wefalck

It begins to look ship-shape 👍🏻 You are in the same dilemma as we all are who try to depict working boats in their real condition: how do I reproduce the irregularities and haphazardness of the 'real thing' without the model looking poorly executed. A problem that our colleagues who build historic ships in an 'artisanal' style to show their woodworking etc. skills don't have. I think there is no problem in using different plank widths or varying shift patterns as long as the planking us such is done neatly. Even if boatbuilders have to do with the random material that is available, they usually take care e.g. to plane/adze the surfaces neatly with no plank edges sticking out etc. I observed this even at the rough beach-building places for dhows in Zanzibar. The irregularities have to be to 'scale'.

The swarf from acrylic glass is quite crumbly and brittle, so it is easy to remove with a bristle brush.

There won't be any wood on this model. On the prototype only part of the wale, the deck, mast and spars would not have been covered in paint. At this scale, even the grain of box-wood would difficult to handle and Plexiglas keeps much crisper edges. More details on the planking etc. at its time 😉

Normal household silver or brass polish will do. It comes usually either as cream in pots or semi-liquid in bottles or tubes. Rinse well afterwards.

This appears to be a pivoting support rod for the yard that is attached to the parral. These seem to have come into use in the 1880s or so for lower and lower top-sail yards that not normally were raised or lowered and replaced halliards. Check out UNDERHILL, H.A. (1946): Masting & Rigging the Clipper Ship & Ocean Carrier.- 304 p., Glasgow (Brown, Son & Ferguson). I think there is a drawing in there. The rod was hinged to a central band on yard connected with the parral and its bottom end was hinged to a band lower down on the mast. The hinges allowed to brace the yard.

If I understand correctly, LYNX was a kind of privately built privateer? So, it may not have followed any navy pattern/regulation. As these are upper deck guns, any eye-bolts would be sitting in the bulwark stanchions. Bulwark stanchions do not have any support from above, so they would be heavily strained on bending, resulting from the recoil. In consequence, one would probably try to distribute the strain from the breech-rope and the tackles over different stanchions and to keep the eye-bolts as low as possible. The question then would be, how the stanchions might have been spaced in order to find a point of attachment. Are there any naval regulations/USN handbooks for the period in question? I am not familiar with the period/country. Otherwise, RN practice would probably the next thing to look for. I would shy away from looking at modern interpretations and models, as one does not what sources the respective author/builder might have used.

I hope everyone here had a good start into the New Year 2025! *************************************************************** Continuing with the bulkheads Progress over December was slow, due to a couple of travels and a visitor over Christmas, but quite steady. All parts of the backbone have now been cut out and sanded/filed to shape. Dimensional accuracy was checked by placing the parts over a drawing on a LED-backlit board. The cant-frames, however, can only be finished, when the bulkheads have been glued in place. Collection of finished bulkheads I was happy to see that the Plexiglas-sheet is dimensionally very accurate and fitting tightly into the milled slots in the base. This means no particular arrangements need to be made to ensure that they sit perfectly perpendicular on the base. Milling a chamfer on the inside of the stanchions on micro-milling machine set-up as router The bulkheads still required a bit of work. I thought it would be a nice detail to give the future bulwark stanchions a light chamfer over part of their length. This kind of edge-treatment was very common on many ship parts for both, aesthetic reason and to reduce the risk of splintering in case of an impact. It is not seen very often on models though. To this end I had made the router table last autumn. A 0.5 mm drill in a collet served as guiding pin and a small conical burr was used as router. The length of the chamfer was marked on the stanchions before milling it freehand. The result is difficult to photograph on the clear Plexiglas, but will become visible, once the model is being painted. Filing notches for the wales on the shop-made filing-machine Another operation was to cut shallow notches for the wale. The top-edge of the wale is marked in the original drawings and its width was taking from a table of scantlings of a similar ship. Having the wale fixed in that way will give a guidance for the later planking. The shop-made filing-machine in action on the bulkheads The notches were cut with a 1 mm x 1 mm fine machine file on the shop-made filing machine (https://www.maritima-et-mechanika.org/tools/diefiler/diefiler.html). I was lucky to have been able to find on ebay some years ago whole boxes of unused machine files in various shapes, dimensions and cuts. A life-time supply of a tool that is not made anymore. Collection of finished bulkheads To be continued

The pump reminds of another project that I have in the back of my mind for some day: a diving-barge with an old-time diver with the large copper helmet, foldy rubber suit, chunky leaded-down boots, etc. They would be supplied with air through a hose. I remember one seeing as a boy, inspecting the pile-driver's work in Kiel harbour. Must have been around 1961 or 1962.

Feel free to ask questions. There are members here with 30+ years of experience in machining ... It is also good to keep in mind, that lathes and mills are 'self-replicating' machines in the sense, that you can make parts on them that improve their performane or widen the spectrum of applications by making attachments. In this sense it is also useful to look at old-time (pre-WWI) machinists handbooks from a time when machine-tools were less sophisticated and one had to make a lot of parts/attachments oneself.

