wefalck

I have learned things the hard way, before the Internet-days with all these instructional videos, a global market-place with access to all sorts of fancy tools and in country (Germany), where model engineering and workshop tips books hardly existed. I realised soon that the relationship between the number of teeth and the thickness of the material to be cut is important. Ideally, one should have more than one tooth of the saw in the work-piece, otherwise the saw may hook, but obviously that often is not possible. One day I wanted to cut a whole series of bulkheads for a new project from 0.25 mm thick brass sheet, but did not have access to very fine piercing blades. In my desperation, I turned the blade I had upside down, i.e. I was sawing with the back of teeth - against all expectations it worked like a charm. I gather, I was kind of scraping the brass, rather than cutting it, but was able to cut out the complex shape of the bulkheads with little effort and distortion of the material. An acquaintance of mine, who worked in a manufacturing company, got the apprentices under his supervision to make a 'bench pin'/saw table from a thick slab of steel and got it hardened. I think this was an excellent idea, as the piercing saws barely would be able to touch it and get get caught by sawing into it.

Beware that there is a difference between 'priming' and 'sealing wood'. Primers are meant to increase the adhesion of paint to particular surfaces as a sort of physico-chemical go-in-between between the surface and the paint. Filled primers (as the Valejo Grey one is) also levels the surface, i.e. it covers up some of the surface roughness. Wood sealers penetrate into the wood, filling (partially) the pores in the wood. They are essentially a kind of lacquer filled with say pumice dust. Thes normally dry quite hard in order to facilitate sanding. Aqueous sealers work best on dry and low-resin wood. For more resinous woods you better use an organic solvent-based sanding sealer. Hence, I would prepare wooden surfaces with sanding sealers, rather than 'primers'.

My point was that the self-levelling of certain acrylics are not very good, which is related to the viscosity of their medium and hence also the capability to keep the pigments in suspension. It seems that the Valejo hand brush thinner overcomes just that problem, if it congeals wiithout drying and initiating the cross-linking of the acrylics particles. Acrylic paints are actually very complex gels (in the physico-chemical sense).

It takes him 12 minutes of talking, before doing the first cut ... Actually, I think his 'bench pin' is not very suitable for the purpose, it its actually the kind used by jewellers for filing. The variety with a hole at the end gives better support to the material being cut. Here you constantly run into the ends and sides of the wedge-shaped slot. It also springy, which is not good. It also better to have the 'bench pin' a bit higher above the workbench (depends on your size and the lengths of your arms of course) - you should be doing this in a very relaxed position.

Perhaps you should have had breakfast first ... I am terrible without breakfast ... I gather you used PVA glue ? That will swell the paper. I can think of two solutions, either take something very thin as backing, such as silk-span, or to use a non-waterbased lacquer/glue for the purpose. If the panelling is to be varnished without dyeing, you may want to apply sanding filler on the 'good' side first to avoid uneven spotting while the parts are glued together. The sanding filler can also be used to stick the panels to the paper backing. Once dry turn the whole thing around and give it good coating with the filler from the back, that should result in a pretty solid assembly.

Looking over the fence is sometimes useful as well: the railway modellers tend to work a lot in metal (brass, copper) and you will find all sorts of advice on the Internet. Another fraternity that does a lot of metal work are the fashion-jewellery makers ... For solders with melting points below 450°C I use a hot-air soldering gun, that I got for less than 50€ from China. You don't mess around with an open flame and don't need to physically touch your soldering set-up.

As for replacement motors in general, it may be a good idea to look into the high-torque motors for electro-scooters. Their arrival on the market means that spare motors are now cheap and easy to come by. There seem to be 12V, 24V, 36V and 48V brushed versions available on the wellknown on-line market places. High torque means chunky motors, so you will have to see, whether it fits into your existing equipment.

