wefalck

Chipping and ripping often is the result of dull cutting edges, rather than the wrong speed or feed rate.

I tend to soak the lines in dilute varnish, once everything is in place and weighed down. The weights are removed once the varnish has dried. This keeps everything where it should be.

This kit seems to be based on a French fishing boat from Brest in Brittany. If you can identify on the Internet on what type it is actually based, you may find images of the prototype or someone on a French forum who rigs the model prototype-fashion. There are various books on French boats, but these are usually in French They may also not so easy to obtain, depending on your location ... identifying the prototype would be my first step to get to grips with this.

I would take a board and draw onto it the shape of the hull in the correct dimensions, i.e. to the inside of the rail. Put lots of nails to the inside of that curve and gently coerce the hot, wet plank unto this shape, while holding it down to the board, so that it does not twist. Work from one end to the other and fix the shaped part with more nails and the occasional little wood strip nailed down to hold it flat. You may not be able to do this in one session, because the wood will dry and cool down. Leave it in the jig to completely dry and then steam only the unbent part before putting it back into the jig to continue.

Rudolf, to be honest, I don't know. I haven't had a need to try the laser on wood (yet). It will be a question of thickness and density of the material. Due to the rather low power, the laser point would have to stay longer on a spot to get through, which leads to more charred edges and a perceptible kerf. This is already noticeable on the 0.15 mm thick cardboard I am currently working with.

I was wondering, because of the somewhat unorthodox spelling of your first name. I is normally spelled Helmuth or Helmut ...

Ah, Ok ...

The baseboard seems to be long enough for the whole boat, but you placed it onto the baseboard so that the bowsprits sticks out beyond it. This seems to be a bit risky arrangement, the bowsprit can easily be damaged. P.S. Is your mother-tongue German ? Your Name seems to indicate that ...

Very evocative 👍 I am just wandering, why you made the bowsprit sticking out beyond the base-board, where it is prone to damage, while there is a lot of empty space on the other side of the board ...

Before using a solvent-based glue, check that it does not attack the printing ink and/or leads to bleeding of the inks.

Very 'high tech' ... the difficulty would be to get the pull equal on all three strands. "Don't say I have a lot of copper... ha ha " - I noted that in Chinese one doesn't seem to distinguish between brass and copper (I have seen this often also in ebay offers ...). Google translator tells me: brass = 黄铜 (Huáng tóng) copper = 铜 (tóng) Is this true ?

Could you show the other end of the rope-walk in close-up as well ?

Attaching real copper plates with CA can cause bonding issues, as the copper ions can interfer with the cross-linking process while the resin is curing. A contact cement is probably the more secure option. In theory, the plates should overlap a tiny bit, so that the issue with gaps should not arise.

The ships in question are only known through archaelogical finds and some graphical (vase paintings, stone reliefs, etc.) representations. This means that soft vegetal matter, such as ropes and sails normally have not survived. We have some fragments of Viking-age ropes, but their use and location typically is not known. This means that all our knowledge about the rigging of such ships is interference from moden practices and modern knowledge about material properties. The best approach to estimate what rope sizes would be needed for the models would be to study the replicas built of them. These replicas where built as what the science calls 'experimental archaeology', which means that the scientists used the material evidence to reconstruct these ships plus guess work for the missing parts and then tried them out in practice in order to understand, whether the parts, including the rigging, perform as one would expect. There are usually scientific reports on these replicas available, many of them online. I am not very well informed on the Greek ships, but the first stop I would go to for information on Viking-age ships is the Roskilde Viking Ship Museum (https://www.vikingeskibsmuseet.dk/). Their Web-site should lead you to more information. You then can also search the Web for the names given to the discovered wrecks and their replicas, which should turn up a wealth of information. As a rule of thumb, you would also expect the ancient ropes to be thicker than their modern counterpart would be due to potentially lower quality of the material (not always !) and a larger safety margin to account for potentially larger variability in quality. Another aspect to consider is that for all of those three ships the rigging is a much more temporary arrangement, as it would be for most modern sailing ships. The Greek ships were mainly rowed actucally. The rigging arrangement allowed a quick and easy striking of the mast, with stays, shrouds and backstays set up in a 'running' fashion. Hence distinguishing runnning and standing rigging is not so straightforward.