As has been noted in other threads here, it helps to draw up a list of things you really want/need to do with the machine and a list of things of which it would be nice, if it could do this as well. The next step is to think about the enveloppe of the parts you expect to work on, i.e. max length, max width/length or diameter. One also needs to think about the materials you expect to work on. Finally, what is the smallest and biggest hole you expect to drill. This determines the chuck or collet capacity and the precision and sensitivity required. Most hobby machines are ok down to 0.5 mm or even 0.3, but below that concentricity and sensitivity of movement may not be good enough, resulting in drill breakage. Milling machines in general are meant to mill, not to drill. Hence, many do not have quill, but you need to lower/lift the head with a handwheel that works on a leadscrew. That is a very precise and safe way for drilling holes, but also very tedious, when you want to drill many holes of medium precision. For some mills drilling quills are available as extras or so-called sensitive drilling-attachments, which is essentially a sleeve fitting into the main chuck/collet with which a light drill-chuck can be moved up an down. As mentioned in my previous post, I would look into using collets for model work, rather than a drill-chuck. Many drill-presses, however, do not allow to replace the chucks with collets. In some cases, aftermarket ER collet-chucks may be available. I am not terribly familiar with the current market for drill-presses or milling machines, as I am fully kitted out, so the above comments are meant to provide you with indications for what to look for in the machines.

Can't comment on the current quality of the PROXXON drill-press, but had the previous model since the early 1980s and it is still going strong, though it has seen considerable abuse by working too hard. In any case, I would recommend to go for collets, rather than using the Jacobs-chuck - less bulky and more precise. I think, PROXXON includes them into the standard kit. At the time I also bought the long column, which came handy for non-modelling projects (hence the abuse), and the kit convert it into a simple wood-lathe (I don't think they offer this anymore since they had the small wood-lathe).

Well, I assumed that just the same knot as fishermen used for their nets were used. While square/lozenges seems to fairly straightforward to make (fishermen do this free-hand while chatting away on quays, much like women do their knitting), the often seen hexagonal patterns seem to require some sort of framing.

31 Aug 1798 - "Beat to Quarters and Stow'd our hammocks in the Nettings and in the Tops and fill'd our Lockers with Shot..." Perhaps you guys have been put on a wrong track by the short-hand writing and the lack of commas? I would have just read it like this: 31 Aug 1798 - "Beat to Quarters and Stow'd our hammocks in the Nettings, and [been] in the Tops, and fill'd our Lockers with Shot..." Much less puzzling, though hammocks were indeed used as protection against small-arms fire, so why not in the tops as well ...

This appears to be cart-mounted fire-pump - the engravings in the back corroborate this. They came into use in the 18th century and were finally surplanted by IC-engine-driven pumps in the 20th century (there were also two-wheeled steam-driven cart-pumps, but they were expensive). Every village used to have at least one, if they couldn't afford a bigger one or when the streets didn't allow access by four-wheeled ones. They were also common in industrial establishments and shipyards for rapid intervention.

To me it appears than that very little bending is actually required.

Are you sure that this should be a part bent into a U and not two parts that meet over the bowsprit in a seam that runs parallel to the bowsprit? I don't think I have ever seen the U-shaped solution on a real ship.

Ah yes, I think I have seen on or two of those movies, but did not memorise any character names 😁

Could you show a picture of the situation ? I suppose the material will be painted afterwards, so it doesn't matter what is underneath? In this case, you could consider cutting the piece from cheaper and easier to work material, such a styrene, or use styrene strip that can be formed with gentle heat from a hair-dryer around a former as mentioned above.

The stempost leans to port compared to the transom. The only solution seems to be to rip off the planking and hope that the ‘backbone’ straightens itself again.

Indeed the ration between thickness and width and radius of the curve are the key parameters. It is probably unavoidable to make some sort of jig. This jig would consist of a former for the inner radius of the finished piece, attached to a flat board. The forming would proceed with gentle hammering the strip to the former, interrupted by heating the part with a torch to red-hot to take out the work-hardening. Otherwise the strip will start breaking on the outside curve. The hammering and resulting stretching will make the strip narrower, so you need to start with a strip wider than the finished rail. Depending on the actual dimension of the part, it may be actually better to saw it from a piece of sheet brass.

"I only place ONE layer of planks, no second coats necessary." ... In POB kit-construction that depends on the spacing of the bulkheads that was chosen by the manufacturer. In many cases the spacing is too wide, resulting in 'kinks' in the first planking that needs to be evened out. A safer construction with less chances of distortion during planking would be to fill the spaces between the bulkheads with pieces of wood, which also makes fairing the hull easier ...

What means 'Mater from Cars' ? If it's Latin it would mean the 'mother' of cars, but that doesn't seem to make lot of sense !? I may confuse them, but I think these artillery-tractors were of a rather special design with diesel-electric drive: the power came from a diesel-engine (or maybe a petrol-engine, not sure) that drove a generator, which in turn drove electric motors in each wheel.

Very clean and crisp construction 👍🏻 And nice to see that someone else adopted also the method of building deckshouses and skylights around (solid) acrylic cores.

Yes, indeed, that looks like less trouble with the next planks 👍🏻

Happy New Year to you as well ! This will be become a true (retrospect) 'Builder's Model' !