemented in place with fast-dryining varnish. The bulwark-stanchions in place Already a short while ago I had fashioned the boiler-ash chutes by milling to shape little blocks of acrylic glass. They were cemented to the bulwark inside and outside at this stage too. To be continued ...

Just a guess, as don't know, how the foresail is handled: if you lower the gaff, the angle may change, depending, how co-ordinated the two halliards are handled; there is the chance that the gaff comes down plus/minus horizontal, so it would have to still clear the space between the two masts, i.e. its maximum length has to be less than the distance between the masts. I have seen quite a few illustrations that shows the gaff being lowered in a rather haphazard fashion ...

I like the idea of drilling a block for the brass collars and then slice off the rails ! At some stage, I will be faced with the task of making a pin rail for 0.2 mm belaying pins and drilling multiple 0.2 mm holes can be a drill-consuming task. However, as there is brass-tubing with 0.2 mm ID (I think), drilling 0.3 mm holes is less daunting. I had actually considered making the pin and the collar in one piece and inserting this into the pin-rail. Also, the pin would be thicker and easier to make. It's a bit of cheating, put one has to be practical ... I am rather surprised that they used a hex-nut on the rail-stanchions, as its corners can lead to chafing of the ropes.

We had this discussion some place else, I think, already ... anyway, it seems that the friction in the gun tackles also transform a considerable amount of the recoil energy into heat. The breech rope was sort of the ultimate stop, as also the movement of the gun depends on the movement of the ship after the gun is fired. In later times, when slide carriages with different types of recoil brakes were introduced, the breech rope lengths were reduced to a minimum. There is a balance to strike between the maximum allowable strain on the parts of the gun and the breech-rope on one hand and the space for the movement of the gun on the other hand. Also, the further the gun moves away from the bulwark, the more difficult it becomes to control and bring back into loading and firing position.

Anything below the waterline would be, depending on period and location, covered in tar, some white concoction or copper-sheathed. So none of the caulking, if there is any, would be visible at all. One should perhaps also distinguish between caulking, a particular multi-step process using on planking, and covering the end-grain of wood in tar before assembling scarphs and the likes. Caulking on hull-planking could be also visible, when certain strakes for esthetic reasons were scraped clean and then oiled with some light-coloured concoction, which was fashionable in some areas and at certain times.

And, apart from deck-planking, this is only relevant, when you want to display your artisanal skills, rather than showing a 'real life' representation of the prototype. On a real ship, virtually all of that structure would disappear under thick coats of tar and paint ...