wefalck

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 !

Watched the quoted above video by P Budzik last night and think there is an idea worthwhile trying out: scribing only through a layer of paint to reveal another layer beneath. This is essentially what is know in art as sgraffito (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sgraffito). As the covering paint layers will be very thin one doesn't need to worry about creating out-of-scale furrows, such as those moulded into kits or that the laser-engraved wood decks seem to have. It has the potential to create very thin lines that would be to scale in small scales. The art will be to not scribe through to the underlying material. This would probably require a quit thick black/brown under-paint and the paint should be quite hard. I think I will give this a try, when I am getting to the only wood deck on my current project, though I already lightly engraved (using an engravers' graver) the bakelite sheet from which this decking will be made.

It‘s the idea, not size that matters

Very clever radius cutting set up !

Ooops, thinks are going mad in Western Europe. We have been in voluntary semi-confinement as much as possible since the February, knock on wood ... good luck and speedy recovery !

CA will bond planks humid from steaming immediately. After all, CA was originally developed for battlefield paramedics to close wounds rapidly without the need for stiching and is used for the same purpose in civilian context too - guess how I know I was told about 'breathing on joints' by my father, who was a biochemist working inter alia on the application of acrylics in pharmaceuticals etc.

It depends on the temperature and particularly on the ambient humidity. Water vapour will trigger the cross-linking reaction. Thus, breathing on it will speed it up.

A wire loop will do the same job at virtually no cost. Biologists and chemists have used this technique for decades or even centuries to apply small quantities of liquid. The amount of liquid dispensed depends on the diameter of the loop and the thickness of the wire and so can be modulated to your needs.

Good idea and the results look great on the two examples ! However, it may depend on the type of primer used, which has to take a clean line without fuzzy edges. It also requires priming, which I often try to avoid in order to not build up unnecessary paint layers. Have to watch the video tonight in order to get more insights.

Trouble is, that such 'debonders' break up the cross-linking of resins such as CA. When you use varnish, the solvent would just soften it, allowing you to reposition the part. I have been working for so long with aceton in the lab (we used to rinse glass-ware after washing it to dry quickly), the a few drops here and there now don't shorten my life too much ...

Some people also grind half away half of the eye of a sewing needle, leaving a forked end, and hold the needle in a pin-vice or in a round length of wood. Some people also use wire-loops (steel wire preferred, as copper ions can inhibit the curing of CA). Any cured CA can be burned off with a cigarette lighter flame. Once the needle has been heated to a red-hot it can also be bent to shape to reach difficult places. Personally, I don't like CA too much and use a fast drying varnish to attach small parts. One has to be aware, however, the bond often is less strong. One has to make trade-offs between ease of application (with a fine brush in the case of varnish), the possibility to correct positioning (by using solvent), and the strenght of the bond.

You are right, for certain milling operations the visibility is much better on a horizontal mill, than on a vertical mill, though they would be geometrically possible on both types.

OK, you are already quite a bit into the project, but otherwise I would have considered to write to Gilberto Penzo, who runs the Web-site www.veniceboats.com, is the historian of Venice boats and has written several books on the subject, to see, whether he can point you to resources. He is a nice guy and speaks English actually. I visited him in his shop or workshop on several occasions. I would have to check in his books, whether there is any information on the brazzera. Good luck with the project.

As I said, I love those small local/regional boats and will follow this log !

That's a pretty big machine ... What is the brass part on the middle of the x-y-slide, a steady to support long parts when milling in the dividing apparatus ?

Sometimes I have feeling that there is a competition out there for who makes the most complicated and intricate designs I gather this internal frieze is actually hiding the duct for the aeration for which are these turquoise shaped vents on the roof ? The colour of these vents doesn't look terribly nice in my eyes - brass would be more stylish ...

The problem was that the the tactical concept for which they were designed became quickly outdated a few years after they were built. The idea was to put an extra-heavy gun behind some armour plate and then fire from a safe distance at enemies (thinking mainly of the French) that could not get close enough in the tidal waters of the German North Sea coast or in the narrow and shallow sunds of the Baltic. They were meant to be a sort of mobile detached fortress for coastal protection. However, when they went into service, the mobile torpedo was invented and successfully made operational. And then a few years after that QL guns were designed. So they became quite vulnerable and were not particularly seaworthy. They were refitted in the later 1880s with two underwater torpedo-tubes in the bow, two QL 8.7 cm guns in the rear and two Hotchkiss 3.7 cm revolving guns that could be switeched between different pivots. SMS WESPE was the first ship of the Imperial German Navy that was designed to make do without any sails right from the beginning. While the class was commissioned, some other, larger armoured ships without any sails were built, but this SACHSEN-class was also conceived as coastal defence ships, the naval doctrine under Bismarck being entirely defensive. Hence they had a limited range of action, relying on the home ports for recoaling.

The DSM in Bremerhaven is undergoing a refurbishment, restructuring and re-orientation at the moment. It seems that they are replacing the 'S' in their name, that once stood for their mission, with an O, that stands for Ocean and makes them drift into the environmental, sustainability and social sphere. Important subjects in their own, but it is sad to see that another 'technical' or 'historical' museum forgets its original mission. We already have a couple of museum with this 'O' in their mission, so the question is, what is gained. I recently found that their library/archive is still responsive and helpful, which is a positive sign.

I would use a sharp chisel to remove any excess glue first. However, I don't think this kind of kit is meant to show varnished wood on the inside, considering the plank joints that are not really prototype fashion.