wefalck

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 ...

The Glowforge ones seem to be relatively serious one with a 40W CO2 laser, requiring proper ventilation etc. They also seem to have a serious price tag, starting from US$ 2500 (not sure about price over here in Europe ...). Perhaps one day I will upgrade, but for the time being I am making do with a cheapo (100 €) 4W diode laser and a 80 mm x 80 mm working area. Limited capabilities and precision, but it helped me to produce some small parts with complicated shapes that would be difficult to make in a different way.

If you use a fast-drying solvent-based varnish or sanding sealer, it is easy to stick parts on with exactly the same varnish. Nearly no need to hold things in place while a glue is drying/curing. I am first (laser-)cutting parts and then soak them in varnish. Resoak them after sanding.

Not at all, no soldering. As I wrote above, the stiles are simply cemented on using the brand cement UHU Alleskleber. Seems to hold on well for several decades now on glass and some five years on the first case I built from Plexiglas. I must admit, that I took the design from McCaffery's book on Miniature Ship models. He uses silicone to cement together the glass panes, as well as to stick on the stiles. At one time I found that I ran out of silicone and because of the weekend resorted to UHU. It is much easier to clean up than silicone, which tends to creep around (which of course is the purpose). Also, although McCaffery is really preoccopied with the longevity and stability of materials, he kind of ignores the issue of acetic acid fumes that form, when silicone cures and penetrate into the case.

(Some) silk has indeed a bad reputation among museum conservators and there are many models with decayed silk flags. It is a question of how the silk was treated after the worm has been killed in hot water and the cocoon unravveled. Some dyes are also acid-producing and lead to the destruction of organic fibres. Man-made 'silk' would not necessarily suffer from these problems. However, as one effectively creates a compound material with the silk embedded in an acrylic paint film some of the problems should not occur or be delayed. The UV-exposure, for instance, would be greatly reduced.

I way curious, as I was not aware of this implement with the two blades working against each other and checked it out. The instructions (https://www.micromark.com/Instructions/81858 sword saw REV 12-16.pdf) are a bit more moderate and state that their transformer is 'recommended'. So I would suspect that any electronically regulated transformer with 12 V operating voltage and 2.5 A output minimum would do.

I am also belonging to the no-sewing party, as any sewing would be grossly over scale on anything, but pond-sailing models. However, if you insist on sewing (for whatever reason), there is a simple trick to make life easier: draw the outline of the sail onto the fabric and then glue the fabric down onto some tissue-paper (of the kind used in the old days to make carbon copies) outside the sail area, but close to it. Both, the paper and the fabric have to be on a flat surface for the purpose. This helps to prevent the fabric from stretching and being pulled out of shape, when running it through the sewing machine. The paper has to be below, of course, so it, rather than the fabric is grabbed by the transporters of the sewing machine.

Yes. I think several people did it here on the forum. Check out 'dafi's' HMS VICTORY project for instance. You will have to remove first any moulded-on plating to create a smooth surface. Another question is, what kind of style you want to present your model in. In real life, the copper below the water-line would have been a dull reddish brown colour after a few weeks in the water. Around the water-line, between the water and the air, you would see some green oxidation (copper sulfate) and some white salt-stains etc.

Yes, this is a 1:60 scale model: I had some trouble keeping the boltrope in place, due to the furling, but I think today I would overcome this - the model was completed around 1995.

Sorry, I always thought that silk-span is the American expression for the light-weight silk fabric used for model airplanes ... I was talking about the fabric, not the paper. I have used silk-paper too.

That's why I was looking towards fabric ...

Same problem as for rope, thickness is not easy to define and measure the thickness of fabric. That's why the gauge is usually given in weight (grams or ounces) per area (square metre or yard, depending on where you are). One can make a rough estimate for threads, knowing the density (g/cm^3) of the material and the number of metres per g (given e.g. by the dernier number). Similarly, one can make an estimation of fabric thickness based on the weight per area and the thread-count and a bit of math, assuming that the threads in the fabric are perfect 'rods'. I looked at the silk-screen on ebay a while ago, hoping to find something thinner but more densly woven than my 14 g/m^2 silk-span and more tear-resistant than my silk-paper. I did study some art history at university for the fun of it and also collected a few books on art materials and techniques (before the age of Internet), so I am quite familiar with the variety of them. Useful knowledge for modelling.

I have not used or touched this, as I still have a life-time supply of silk-span that I bought in about 1978, but silk-screen for screen-printing might be another source of very fine silk.

Over the past 30 years or so I wrote/co-authored/edited probably a couple of dozen of books of various sizes for work. I also served on the editorial board of an UN organisation. And I am proof-reading/correcting four times a year the journal of the German equivalent of the NRG of which I am the legally responsible editor (not the technical one) ... Producing a decent book is hard work, though greatly facilitated by modern Desk-Top Publishing (DTP) systems. Getting all the formal stuff right, such as bibliographic references, credentials, permissions, etc. is indeed time consuming and tedious. I can fully understand that someone wants to spend his/her time with more sexy things ...