wefalck

This is neither 'my' period nor 'my' region, so I overlooked this build-log until now - shame on me ! It's an excellent tour-de-force on weathering. I will keep watching the progress now ... On the subject of lamp-boards for the navigation lights: I seem to remember that in the mid 1970s or so the maritime rules were changed, requiring the boards to be black rather than in red resp. green. Anyway, roundabout that time I noticed the change. There are some guys in the model railway fraternity that push the naturalism to its limits. There is, for instance, this Swiss, Marcel Ackle: http://www.feldbahn-modellbau.ch/. Quite inspirational !

BTW, most of these Heller-kits seem to be based on plans issued by the Association des Amis du Musée de la Marine in Paris, which in turn are based on drawings from Pâris' 'Souvenirs de la Marine'.

I have been using glue-sticks (Pritt, Uhu, etc.) on wood, metal and acrylics. Good for small parts, as the application is not messy. Photo mounting spray cement and similar have to be used in well-ventilated rooms and you have to protect the work surface from over-spray. Not really worth the effort, if you deal with drawings smaller than say A5. For larger drawings, the glue-stick dries too fast and you would have to apply it in stages, which may lead to distortions. Here, the mounting spray may be better. One should have a flat-bed ink-jet printer with a height-adjustable nozzle to be able to print directly onto the wood etc. of different thickness ... ... thinking about this, if you have a suitably sized, but weak laser-engraver, you can burn the lines and then cut the piece out with the scroll- or band-saw.

One has to go where the work is ...

I found the Danish Veevus (http://veevus.com/) the best and they have a good range of colours and sizes. For seizings you may also use the monofiliment, which is the finest 'thread' (it is a wire, strictly speaking) I am aware of - but it only comes in black and translucent. Check out ebay for offers.

Johann, in his log on the CREOLE, has shown a simple leather-splitter, kind of an inverse plane. Seems to work well for him for 1:48 scale stuff. I cemented (with superglue) 20 mm sections of 0.4 mm copper wire onto a flat milling sub-table and turned it into 0.2 x 0.4 half-round stuff. The principle has been used by watchmakers for the last 150 years or so, employing what they called wax-chucks (the 'wax' was actually shellac), that is a small face-plate. What is obviously important is that the rod/wire is absolutely flat and perpendicular to the Z-axis of the mill. I would mill the groove and then leave the wood in situ for cementing the rod on.

I learned that later (when I saw it on your LOGBUCH articles), I thought you would be living in Amsterdam.

Thanks, Ab. I had three years to study the 'atmosphere' while living in Alkmaar (mid 2006 to mid 2009) and working at the JRC Petten.

The linen you referred to may have been 'tracing linen' as used in the old days to copy technical drawings. I am not sure, whether it is exactly the same linen as was used to mount maps, but I have some old ones that are certainly mounted onto very fine cloth. I don't think 'tracing linen' is available commercially anymore. Your contact to restorers and museum workshops may be very valuable in this context. I now what you mean by things 'getting too complicated' - I am constantly bogged down in my projects by technological challenges due to working in a rather small scale ...

The baby sister is coming on nicely ! For the the D-profile, you could mill a groove into a straight piece of wood, temporarily glue the brass rod into it and then mill away as much as you need. However, I would have thought it to be possible to find half-round brass profiles at that size. I am curious as to how you will be replicating the excellent leathering jobs on the full-size boat in 1:8 scale

Haven't looked into the market for 'silkspan' for years, as I got a life's supply in the late 1970s ... in Germany it was sold by Graupner as 'Japanseide' in various densities. It is a real woven silk fabric and, hence, different from 'Japan Paper', also sold to cover model aircraft. An alternative may be screen-printing silk fabrics. These are readily available (think of the electronic bay) in various mesh-sizes. I have, however, no personal experience with these fabrics. 'dafi' on this forum experimented with silk fabric as used by document restorers and obtained good results. Given that 'Japanseide' is not very densly woven (the idea was to create a sort of composite material by soaking it in lacquer, whereby the lacquer provided the impermeability against air and the fabric the tensile strength) I originally soaked it in casein paint (Pelikan PLAKA was the German produkt I used), but since acrylics became available, I used these. While the aspect is quite canvas-like, the sails are not transparent. I have built up sails from individual panels cut from material impregnated with varnish, glued them together with varnish, and then painted them. This method has been discussed in one or the other thread here on the forum and is described also in my thread on the 'Botter'-model (where I actually used silk paper, rather than fabric, due to the smaller scale). Repairs were not necessarily done with new cloth, but presumably with anything that was at hand. It is conceivable that ripped sails were kept as material for repairs. Hence it should not be surprising to find darker materials being used for patching up sails. Also heavier cloth might have been used, if no matching cloth was available.

