wefalck

Perhaps I wouldn't use the word 'coating' and the underlying concept. The idea is to soak the rope material in order to stiffen it. When soaked-in, the lacquer/varnish becomes invisble, a 'coating' by definition is a visible layer.

Nail polish is essentially the same as zapon lacquer, except that is comes in smaller bottles and, hence, is more expensive ... Beware, some nail polishes are acrylic-based and do not dissolve readily.

This topic seems to pop up over and over again. A search through the various building logs might be useful ... As druxey said, the 'dimples' are barely visible on the real ship from a view metres away. They are, however, one of those details that, when left off, may make the coppering look rather sterile. On the real thing you can see that there is something, but you can't really tell what it is, when you are some distance away. What you can do depends very much on the scale you are working in. In scales of 1:48 or above, I would perhaps imprint lightly the nailing into the copper sheet using a copying wheel (sewing supplies) and then flatten them again from the back with a round piece of hard wood. This gives you quite realistic 'dimples' that are not proud of the surface. There are very thin copper adhesive strips where you may use the same technique for even smaller scales. I have used them for rivetted plates, but not for copper sheathing yet using the above technique. Always use a glue that sets by evaporating the solvent, i.e. contact cement, and not something that polymerises, i.e. CA cement. Copper ions can inhibit the polymerisation. Also CA can react with the oxide film on copper, leaving bright spots, and it is difficult to remove excess cement. Excess contact cement can usually be wiped off with a solvent.

I should have added that the varnish I use is the kind of thin cellulose varnish that is used to protect silver and brass ware from tarnishing. In continental Europe we call it zapon lacquer and it dries alsmost invisible.

Is there a particular reason that you are building at such a large scale ?

Any equipment that constitutes an Ohm-resistor (collector motors, soldering irons, incandescant bulbs, etc.) can be controlled with a simple dimmer - but check that it is rated appropriately. Dimmers are either available for wall mounting (which can also be set into a workbench) or as 'plugs' to go between the plug of your equipment and the wall socket (hence, no installation is required). I have a dimmer hooked up to a foot switch from which I run all machines. This has the advantage that they are only under power when needed and that you can interrupt them by simply lifting your foot. The rpms are preset, so you can return to the same setting by pushing your foot down.

The tool of choice would depend on the location and its accessibility. I typically use the following: - micro-scissors for eye-surgerey (Castrovejo-style); they can be very expensive, but I got mine as 'seconds', which are good enough for our purposes - check ebay et al., where one can find all sorts of medical instruments these days; the most useful is the curved type, as it lets you get close to the point of cutting. (Found even on Amazon ...) - ordinary scalpels with replaceable blades - broken-off pieces of razor-blades - there a special holders for these, but they are ridiculously expensive; you can hold it in a pin-vise with a double-slotted head/collet; razor blades probably give the cleanest cuts after scissors. - antique biological lancets for tight spaces; they have to be honed on an arkansas stone to have a really keen edge. Don't use your scissors and lancets for anything else but rigging work. I soak all splices and knots in clear varnish, rather than PVA or CA glue, as I can loosen them with solvent, should the need arise. Incidentally, you will find that splices are much more common than knots. The latter are mainly used to belay ropes, rather than attaching them to say blocks. You can fake splices by drawing the end twice through itself using a needle, cutting off the excess and then roll the splice between your fingers with a bit of varnish on.

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.