wefalck

In Germany and France at least there are nitrocellulose- or shellac-based sanding sealers that are 'filled' with pumice dust. The idea is simplify and speed up the traditional process of 'french polishing', whereby the wood was 'sanded' with a pumice stone and then shellac was applied, which consolidated the pumice dust in the wood pores, thereby evening out the surface. When you rub the wood down with steel-wool, it just takes away the excess sealer, but does not actually cut into the wood itself, as when you are using sandpaper. You immediately get a shiny and smooth surface without scratches. I have been using this process for at leat forty years now in furniture- and model-making. BTW, shellac is not really water-proof, as anyone knows, who put a wet glass onto a french-polished piece of furniture. Alcoholic beverages obviously are even worse. However, when you spray-paint with acrylics, the water (and the alcohol, if your paint also uses alcohol as thinner) evaporates so quickly, that no harm is done.

Shellac is a traditional glue, used by many trades ...

Try to find some nitrocellulose-based sanding sealer. Sand the wood, wet it, sand again (as previously mentioned by Jaager), let dry thoroughly and then apply the sanding sealer. Rather than using sandpaper, rub down the wood first with 000 steel wool and then with 0000. This gives you a nice surface without appreciably adding thickness, as you basically rub down to the wood and just leave the sealer in the open pore space. Such wood surface can be buffed to get a nice satin sheen, or indeed it can be spray-painted with any paint, preferably one that does not contain organic solvents, such as acrylics.

Shellac, lineseed oil, or acrylic varnish would be options. It depends on what degree of shine you anticipate. You may want to give the wood a treatment with wood filler, rub it down with steel wool and then put on the bands. The final treatment then could be any of the previousl mentioned or, indeed, nothing.

Planking thickness on the real ship will vary around the hull. Some of this is visible from the outside, namely the wales. You would need to check the thickness of the planking on the real ship from appropriate resources and then adapt it to the scale of your model.

I think the best thing would be to get some background information on her or the J Class in general. There are also some textbooks on yacht-building and rigging. I am quite sure that double-blocks would have also been used, say on boom-sheets.

Not sure you can see the pictures in this German forum, but a colleague there is just doing that, he uses down branches and trims them to shape: https://www.segelschiffsmodellbau.com/t7885f20-Slawenboot.html Or lamination from many thin layers (plane sheavings) over a former.

When I look at the linked picture, I don't think that any structure of the the aluminium? lining inside the hangar would be perceptible at a 1:350 scale. I would spray the internal structure in silver and then modulate the silver with a soft (e.g. B8) pencil to simulate the folds etc. in the lining.

I have not doubt that it works. The point was that there are cheaper materials and that there is a risk that the alloys change their properties due to contamination from the plating metals. So they may or may not be re-useable. But one would need to try.

There are many low-temperature alloys that could be used for this purpose, such as Wood's Metal, Rose's Metal etc. Melting points are somewhere between 50°C and 90°C, so that they could be liquidised by boiling in water. However, I am not sure, whether they wouldn't be contaminated by the plating metal ions and then change their melting point. They are also rather expensive compared to jeweller's wax for instance. I think I would rather go one of the above mentioned methods, than using one of the alloys.

