wefalck

Postscriptum: in a German Forum I received comments on the man-handling of the shells from a colleague, who observed the available historic drawings more attentively than me. These show in one case a winch located inside the deck-house and marked as ‘shell-hoisting winch’. In another, presumably somewhat older drawing, a substantial bracket is drawn above the shell hoisting hatch. Both features are not shown on the oldest drawings that were the main basis for this model reconstruction. I will install the bracket that was presumably used together with tackle, when the winch was not yet installed. Anchors The WESPE-Class was fitted out with two Inglefield bow anchors and (presumably) a standard anchor as stern or reserve anchor. The bow anchors are stowed on chutes and handled with two small cranes on each side. There is no drawing for the stern anchor, but the drawings seem to show chocks for its storage. There is also a hawse-hole in the stern and a crane above it. So it is likely that there has been a stern-anchor. What is not clear at all is, how the chain would have been handled and there are no stoppers or similar to belay the chain when in use. Neither is there a chain locker drawn in the stern. So there is de facto conflicting evidence. Inglefield-anchors a are complicated affair, but seem to have been rather popular at the time with the Imperial German Navy. In an instruction book for drawing in shipbuilding a nice detailed drawing of an Inglefield-anchor was found and used as the basis for the model reconstruction. Its size is taken from the WESPE-lithographs in the German Technical Museum in Munich. Drawing of an Inglefield-anchor from WAAP (1910) One could have perhaps sawn out the parts from a 0.5 mm brass or styrene sheet, but considering an overall length of the anchors of 12.5 mm this seemed to be a rather daunting task. For this reason the individual parts were drawn for the laser-cutter and cut from 0.12 mm Canson paper. The shaft and other parts were built up from several layers that were cemented together with fast-drying lacquer, resulting in some kind of composite material. Drawing of the components of an Inglefield-anchor for laser-cutting The parts then could be easily shaped using diamond and other files. After a certain amount of filing more lacquer was applied in order to prevent the fraying of the paper. Finally the built-up parts were assembled using lacquer. One half-completed anchor and parts ready for assembly of the second (I should stop taking these quick-and-dirty close-ups with the iPhone and take out the SLR camera again ...) Instead of the traditional way of shaping the shackles from wire, I decided to also cut them from paper. The bolts on the smaller shackels would have been too small to represent and were omitted. I think they turned out quite convincingly. On the other hand, the bolts that keep the parts of the anchor together were turned from steel and blackened before assemply. The standard anchor possibly could have been cut from brass and soldered together, but then, once it is painted, no one really will know the difference. So I also made the respective designs and employed the laser cutter again. The proportions were taken from an anchor drawing in the Danish Naval Yard archives of the same period. Drawing of parts for one standard anchor Laser-cut parts for the stern anchor The shaft and arms were build up from six layers this time and after lacquering them together the part was shaped using a diamond nail file and various needle and echappement files. As usual more lacquer was applied to keep the paper consolidated. Finally the flukes were lacquered on and the large shackle also cut from paper attached. Turning the stock for the stern anchor The stock was the biggest challenge, as it is only 0.3 mm in diameter in the middle and tapering off. It was turned from thin steel rod. As the anchor will be stowed in the stern, the ball at the end of the bent side will not be visible and therefore left off. The visible ball was formed by a tiny drop of white glue. Assembled anchors ready to be painted Painted anchors To be continued ...

Pipe cleaners should be available in craft-shops in various colours. At least they were in the past, when kids used them to make little sculptures and such from them. If you can't get them, there is also the good old method our mothers and grandmothers used to make 'pom-poms' on home-knit ski caps. You cut a round disc with a hole in the middle from cardboard or take a washer of appropriate size and wind string around it. You then have to make a loop around the threads along the the rim of the hole so that you can pull all the wound strings together and tie them up. Finally, you cut open the windings along the periphery and arrange everything in a nice 'pom-pom'. Not 100% sure I described the process correctly, but I am sure one can find it on the Internet.

