wefalck

Following Basil Greenhill ('Archaeology of the Boat'), the shell-first method may have originated in extended dug-outs: the dug-out was heightened by adding planks; dug-outs were also widened by heating them and spreading out their sides. Eventually, a dug-out was a too small a base for a boat. Also very large trees became increasingly scarce, so that the back-bone was reduced to a keel or floor-plank. Some native craft around the world (including actually Europe) were built until quite recently on the basis of extended dug-outs. On the other hand, the shell-first method, commonly associated with the wood-rich northern countries, seems to have also been used around the Mediterranean and other places of th World. Edge-fastened (with tenons and mortices) planks were assembled into shells with internal structural timbers being added later in the process. Edge-fastened planks, whether overlapping (clinker) or butting against each other is the key feature of the shell-first method. The other way to conceive a boat is to cover a structural framework with a skin, be it hide, cloth or wooden planks. Here any edge fastening (e.g. by sewing) does not give structural strength nor shape, but only serves to make the skin water-tight. In frame-first building the wooden planks are never edge-fastened, but only attached to the frame.

I know what you mean, I admire people, who get whole battleships done - we are getting lost already in the details of such seemingly simple projects ...

You are welcome I am just sharing my book knowledge augmented by 30+ years of tinkering in the workshop ...

Exactly. I am actually using one of those plug-in dimmers that go between the plug and the wall socket.

Of the single shrouds, one would go around the front of the mast and the other around the back. It would be the art of the rigger and the mate/officer in charge to make sure that all shrouds are set in a way that they take up the strain relatively evenly distributed.

Interesting. I would have thought that the double-shrouds would weigh down on the single ones and through friction secure them additionally, thus taking some of the strain from the lashings (which, incidentally would be double or triple, as for the lower end around dead-eyes).

Instead of a splice, the single one may also be just lashed together as the double one: each side reaches over to other side, together forming a loop. The correct method would need to checked in period reference books.

Plank-bending inserts for soldering irons have been on the market for 50+ years for a few quid. Essentially, they are rod with a disc or something egg-shaped in cross-section at the end. You can even make one yourself, dito the wooden die for shaping. Get yourself a heat-controlled soldering station with exchangeable tips for the same amount of money and you can use it for soldering too

As an avowed tool-junkie I would love to have a peek into his tool-chest ... Sticking sanding paper to palette-knives sounds like a good idea. Although I have 'inherited' a bunch of them from my mother, when she went to a retirement home and had to give up porcelain painting, they are too big for my scales. Perhaps one can make ones own micro 'palette-knives' from bent thin steel strips with a suitable handle. They should have the same size as toolmakers rasps/files or watchmakers echappement files.

Carrier hardness vs. hardness of the abrasive vs. hardness of the material to be worked on is actually very important. If the carrier is too hard, the abrasive gets squashed and becomes ineffective, if the carrier is too soft, the material may smear over the abrasive, rendering it ineffective. This is why we have relatively soft abrasive wheels with red iron-oxide as binder and the grey ones with harder Si-carbide as binders. Soft polishing pastes (say 'rouge' in oil) would smear around a steel lap and not do anything. An old-time watchmakers polishing kit would contain lapping disc made from steel, bronze (bell-metal), and boxwood. A little anecdote: as a student I worked in the institute for tunnel engineering of the ETH in Zürich (Switzerland); my job was to prepare samples for testing different pre-cutting configurations for tunnel-boring machines. For this I had to drill large cores (150 mm diameter) from different rock types, ranging from granite to sandstone. We had a large drill-press and a core-drill with a diamond-impregnated rim. I was really struggling with some of the granites and we thought something was wrong with the core-drill. So I took it back to the distributor; he chucked it up in his concrete-drilling machine and went through a slab of high-quality concrete (from a nuclear power station) like butter. He explained to me that we just got a drill with the wrong binder (brass) and that it smeared over the diamond grains, when drilling in very hard rock, such as granite.

Yes and no. With softer abrasives, one needs to also a softer material as a carrier, such as wood. Watchmakers use, for instance, boxwood discs charged with chalk, rouge (iron oxide) etc. for polishing. I found that a new and unused milling cutter moved at slow speed gave a quite polished surface, at least on the tiny surfaces we are talking about.