One has to distinguish between 'plating' and 'galvanoplastic'. Technically the processes are similar, but the product and the set-up is different. Plating is, what is called a redox-reaction, whereby a metal is reduced from its soluble salt-form (broadly speaking) to the solid metal and deposited onto a metal or conducting surface. The redox-reaction can be purely chemical, then we talk about chemical plating, or it can be induced or supported by an electrical current, then we talk about electroplating. In the latter case most of the metal to be plated onto a conducting surface or another metal is dissolved from a solid electrode of that metal. The solution is thus continuosly replenished with that metal. Chemical plating can be done with a variety of metals. I just googled and there are many commercial kits available on both sides of the pond. The process can be done as a dipping or a brush-on process. It normally requires a metal surface and with the right chemistry, most metal can be substrate for chemical plating, though aluminium probably not, due to it quickly forming oxide layer. I regularly tin-plate etched or machined parts to give them a silvery look and to facilitate soldering. Often only the addition of flux is needed. Self-tinning solutions can be bought either ready made or as dry mixtures of the salts. They are also used by the fraternity that produces home-etched printed circuit-boards. Electroplating also can be done with many different metal. The surface to be plated can be a metal or any other conducting surface, e.g. a graphite lacquer. Not all metals can be plated on every other, so nickel-plating on steel requires a first plating in copper. Again kits are available on the market for doing this in a bath. For repair purposes also so-called tampon-plating kits are available. Here a felt 'tampon' is soaked in a solution containing the metal to be plated with, a cable is clipped to the part and the tampon pressed onto the surface to be plated. These kits are availble easily from jewellers supply shops for copper, gold, rhodium, silver and some other metals. Galvanoplastic is similar to electroplating, but a thicker layer (up to several miliimeters) of metal is deposited, with a corresponding need of electrode material. The model normally is non-conductive material, such as wax, plaster, wood or plastics that is made conductive by a graphite or silver lacquer. The process can be done as positive or negative. For the positive one a model of the object is made and then covered in the conductive lacquer. The final object is slightly larger than the model and some of the surface structures will have been evened out during the process of plating. Alternatively, a mould can be made from the object to be reproduced and the inside of the mould is covered with the conductive lacquer. The metal electrode and the salt solution is put inside the mould. The process reproduces every detail of the mould. It has been used since the 1840 to reproduce coins, statues and other metal objects. Today, CNC machining opens up new possibilities of model and mould making. Models can be milled or 3D-printed from jeweller's wax for either lost-wax casting in brass or for galvanoplastic. I German colleague now prints 3D-models in wax and has them cast. And @Valeriy V here on this forum CNC mills cores for ventilators for his cruiser VARYAG from wax and deposits copper on them to form the ventilators. The wax is removed by heating. One can do this also with acrylic glass or styrene and dissolve the plastic in acetone. The negative process with a mould has the advantage, that several copies can be drawn, while for the positive process you need a new core every time. As a kind of curiosum I should mention another process. I know an octogenarian in the UK, who sculpts the decoration for his model of the ROYAL OAK (1769) in Z-brush, has them 3D-printed in acrylic resin and then vacuum-plated with gold. This process, called 'sputtering' is a preparation step normally used in electron microscopy, when you want to examine fine surface details. In EM only a one atom layer of gold is required, for plating you need a bit more, of course. He is lucky that his sun is a researcher with access to the facilities. The process is not cheap because of the machine-time and the amount of gold needed. However, the results are just phenomenal - beats every carving with respect to detail and definition ... well, not exactly a low-cost option, which was, what this thread was about

At the very beginning I also thought that these structured acrylic glasses might be a good idea, but at least the ones I found at the time didn't quite look like waves, but rather than water droplets on a glass pane, so I gave up that idea. Unless the sea is dead-calm, it is probably better moulded or carved. There would be swell/waves of different heights and lengths. In most cases the sea would be translucent at best and you can see only through a top layer of a few centimeters, when you look sort from above. So one doesn't really need to have something that is completely translucent. Hence, the sea can be moulded say from plaster of Paris or carved from wood or hard foam and then covered with 'gesso' (essentially Plaster of Paris). The changing colours of the sea then are painted on. Finally one gives it a cover of glossy acrylic varnish. Splashes, wave crests etc. can be modelled using acrylic gel medium. As the sea is never really that glossy, except again in a dead calm, I stipple on with a bristle brush gel medium to simulate the wind effect on the water surface. I have described the process in more detail on my Web-site: https://www.maritima-et-mechanika.org/maritime/tips/makingwaves.html Here one example for a tropical lagoon using an acrylic sheet as the basis:

Interesting way to build the deckhouse around the furniture, inside-out 👍

Parrel beads is what you are talking about now. Here is my comment on that subject a couple of years ago: "Although I inherited a box full of antique very small seed-beads (at some stag,e embroidery using these glass beads was fashionable), I have been constantly hunting for them, as they never seem to come in the right colour ... The keywords to look for are seed-beads or rocaille (beads). Their size is given in either millimetres or fractions of an inch, i.e. a size 16/0 would be 1.58 mm in diameter. They seem to have been made traditionally by the Bohemian glass industry and in Venice. However, new stock seems to go down only to 18/0. If you need smaller ones, you need to hunt for antique stock. The smallest I have seen on Web-sites are 26/0 and my antique stock (unfortunately ivory coloured) falls into that size category. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_bead" For beads of any size and description, just look around ebay, in the ladies' handycraft sections as well as in the nail 'art' section.

Direct line to 'mistress' ? Does the owner have a mistress and what does his wife say to that ? Or did you mean 'distress (centre)' ?