Pat was referring to this kind of chain: From: http://www.cqhisea.com/m/productshow.php?cid=112&id=1123 It is common among larger ships and from the early(?) decades of the 19th on. Due to the difficulty in reproducing it, it is often neglected by modellers. There are now some apparently very good 3D-printed products on the market. However, we were discussing, whether studded chain would be really appropriate for your type of ship and period. In any case, the thickness of the material of your chain seems to be rather thin.

I actually wondered myself a while ago, since when studded links came into use and down to what size of chain. I think one of the picture of the GREAT EASTERN from the 1850s shows huge studded links for her anchor chain, but small chains even today are not studded. I would agree, however, that the material for the links on the chain above is a bit on the thin end.

Bronze is quite corrosion resistant (depending on its actual composition). There are always trade-offs, but bronze nuts and steel/iron spindles is a common combination in engineering. Here, because of the cast-iron gun, the spindle had to be bronze. Everything would be greased and the crew kept busy maintining everything corrosion-free.

Thanks, gentlemen, much appreciated ! **************************************** Folding tool As will be seen in the next post, quite a number of delicate laser-cut parts will need to be folded. Therefore, I thought a folding tool might come handy. A number of commercial gadgets are available, but considering that they essentially consist of a couple of milled-to shape pieces of aluminium and a thumb-screw, I find them rather overpriced at €20 to €70, depending on what you buy where. Also, if I have the right materials and tools, I prefer to make such things myself. I did not have a suitable piece of flat aluminium in stock, so I decided to make it from some 4 mm thick Plexiglas off-cut. This has the added value that you can better see, where you place the folding edge. Plexiglas is more vulnerable than aluminium, but I can always make a replacement, should the need arise. A set of fingers ranging from 1 mm to 6 mm width were separated by notches made with a 4 mm cutter. The front was bevelled for better access to small parts. The opposite side was left straight for longer parts. For the moment, the front edges where milled at 90° degrees, but I can imagine that a slight overbending would be better. I am considering to mill on a 5° or 10° relief angle, but will first test the piece in practice. A more acute angle will make the edges more vulnerable to chipping. The underside is somewhat recessed over most of the width, so that tool really clamps with the front edge, where it is needed, and does not wobble. As I also did not have material for a base in stock, I decided to use the base of the sanding tool that I made a while ago. It has the added value that no extra gadget is floating around the workshop. The folding ruler was drilled and two corresponding holes in the base were drilled and tapped for M3 thumb-screws.

Or sculpt them from suitable modelling clay ...

This depends on the type of ship you are building. Most had planked deadwood, some not. It depends on, where your rabbet is. If you have to plank the deadwood, you may have to work with stealers there. Bulkheads have nothing to with actual ship construction, but are just a 'fake' for us modellers to provide the shape of the hull. Therefore, the edges of the bulkheads are not necessarily a good indication for where constructional details should be.

If your ship has visible 'wales', you have mark out their lines first. Then you would measure the circumference of the bulkheads between the wales and the lower edge of the keel-rabbet. Likewise you measure the distance from the top of the wales to the lower edge of the capping rail and divide these spaces into equal segments.

The binnacle looks good ! A variant of this technique could be to use wax instead of plasticine/plastiline. Ordinary candle 'wax' (which usually actually is stearine) may be too brittle, but the jewellery-makers have special wax for that purpose, which can be milled and turned. One can also dunk the core repeatedly into varnish or even diluted white glue to build up a layer, if you don't want to use galvanoplastics as some Eastern European colleagues here do.

I may have been colporting wrong information then. Admittedly I do not have the book, but have seen criticism to the effect that it generalises information from just a few sources, mainly Swedish ones. Apologies, I was wrong in this respect.

Could be the basis for a 'third-hand' or a rigging stand, if one replaces the studs with clamps with something more versatile. Perhaps along these lines: Could also become a rotating building stand for a small model, to clamp stem and stern-post.

Remember that Peterson's main source of information seems to have been the models in the Stockholm Maritime Museum. So strictly speaking, what he shows would be Swedish practice at the time the models were rigged or restored (which does not necessarily coincide with the period of the prototype ship).