Each brush has its particular use and purpose. Perhaps it would be useful to study the use of brushes on a Web-site that introduces into painting. There are also many sites on painting plastic models that provide introductions. Having said that, the preferred tool for painting larger uniform surfaces today are not brushes, but an air-brush. I believe so-called double-action air-brushes and a suitable compressor can be had for 100€ or even less. My preferred brushes for small details are so-called 'spotters'. These are short-haired, stiff hair-brushes, not bristle-brushes. They come in different sizes. It is better not to chose a too small size for working with acrylics, as these will take up less paint and in consequence dry out faster, so that one has to work fast. When using oils, this is not a problem. Applying acrylics smoothly over a larger area can be challenge due to the fast drying. I tend to air-brush the larger areas and then work in the details and washes etc. with brushes. For washes I use the paints pre-thinned for air-brushing for convenience sake. Some people also use very successfulle mixed techniques, i.e. the apply oil-colour detailing and washes over an acrylic underpaint. Very subtle effects can be achieved in this way, but as said above, drying times are long. When one layer of oils is not thoroughly dried, the following layer is going to be re-dissolved by the medium, i.e. the turpentine, of the next. Drying times can reach from days (for 'lean' paints) to weeks (for 'fat' paints).

„... but that is the reason we all love the hobby„ - what can I say ...

Thanks, Jim. Interesting indeed. You work essentially then on the dry paper ? How do you develop the preliminary drawings of the ships. In some cases there would be photographs, but of course not for the historic subjects. I know that some marine painters work from models - and you ?

Thanks, gentlemen ! Indeed, the technique is quite similar to facetting gem-stones, but there one uses abrasive discs 'charged' with abrasive or polishing powders. I thought of using silikone polishing bit, but they can round the edges of Plexiglas. I do have small polishing discs in brass, but don't have diamantine to charge the discs. Perhaps should look into this, as these hard discs don't round the edges, when polishing. However, diamantine is a bit messy and not so good for the machines ... Yep, the brass columns will be painted to simulate the varnished mahagony. I found virtually all real wood too coarse in grain, even boxwood, at this scale. Also turning such delicate parts with the necessary definition is very difficult. One cannot stabilise the boxwood with CA before turning, because it has to be dyed afterwards. So it will have to be paint. I still have to experiment a bit to find a satisfactory procedure to simulate the varnished mahagony. It will be probably a base coat in a light wood colour with several washes of mahagony-brown to create depth. Then a final clear semi-gloss varnish, again to create the depth one finds on polished wood. I am talking about using acrylics here. The same technique will be used on the skylights, stairs etc. that would have been varnished mahagony or teak at this time.

Thanks for the sympathy, gentlemen !. In the end, I persevered Binnacles WESPE-Class was originally equipped with three binnacles, one on the bridge, the mother-compass on a sort of pole in front of the engine-room skylight, and the third one in front of the emergency steering-wheel at the stern. In the 1890s a fourth binnacle was installed on a platform atop the engine-room skylight, but is left off here. As SMS WESPE was built in 1876 the original binnacles lack the conspicuous compensation spheres, that were only invented in the 1880s by Lord Kelvin. Also other type of compensation gear is not visible on the lithographs and the earliest photograph. A photography of the early 1890s shows a much more substantial binnacle in front of the emergency steering-wheel, which preumably now houses the compensation gear and also sports the compensation spheres. Originally, the compasses must have been illumanted by petroleum lamps, but from the lithographs it is not clear, where these lamps would have been attached. At least there are exhaust funnels on top of the binnacles, which have disappeared in later photographs. This seems to indicated that electrical illumination might have been introduced, when a dynamo was installed on board in the early 1890s for a search-light. The binnacles as they appear on the early 1880s lithograph For the model the individual binnacles were redrawn from the lithograph in order to serve as a basis for working sketch to guide the lathe- and mill-work. One needs to keep in mind that the total height is somewhere between 10 and 15 mm. Redrawn binnacles, broken down into individual components to facilitate machining and painting The columns presumably were made from mahagony and were turned from brass rod before being transferred to dividing head on mill to cut the octogonal shape. Milling the octogonal section of the binnacle columns The actual compass was made, as usual, from brass and so on the model. Body and funnel did not provide a particular challenge, not considering the small size. To the contrary, the glass hood with its narrow frames of perhaps 15 mm width on the original. The body was roughly turned from Plexiglas and then transferred to the mill. Here the octogonal pyramid was milled. Using a 0.3 mm ball-head burr narrow grooves were cut into the edges and these grooves filled in with brass paint. Set-up on the micro-mill to shape the octogonal pyramid of the glass hood Milling the faces of the octogonal pyramid Cleaning up the faces after painting the edges Once the paint had thoroughly dried, the faces were very lightly milled over, which resulted in sharp narrow brass strips at the edges. This is a technique that I copied from making engraved scales. Each binnacle is made up from four parts Originally I had the crazy idea of placing a miniature compass-card underneath the Plexiglas hoods, but even without it, assembling the binnacles was fiddly enough. The binnacles provisionally assembled, pending the painting of the stands (apologies for the poor quality picture and the missing match for scale) To be continued soon(?) ...