The price for commercial custom-etched parts is made up of four components: 1. making the two drawings (left and right) 2. printing two films (left and right) 3. the actual etching 4. packaging and postage No. 1 in most cases is charged as an hourly fee. However, customers can usually supply their own artwork in a format acceptable to the company. Most companies towday accept or even prefer PDFs. The quality and correctness of the drawings is the responsibility of the customer. So, in practice you don't have normally these costs. No. 2 is best left to the company, who has professional equipment to make real films, rather than print-outs on laser-printers. Some companies accept your films, if they conform to their specifications. Then the quality (i.e. the density of the black areas) is your responsibility. Many companies keep the film for you and if you need duplicates, only the cost of the etching arises. No. 3 depends on the material to be etched. Prices increase with thickness of the material, its unit cost, and the difficulty in etching. Brass is the cheapest, hard brass more expensive, then nickel-silver, steel is the most expensive. No. 4 obviously depends on the origin and destination. I wasn't able to check, how much the well-established German custom-etcher, Saemann-Ätztechnik (https://www.saemann-aetztechnik.de/) charges, because their Web-site is under reconstruction, but they are more expensive than the Czech guys (https://www.etchworks.eu). However, I think more than 30€ for an A4 sheet involving steps 2 and 3 above would be excessive. The Czech guys may be battling with the Corona-effects and having difficulty keeping up with business, like many other small businesses. On laser-cutting vs. etching: - cutting anything else but paper, cardboard or thin wood would require a pretty substantial laser-cutter, even (white) plastics, such as styrene require quite a bit of laser-power. Plastics and metal would also require a good aeration due to the fumes produced and stronger lasers need water cooling. So anything more substantial than the small laser-cutter I showed here on the forum a while ago is a major financial and time investment on top of the actual machine. - with laser-cutting you have only a limited capability of producing similar to the surface-etching process. In some lasers you can modulate the power or go over the same part several times to achieve different depth of material removal. The success of that depends on the reproducibility of the mechanical positioning of the cutting-head, which can be not so good in cheaper models.

Incidentally, there is another, much safer way to mill a round on an indexer: take repeated tangential or longitudinal, if the axis of the indexer is horizontal, cuts, advancing the indexer 5° degrees or so every time and locking(!) it. This is best done, if the blank is just a tad bigger than the final part. So cut the blank to size first on a table saw or by hand. The final pass on the mill, to really smooth it, then can be done by turning the chuck. I use this procedure to make half-round parts or for rounding-off corners. This procedure is also safe with metals, because you lock the indexer every time you take a cut and your hands are away from the milling cutter. On safety: always wear safety glasses - more important than on a lathe, because the chips fly around much farther and often into the direction of the operator. On a lathe the chips tend to be projected downwards towards the operator, who usually looks down onto the work.

Not sure, I understand correctly what the problem is - picture would be helpful, but it sounds, as if the workpiece has not been clamped down properly. In general, lathe or mill, if the workpiece can flex or otherwise move, you will not get satisfactory results or it may even result in desaster.

Two additional comments on the above: - rotate the rotary table always against the rotational direction of the mill ! These rotary tables are not actually meant for round-milling, but for indexing. If you rotate the table the other way around, the mill can grap the workpiece and wrench it from your hand. For this reason it is also advisable to let the locking knob slightly bind, so that there is a bit of frictional resistance. That helps to steady the movement. And: do not try to do this kind of operation with metal ! Real rotary table built for round-milling have a self-locking worm-drive. - I would make the first cut a bit wider (on the outside) and narrower (on the inside) and go for second, finishing pass.

As a matter of fact, this ring of wedges would not normally be visible. It is waterproofed by a sleeve of painted/tarred canvas that is nailed to the mast and to the deck. It may also be fastened to the mast by a rope wound around it.

I had the same feeling, that there is a confusion betweent the two items. That ring of wedges really is a lathe job and not one for a milling machine.

Thanks for the hand on the last picture - I imagined the model to b much bigger ...

I think the discussion is diverging somewhat from the original topic. In this building log below (no idea, why it shows a Christmas motif ...) I go through a wide variety of milling set-ups, albeit on different small mills.

Still too big for a lot of milling jobs around models. Note that the toolmakers vice has recesses at the top of the jaws that allow you to safely clamp smaller pieces without the aid of 'parallels' underneath. The recesses are about 2 mm x 2 mm.

I do this also with metal, btw. One can solder a spigot to any part so that it can be held in a 3-jaw-chuck or collet for machining. For smaller parts I just use a big enough diameter round brass - a bit wasteful, but safe and simple.