Maintenance efforts seem to be correlated with economic margins in the respective trade, as evidenced by photographic records from the 1850s on. Low-margin trades had to make do with smaller crews and less cash to carry out maintenance beyond the functionally necessary. One could speculate that these margins also correlate with the pride of shipowners and captains took in their assets - this could be, however, also a 'chicken-and-egg' issue: low margins make owners/captains sloppy or sloppy owners/captains drift off into low-margin business. There would also be a difference between long-distance traders and those that had short turn-arounds, say in European coastal waters, which didn't leave much 'leisure' for cosmetic maintenance. The Navy is an altogether different story, where maintenance was the prime occupation of crews during peace-time.

I gather there are two main streams in shipmodelling: those, who go for the 'cabinet-maker' style to show their artisanal skills and those who try to achieve a representation of what the ship may have looked like in real life - and anything in between. There seem to be also certain conventions, such as 'builder's model' or 'admiralty' style that were developed at various times. The two most common ways of finishing sailing-ship models seem to be the 'cabinet-maker' style with all wood stained/varnished and the one painting the model prototype fashion, but minus weathering and everything brand-new and Bristol-fashion.

Anything venturing South beyond the Bay of Biscay would be coppered - resources permitting. Ships and boats that would be hauled out frequently or fall dry during tides, may not need this, as any fouling can be removed relatively easily.

Very nice presentation and glass-case ! Me personally, I dislike, however, the cold-white LEDs, they give everything a 'clinical' or 'industrial' aspect. I prefer warm-white LEDs at 3600K, more compatible with a comfortable living environment.

What are you doing that you need a fire-extinguisher in a hobby workshop ?

JCF is right, I have never seen an outhaul on the tack of a main topsail. The fact that it can be on the 'wrong' side of the gaff halliards does not impair its efficiency dramatically, given the moderate overall efficiency (by modern standards) of such kind of rig. The situation is different for the topsails to other gaff-sails. Here the triatic stay between masts gets in the way and there can be outhauls that allow to lift the tack and sheet over the triatic stay - or men need to be sent aloft to do this.

I am guilty of having used brown packaging tape (the type you need to moisten, not the self-adhesive one) wrapped around a metal rod in several layers and then soaking it in shellac. Spinning it on the lathe allows you to easily slice off rings with a cutter - a lathe cutting tool would fray the edges. This kind of tape is also used to seal the back of framed paintings and have such paintings that were framed well over a hundred years ago without visible signs of deterioration. If you are concerned about acidity, you can test the material before use by pulping it and sticking indicator paper into it. It is important to remember, however, that these hoops were not seamless, but had overlapping ends that were lashed together. The lashings go through holes drilled some distance from the ends. I represented this by making the hoops slightly larger then needed and splitting them obliquely with a scalpel. This also allows you to put them - prototype-fashion - onto the mast after the rigging is installed. The ends are glued together and will come under the lashings of the sail.

Well, I can only join into the chorus of praise ... 👍

Very simple: there are shovel-like implements with short handles, bailers. I think you can see one on one of the images. If I am not mistaken they found such bailers in the ship-graves. It works with keel-boats as well as with flat bottoms.

... and, if it had been asbestos, its safe removal and disposal in a licensed facility (according to EU legislation) would cost you more than the boat is worth 😲

I recently spent a few days in Oslo and had the opportunity to visit the Norsk Maritimt Museum. They have a small collection of wooden boats strongly reminiscent of the Viking Age - more than a thousand years on: https://www.maritima-et-mechanika.org/maritime/oslo/oslo.html For comparison, there are also a few pictures of the boats from the GOKSTAD-grave in the Vikingskibethus.

The fillers should be somewhat softer than the bulkheads, but not too soft, so that one doesn’t sand hollows into it. l found MDF board a useful and cheap choice with the added advantage that it is not directional.

I used to make such bolts and nuts in my pre-lathe days on the hand-held drill: take a piece of brass rod (I actually used small brass nails that turn better, due to being work-hardened from the stamping process) into the chuck, turn a step on the front with a small file, then (using the hex-nut of chuck as guide) I filed the six sides by counting the number of file strokes on each side, finally filed the short 'bolt' that will go into a pre-drilled hole and parted off. You won't produce them by hundreds this way, but it's quick enough for machinery, such as winches or the engine. Today, of course, I use the lathe and the dividing head on my milling machine.

On the flooring: was it actually done like this, i.e. like a ship's deck, and not rather in sections that could be lifted up for access to the bilge ?