Something to admire on those winter days, when you can‘t take out the real thing.

There are very light-weight tissue papers from around 8.5 g per sqm upward that are used by book- and paper-restorers to invisibly re-enforce damaged pages. Wouldn‘t know any brand name in the US. Some German colleagues make sails from them by sandwiching a layer of tissue paper between two layers of this special paper, which is impregnated with an iron-on glue. The sail are quite flexible, when wetted, and can be shaped very well. Perhaps someting like this might be worth a try.

Thanks gentlemen ! Unfortunately, I seem to loose or damage parts during assembly faster than I can make them. It's kind of two steps forward and one step backward all the time. Meant to assemble the binnacles today, but dropped parts unretrievably on the floor and messed up some with my beloved CA 😡 Update coming ... one day.

These books are rather rare. I chanced onto my copies while trawling antique booksellers in Copenhagen in the late 1990s (when I went there on business quite frequently). The full references are: [FRIIS-PEDERSEN, J.] (1980): Sejlskibe - Danskbyggede traeskibbe opmålt, tegnet og foto-graferet.- Handels- og Søfahrtsmuseets på Kronborg Søhistoriske Skrifter IX: 107 p., København (Høst & Søn). [FRIIS-PEDERSEN, J.] (1981): Sejlskibe - De sidste i Grønlandsfarten opmålt, tegnet og fotograferet.- Handels- og Søfahrtsmuseets på Kronborg Søhistoriske Skrifter X: 108 p., København (Høst & Søn). [FRIIS-PEDERSEN, J.] (1983): Sejlskibe - Nordiske fartøjer opmålt, tegnet og fotograferet.- Handels- og Søfahrtsmuseets på Kronborg Søhistoriske Skrifter XI: 96 p., København (Høst & Søn). They have not been authored by himself, but were issued by the museum in Kronborg Castle (now located outside of it) based on his work. In fact most of the drawings I had in mind only showed the cross-sections of bulwarks, but not actually the constructional details of the waterways and covering boards. Above is a drawing of a single-decked small vessel that shows the covering board sitting atop a plank that in turn sits atop the inner waterway-plank that is sort of hollowed out on the inside. One should perhaps also consider that the measures given in the classification are probably the starting dimensions of the timber. If the top-timbers serve as stanchions as well, they may have been tapered quite a bit (are there dimensions for the rails ?). Also the waterways would have been shaped. I always wondered, how the large quantities of water coming on deck in a storm would be drained with this kind of arrangement. With low waterways and on smaller vessels the lowest bulwark plank often was raise a couple of centimeters or so above the covering board to allow shedding the water. The metal scuppers on the inside of the waterway planks certainly would not be sufficient. Later vessels with metal bulwark plating had freeing ports. There are not many drawings of the deck planks in the above books, but in the few, that are included, there don't seem to be any margin planks and any notching into the waterway-planks either. They just butt against them, even, if that means that they feather out (which would be difficult to caulk). It seems, however, that the deck planks may have been slightly curved to avoid too many planks with feather-edges and to have them instead butting against the well-rounded bow-section and the more square stern-section. The above books are also interesting, because they study the decorative profiling of a lot of planks and timbers. Edges were rounded and decorative beads were cut into the margins of e.g. bulwark planks. This is a feature oven overlooked by modellers, unless they work in really large scales. Dito the edges of stanchions would have been beaded.

Well, the idea of these automatic pipettes is to dispense precise and repeatable amounts of liquids from something like 2 microlitres and up by pushing the button.

Yep, understood. But I wanted to show that some model shops try to take innocent modellers for a ride. It may have worked in those dark, pre-Internet ages, but today we have access to a global market and share knowledge beyond the plate and the trade - and they still try. I think these automatic pipettes with their disposable tips would be quite handy for applying measured quantities of glue say when planking. I also thought of creating my own rivet-strips on decal paper by placing measured blobs of acrylic gel, for which these pipettes would be useful too.

It looks, as if the Micro-Mark guys moved the comma too far to the right. On ebay you can get such adjustable pipettes for less than USD30 : https://www.ebay.com/itm/Single-channel-Adjustable-Volume-Pipettes-Transfer-Micropipettor-Lab-1000-l/143391759789?hash=item2162d09dad:g:XCYAAOSwaCtdmJne I remember from the time, when they were first introduced into general lab-work in around the early 1980s, they were not that expensive.

Is this a 'professional secret' or would you mind showing the various stages of how your watercolours are developed ?

I could imagine that it might be useful tool (apart from the price) for free-hand cutting or carving, but how would one make straight long cuts in thicker material ? I don't think it would replace a circular or scroll saw.