It is always wise to compare different (secondary) sources and to dig up, if possible, the primary sources mentioned (if at all) in those secondary sources. While certain books are more trustworthy than others, there is always an element of interpretation and real evidence may be scarce. There were also many common features and practices that were so common that no one at the time thought it worth mentioning or documenting them. Ships were 'living' beings and only partially subject to rules and regulations (in the navies) or hardly at all (in the merchant navy). There was a considerable amount of discreetion on the side of the masters, particularly, when it comes to rigging. However, the responsibility for the performance of any deviation from the common practice at the time rests with the master, so that there is a certain element of conservatism involved, just to be on the safe side.

As I said, don't check models, which are the interpretation of another modeller, check the literature that draws on the sources. HMS VICTORY is a hugely different ship (in the true sense of the word) from HMS BOUNTY.

In spite of its miniature size, the model conveys very well that they must have been powerful sailers with their large amount of canvass.

The curly thingy also exists on arab vessels that normally do not have a bowsprit and where the foot of the sail stays inside the stem.

These turban-like protrusions are also common on arab ships and boats. Not sure, whether there has been a study on their meaning, history, and respective cross-cultural influences. In some cases they are or seem to resemble also sheep fleeces.

For rigging questions, I would consult the books by Lees and/or Marquardt. Looking at modern replicas or even modern ships might be misleading, particularly, when they are operating vessels, as they then have to comply with current safety at sea standards. As several people have shown on this forum, it is perfectly possible to make working blocks of 2 mm lenght, given the availability of the right tools, of course. Pulling a thread through the hole in order to round off the edges in order to simulate the sheave actually may be a good idea. In the cut stone industry diamond-studded wire are used to cut e.g. marble blocks in the quarries, but also microscopic variants are available for jewellers to be used in piercing saws. I checked the Internet and in an industrial context they are offered down to a thickness of 0.09 mm, but on ebay the smallest diameter is 0.25 mm. The cost is quite moderate with less than 9€ for a 10 m spool including shipping from China. This is more than a lifetime supply. One should give it a try. One could also use a 'normal' thread with pumice as cutting agent.

Not so easy on blocks just 1 mm long. Holding them is the issue. I haven‘t tried this yet, but one could make tiny half-round chisels for the purpose from injection needles ground to a suitable angle, held in a pin-vise or set into a dowel.

These eyes, that are very common around the Mediterranean also in painted form, date back to antiquity and are an apotropaic magic, meaning to ward off evil. I tend to use varnish to make kind of compound materials because of the inconvenience of using CA, but CA make indeed a much stronger material.

Many model blocks fail on one account in particular: they have just a hole drilled through them, which means that the rope comes out of them with a sharp bend. In reality, they should come out of the block sort of tangential, going around the sheave. In larger blocks one can file the edge round, but for the sizes required at 1/110 scale this is likely to be difficult or impossible. Blocks at that time would have been fastened with a strop around them, not in a second hole. Another mistake frequently made. One could take styrene strips and sand/scrape them oval in profile, after having drilled them in the upper quarter. This strip then can be cut into individual blocks. This doesn't solve the problem with the sharp bend, but at least gives the blocks the right outside shape after some sanding of the faces. Make a slight notch in the bottom to prevent the strop from slipping off. The strop should be also made with a fake splice, rather than a knot. Fake splices are easy to make: just take the short end in a needle and go twice through the long end, secure with a drop of varnish, cut off the loose end and then roll it between your fingers to smooth it.

What else, but an eulogy would this deserve ...

I think you should be happy to get it so slick. This will help to get the actual paint smooth very quickly, provided that primer and paint are compatible.