As stated above, cast-iron cannon balls were sand-cast, which results in approximate diameters only. Hence, cannon-balls had to be calibrated using specific sets of calipers (for larger balls) or wooden screens. Undersized or oversized ones were returned to the furnace. Sand-cast balls also had to be cleaned carefully from any adhering sand (a process which appears to be depicted in the 18th engraving shown above) to avoid eroding the gun-bores. They would wear oval quite quickly by any adhering sand. The cannon-balls would be calibrated again upon arrival on board by e.g. the master-gunner in order to make sure that they fit the guns of the ship. I believe some sort of forged-iron cradles were used to move cannon-balls around. These consisted of a ring with two handles. For larger balls the handles may have been extended into handle-bars so that four people could carry them. Not sure how these were handled on the ladders in the hatches. Musket-balls and the likes were cast from lead in steel-molds two or three at a time. These were kind of prongs with two half-spheres drilled out/engraved on each side and a funnel. The flash and the spigot from the funnel would have to be trimmed off by hand with a file. As the shrinkage during the casting process depends on accessories in the lead, also the musket-balls need to be calibrated. Musket- etc. balls would also be produced in the arsenals, but ships would have carried lead ingots, casting prongs, calipers etc. Privat guns would often be supplied with a complete set of tools to make your musket- or pistol-balls. Shot-gun pellets were cast by pouring lead through sieves in the said towers. Sometimes disused church-towers were acquired by contractors for that purpose, as the still existing Tour St. Jaques in the middle of Paris.

Mark, hand-brushing of acrylics is rather difficult (at least I am not good at it), because the medium (water or water/alcohol mixtures) has a low viscosity compared to the medium in e.g. enamels (oil/organic solvent mixtures). This means that it is very difficult to apply even and thin layers with sufficient coverage - you push away the newly applied paint too quickly. There is also no time to even out the layer, as you would do for enamels/oil paints, acrylics cure just too fast (I tried my hand at artistic painting with acrylics, but am too slow - the paint cures/dries on the brush). The away around it is to apply numerous very dilute and thin layers (Vaddoc talks about up to a dozen), which is tedious and time consuming. Then there still is the risk of paint accumulating in engraved details etc. The power of acrylics is in air-brushing. Compressors and spray-guns have become so cheap and ubiquitous that the investment should not really be an obstacle. I found that two to three layers are in most cases sufficient. Being lazy and not trusting my mixing capabilities, I normally use paints pre-diluted for air-brushing. They are relatively expensive, but then we don't paint square-metres. Vallejo were originally manufacturers of artists paints and their products for modellers show that. Personally, I use also a German brand (Schmincke) with a similar pedigree. The colour ranges in these pre-diluted paints are more limited than that of their other acrylics, but for 'historic' shipmodelling subjects this should not be a problem - we normally do not have to reproduce 'standard' colours as used on aircraft or military vehicles etc. For an occasional user, like me, mixing one's own colours and keeping perhaps stocks of them is not really working. The pre-mixed and -diluted paints keep in the order of years or even decades, while home-mixed ones disintegrate in the matter of weeks.

Indeed sublime attention to detail. These rope ladders became common, when the man-high bulwarks and solid boxes for the hammocks were introduced. Otherwise it would have been very difficult to climb into the shrouds. We have contemporary pictorial evidence from various countries.

Some time ago I bought a cheap (around 25€ from China) independent 4-jaw-chuck in die-cast zinc (I think) with a view to make jaws in POM/Acetal and/or to machine the existing jaws down for screw-on jaws in different materials and shapes. Didn't get around to do this yet ...

I would have some reservations against a self-centring chuck made from plastics, but I think in reality the jaws are invdividually adjustable on this one. Plastic jaws (not necessarily a plastic body) are good for delicate parts, when metal jaws could easily mar them. I don't know what this chuck is made from, but one could make quite a tough chuck from, say, POM or Acetal ('silent' gears are made from this).

POM turns indeed very nicely. Got some to make draw-bar knobs for my machines.

Yes, shaping parts from the solid in this way is not terribly material-efficient, but allows one to hold complex parts securily while machining. This was for me one of the reasons to build my micro-mill with an integral dividing head. I envisaged in particular to shape such parts from round stock - holding the stock in a collet also provides for easy transfer between the milling machine and the lathe.

