wefalck

Don't know what happened, but I managed to completely miss this until just now 😱 Excellent rendering of the Pâris plans !

Fluorescent tubes become slowly obsolete and are replaced by LEDs. The jury is still out as to their relative environmental impact and resources requirement, but one thing is for sure, they only need a fraction of the operating energy. The stroboscopic effect is only relevant in conjunction with rotating machinery or (old-time) computer screens that have a refreshment cycle near the 50Hz/60Hz or multiples thereof. As with all lamps, they have to be designed to diffuse the light in order to avoid too stark shadows. I am currently using an 'architects' lamp for a single bulb, but replaced the bulb with a high-power (100W equivalent) LED-globe. The fluorescent tube in the illuminate magnifier stays until it burns out and will then be replaced by LEDs. These days you can get LEDs with virtually any socket that is used for traditional incandescent bulbs, halogen bulbs, or fluorescent tubes. The architects lamp is good for draughting and working on flat pieces, but still does not illuminate surfaces very well that are turned towards you and it is not always possible to orient parts you are working on with the respective surface up. So I am looking for a light source that comes from my back, but without throwing my shadow onto the table. I have put my writing desk perpendicular in front of the window, so that it is to my left. That's a good arrangement for hand-writing and -draughting (both of which I rarely do anymore), but when manipulating parts, we are typically working with both hands. So this needs to be considered as well.

One thing I have noticed as I am getting older: I also need more light from the front onto thing that I am working on. The under-cabinet lights (as in the kitchen) are good, but somehow they put shadows from behind onto objects you are working on. Perhaps not so much an issue when you are standing and looking down onto the bench, but irritating when you are, like me, work seated. Not sure, what the ideal solution would be. Perhaps some LED-panels somewhere above the head where the chair is, so that one does not oneself cast a shadow onto the workbench. I am in the process of designing a workshop in our new apartment, so I am watching this space ...

Limp sails, half-hoisted for drying are so much more difficult to represent, than the dramatic billowing ones, but I think you are getting there ! This begins to look rather convincing. While pottering along with my current project, I have been looking at various images, including van de Velde paintings and mid-19th century photographs, to get a better feeling for how limp sails drape over stays and the kind of folds and creases they have. My challenge then will be that I am/will be working at 1:160 scale. At any scale the problem is that the materials that are available to us are at least one order of magnitude too thick compared to the prototype and the the stiffness of the fibres does not scale down. This means that the material, whether textile or paper, does not crease and fold as intricatly as it should. Even on those billowing sails one would normally see fine creases raying out from the corners - they are never as taught as the modern plastic yacht sails. This will require almost something like sculpting in 3D, using e.g. tweezer, while the material is drying. I will also experiment with painting, acrylic washes, as figurine painters use to depict fabrics or indeed any painter, with the difference that the substrate is not flat, but in three dimensions. @Schmidt has been continuing with his paper experiments and he tries to achieve the transparent effect one observes when viewing a sail against the light. His recent results look quite promising: https://forum.arbeitskreis-historischer-schiffbau.de/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=1874&start=75. He also works in 1:160 scale for theses models, btw.

Something to look forward to every second evening or so 👍

We had this discussion somewhere else on the forum: either nitrocellulose varnish (known under the name of zapon-varnish also, which is used to protect polished silver and brass from tarnishing) or a shellac solution. It does not appreciably darken the lines, particularly when used diluted.

One would indeed need to know what (type of) vessel we are talking about. In European commercial vessels for much of the 19th century the light upper yards were often set flying, with no parrel. Sometimes also a kind of vertical stay parallel to the top-mast was used on which the yard ran with a truss into which an eyes was spliced. Weight of gear was important in trading vessels with small crews.

I am a bit pressed for time at the moment and cannot extract relevant works from my literature list, but you are welcome to browse it here: https://www.maritima-et-mechanika.org/maritime/maritimebibliography.pdf. Beware it is long document ...

As I always say: nothing looks more like metal ... than metal However, not everyone has access to certain tools and techniques. Tampon galvanising kits for copper, silver and rhodium are avaialble from jewellers supply houses. They also supply the materials for polishing and buffing, which is not really difficult.

If you could show what the windscreen looks like and and what cross-section the frame should have, one could give some more specific input. I gather you will have two challenges here: a) to shape the frame, and b) to get the shiny chrome finish it presumably had. I assume that it would have been framed with some sort of U-shaped profiles. Depending on the scale of the model, you may be able to buy something suitable in brass or styrene, otherwise you would have to fabricate it yourself. This profile would need to be coerced around the windscreen, or perhaps some sheet metal former to avoid scratching the windscreen. It would need to made in section to allow insertion of the screen material. Brass you could then take to a company that does chrome-plating, or you could spray-paint it using some high-quality metallic paint, such as Alclad, as you would do for styrene. A completely different route would be to build the frame around the existing windscreen with narrow strips of styrene. After masking off, this can be painted again with Alclad paints or something similar.

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.