I am curious, how you will tackle the blocks (intended pun). When I started the BOUNTY in the early 1972s the blocks, among other things, stalled the project and it was never completed. In my teens I just didn't have the means and the knowledge (even though I tried all sorts of things and visited the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich) to produce the small blocks needed. I think somewhere I still have the same kind of sketches you made In the late 1980s McNarry's book on Miniature Shipmodels came out and he proposes a method using punched-out ovals of paper or card for the blocks, but uses twisted wire for rigging and pre-assembles the tackles etc. As I am writing, I am experimenting with laser-cut card-board parts for blocks about a millimeter long. With moderate success so far :(

Very egyptian !

Bought one almost 40 years ago and did not find using it a steep learning curve. Patience and patience with yourself is the keyword - as always. It may depend on what you are actually spray-painting - I am not claiming to be an expert in achieving a mirror finish on automobiles. I worked on ship-models and graphic illustrations only. The difficult part is getting the right dilution/viscosity of the paint. Here, I must admit, that I decided early on to cheat and use only pre-diluted paints. Thirty years ago the range was quite limited - but for ship-models you don't need such an extensive range (unless you get into WW2 or newer ships, where they used standardised colours). These days several manufacturers, e.g. Vallejo, offer a wide range of ready-to-go paints that require only to be shaken well. Makes life a lot less troublesome. I also only use paints that can be diluted/cleaned with water, meaning acrylics. Again saves you a lot of trouble, as the air-brush can be cleaned under the tap and you don't need to mess around with organic solvents. Cleaning the airbrush thoroughly is vital for trouble-free operation and a long service-life.

Yes, it is Molybdenum and since it is used by smart-phone repair-shops to separate broken glasses from LCD screens, it has become widely available in many different thicknesses. I bought a collection of different diameters a year or two ago to use it, when something very thin brass-like is needed. The wire is very tough and one can easily damage cutting pliers. I tend to score it with a disposable scalpel and then bend it until it breaks. It is also very springy and once you made a bend into it virtually impossible to straighten it out. Many metal wires will burn if you take a very thin one and apply enough heat. As you can see from the above experiment, the burning is not self-sustained, it extinguishes after a few milimeters of burning, once the area heated by the flame has been burnt. What makes you think that a single spark could ignite a whole spool ? Did you try it ? I don't think that a cigarette could set it on fire - I would be more worried about the health effects of smoking actually. So far I only used it to make some micro-handles and such things. As it cannot be annealed like steel, my original intention to make micro wire-rope from it is not likely to work, as it has too much 'memory' and cannot be twisted easily according to my so far limited experience. It's a pity given the small diameters that are available.

Looking cute, pictured sittting on your hand. I have seen some of them 'live' a couple of years ago in Rochefort, but this give a good idea of the scale.

I love steak pie and mash, but minus the kidneys . Found eating snails always revolting and having to dissect some in the biology class at university didn't help either - however, they are actually interesting animals from a biological point of view. Wouldn't eat (voluntarily) mussels either, but my then girlfriend (and now wife) insisted that I try oysters and in those pre-Covid days we would go a couple of times a year to one of the traditional Parisian brasseries that specialise in them (e.g. this is a favourite one: http://www.mollard.fr/?lang=en) . She claims that I eat them because they are posh enough However, this has nothing to do with ship-building ...

Well, with the lock-down (well a kind of half-hearted one really), not much will happen in any case until Christmas, I am afraid. Restaurants and non-essential shops are all closed. Personally, rognons (together with Andouillette AAA and snails) are something I don't really care for Obviously, we have a several good art-shops, but only one them stocks (in principle) this product: https://www.neschen.de/en/product/filmoplast-r-2/. When I visited them at the end of last year, they had run out of it and didn't know, when they would get it back. I wanted to give it a try, though the project I would be using it for is still a long time away. One can get it through the Internet, but shipping cost are just too high. Perhaps you can find something similar in the USA, based on the product description in the above link. Neschen is the manufacturer of this product and they give quite detailed instructions, also in English, for its use. Once I get to it, I will certainly report on the experience. Eberhard