'shroud attachment' is the literal translation of 'Wantenbefestigung', but this is just a description of its function, not a proper term. The link above is a Swedish Web-site using an old German reference. Fircks is not really a specialist for Viking-age shipping, he just pulled together various informations. Actually, I doubt that we can ever know what the parts are known, because there are no contemporary written sources that match the archaeological finds. I am not an expert on Nordic shipping, but perhaps there is somewhere an equivalent modern part in use. Its modern name then may be derived from the old term ...

A main criterion for me would be, whether you can have pull-in collets on a lathe, which means mainly that the spindle is fully bored through. In this case you can make adapters for such collets, if they are not readily available. Collets that have to be tightened with a nut from the front (such as the ES) are really only for spindle tooling and not for workholding. The nut also gets in your way. Collets are a so much safer option for working on small parts than three-jaw-chucks. Coming back to the original question: it also depends on what means 'several accessories'. Kitting out a lathe properly easily doubles the purchase price. I am not sure that these Chinese lathes are a good option for someone, who does not have some experience and knowledge of machine tool adjustment and maintenance. I have heard (and Bob referred to this above) that they often bang them together without proper cleaning after casting and machining. They also don't seem to be properly adjusted. I would consider them as a sort of parts kit in advanced stage of machining. When you are happy with that, you probably can turn them into a useful tool, but you have to be aware of that caveat.

To what ?

It probably depends also on where in the world you were. In some places access to oil was easy, while in others not. In the Mediterranean olive oil has been available since antiquity, while in the North vegetable oils were less readily available. Here animal tallow was used to make candles. However, commercial whaling from the 17th century on made whale oil accessible to northern Europe. At some stage also sunflower oil became available. The commercial exploitation of mineral oils from the mid-19th century on changed the game. Since then petroleum was the main energy source for lighting until electricity was introduced in (steam) ship from the 1880s on. Sailing ships, however, retained petroleum lamps up to the end of commercial shipping under sail due to the absence of generating power.

I gather, once you have applied a sanding filler (perhaps inside also) no retrospective 'edge glueing' will be required anymore. The sanding filler will probably turn your hull into a quite solid shell.

I would not go for 'veneer' in such small scale. Veneers are usuall cut tangentially from tree trunk using something like a long knife. This 'peeling' process results in a very open grain and partly destroys the structure of the wood. If it has to be wood, then it should be cut from the solid. Does it really need to be wood ? If it is a full hull model and to be painted, it doesn't really matter too much what is underneath, if you are interested only in the result, rather than showing off your craftmanship. The 1:72 scale is not all too small, have a look at Ed Tosti's YOUNG AMERICA build-log in the same scale.

´Ballenmattiierung’ essentially is a shellac solution.

Pat, without your markings I would have interpreted the photograph so that the heel-chock sits in the more inward position. The jib-boom seems to be somewhat tapered on its top. I think I have seen this on other ships. From the second quarter of the 19th century on it seems that jib-booms were gradually extended to eventually doubling the bowsprit to account for the higher loads due to taller masts. I would also go for an iron-cap. Though the navies have been quite conservative re. technology for a good reason, namely the ease with which battle- or storm damage to wooden parts could be repaired away from a base, iron was the fashion of the day. And if the iron cap was lost or damaged, they still could make a replacement one from wood.

I love these little 0-4-0 engines, but don't like the British saddle-tanks too much, they look bizarre by continental European aesthetics. What's your's going to be ? I have started to collect some material on the French Corpet-Louvet and the British built Neilsons for a potential future project. When you say 6" by 1" you probably mean scale-inches, i.e. 3/4" by 1/8" in reality ?

Well, my wife made it very clear, before we got married: models only in my study ... which really limits me to small sized models. This can mean either a larger ship at smaller scale, or a smaller boat at larger scale. For convenience sake, I limit the size of my models in a way that the profile drawing/side elevation fits onto an A4 paper, which means that I can print the drawings off an ordinary laser-printer. As I like to display the models in an appropriate environment, I prefer 'railway model'-scales, because of the figurines available commercially (usually from German company Preiser). This means 1:160 for larger ships and 1:87 for boats.

I also found that the iPhone produces quite good close-up pictures with much less hassle than my big SLR with all the gear.