Oh, yes, I meant to also comment on this. I am using small single-lip carbide milling cutters as boring bars in my lathe. One has to start with a drill slighly larger than the boring bar and then open up the hole. Through-holes and blind holes can be done that way. It is also quite easy to grind 'D-bits' yourself from either virgin drill-rod or broken HSS twist drills. Over a short distance you grind away half the diameter and then at the front a relief angle and a slight clearance angle at the front. When you grind an oblique face to the broken end of the drill, you can also use this end for boring. All these 'boring bars' have to be set with their axis at a slight, a couple of degrees, angle to the lathe axis to provide side clearance. I used silkspan (or tissue-paper) on virtually of my models as a basis for sails, but then I have been working in small scales, well from 1:60 down. Basically, I soaked the material in paint, evolving with the availability of paint types, drawing on the panels with ink and later putting the sails together from individual panels, adding reenforcements etc. For the bolt-rope initially (in the late 1970s) I dreamt up a technique, whereby I used my mother's sophisticated sewing-machine, making very close (at a distance of the thread diameter) stitches using the zig-zag program with the minimum width. This resulted in a kind of 'worm' around the sail. The silk-span was attached to a sheet of tissue-paper with a few blobs of glue outside the sail area to prevent the fabric from distorting while beeing fed through the sewing-machine. The paper then could be torn off and the sail cut to size. This I did until I learned, that the bolt-rope is not attached to the edge of the sail, but rather to one side of the sail. Thereafter, I just glued on the bolt-rope. You will have to try out covering the silk-span with a varying amount of paint to see, whether it really looks convincing in 1:24 scale. Recently a German colleague developed a technique whereby he sandwiches a sheet of ordinary silk-paper (or silk-span) between two layers of the extremely fine tissue-paper used in archival paper repair. This tissue-paper is coated on one side in a heat-activated acrylic glue. The 'panels' are cut from this tissue-paper and ironed onto the silk-paper as carrier. His sails are translucent against the light and look very convincing. I had not had yet the opportunity to try this myself - couldn't get the tissue-paper here in Paris and then came Corona ...

Yes, papier-maché is paper mixed with wall-paper glue or a similar cellulose glue. Wall-paper glue contains fungicides and bactericides to discourage bugs from munching it. It's easy to make papier-maché oneself, but you can also buy it as flocks in DIY-stores or from model-railway suppliers, where it is used in landscaping. It can be also made kind of in situ by applying strips of paper soaked in the glue onto the basic hull structure to build up the shape. Be aware, however, that the glue shrinks on drying - after all its 95% or so water. One should always work on both sides of the hull at the same time in order to avoid distortion. In situ papier-maché would not sand very well, as it is not actually 'maché' meaning that it is not munched. A layer of real papier-maché would help, particularly when some plaster of Paris has been added to the mass.

For a change, I caught one of your logs at the beginning, well sort of, as it has already progressed quite a bit. Looking forward to further instalments ...

I tend to look not too often into 20th or let alone 21th century subjects, I must admit, so I had missed the build log so far and hence missed to the opportunity to comment. As to the curved separation line between bottom paint and the hull paint: there may be also a bit of tradition into it, not only the already counteraction of the optical illusion of sagging ends, when compared to the upsweeping bow and stern; it can make the ship look going faster than it actually does, giving the illusion of dynamism; in the old days wooden ships often developped what is called 'hogging', meaning the ships' ends actually sagged because of les buoyancy there, painting a raising waterline covered this fault visually to some extent. Concerning the use of wire for rigging: modellers of scale WWI air-craft are catered for by a variety of hard-ware by the model industry, perhaps one could find something interesting there, but I am not familiar with suppliers. Otherwise, this is an interesting and well-executed project of a somewhat unusual subject. I really wonder how those passengers in wheel-chairs cope with a heeling vessel and it rolling and pitching.

Geometric precision in the execution shows the master !