wefalck

Quite right so - I use steel-wool too and no magnets. By the time you get to steel-wool, the hull will be very smooth and the flicks of steel can be brushed off quite easily. It is a good idea to change the pad of steel-wool frequently, before it begins to to crumble.

Oops, have to check this out. The binnacle was made in about 1990, when such detail research possibilities and my library of period books were more limited. I would have thought that these compensation balls were in use from around the mid-1860s or so, when iron ships became common. Indeed, in earlier days they put the binnacles on long 'masts' above the deck. I cannot change this anymore, so we assume the tug was still in operation in the 1880s In fact, the design is from the mid-1860s, but the lines etc. were published as a worked-through example in the first German textbook on iron shipbuilding of 1869.

The problem with scavenged material is, that there is no sustained source for it. I wouldn't know, where to get a computer CPU just like this ...

Could enlighten us to what ships this pertains. This always helps to understand functions. Also, it would be good to know, where on the ship this is located.

Keith, the 'appendage' is the lamp to illuminate the compass. It is obviously an electrical lamp on the modern version, as otherwise the binnacle cover would have had a short 'funnel' on top, to release the hot air from the petroleum lamp. For starting a drill hole at an angle, I use an end-mill that cuts over the centre. In this way the drill doesn't wander off. Nice job, btw. This is a specimen I did some 30 years ago (diameter about 6 mm):

Just beautiful, the hull 👍

Valery, this is just some sort of nitrocellulose laquer filled e.g. with very fine pumice powder. It is used as a primer on wood, to fill the pores. On decks and surfaces that will be matte, depending on the wood, often one coat is sufficient. It sands well and I finish with fine steel-wool.

Forty layers seems to be a bit exaggerated. If one needs so many coats, it means the wood was not properly pepared (by modern standards). In the old days only shellac and pumice was used, but today good sanding fillers on nitrocellulose basis are available that cut down the effort. It also depends on the kind of wood, the larger the pores, the more work. Dense wood works faster. There is also the risk, if one does not work fast enough or too wet, to dissolve too much from the underlying layers and then you have to begin again. In practice, I found a couple of coats of sanding sealer and two to three coats of shellac are sufficient, if you don't want a mirror-like surface (which I don't like anyway).

I am applying a sanding filler before anything else. This stabilises the paper and sort of turns it into a compound material. The filler also prevents 'dirt' from getting into the wood pores.

The brand-name is Rohacell and it is made by Evionik Industries, formerly Röhm GmbH in Germany, who are the inventors and producers of PLEXIGLAS: https://www.rohacell.com/product/rohacell/en/ To be honest, I don't know exactly, how Rohacell is made, but to my knowledge it does not contain cenospheres, but is just the co-polymerised acrylic and acrylimide resin. It is seem that the monomers are heated to 170°C, whereby they begin to foam an polymerise. It is a true foam, not sponge, meaning that the bubbles are not connected and, hence, the uptake of humidity is limited. I would know, where to buy the stuff in the UK. I was lucky that my late father worked for a the pharmaceutical daughter company of Röhm GmbH and that at that time I had easy access to everything related to PLEXIGLAS. In Germany PLEXIGLAS and Rohacell are sold in small quantities by shops catering for the builders of architectural models. I didn't check the prices, but it certainly is more expensive than the common 'styrofoam'. The pores of Rohacell are very fine and the surface of the sheets or blocks is quite smooth. It can be easily and cleanly cut with a knive or any saw. I can be cleanly sanded with sharp edges. The dust is a bit messy, at it is very light-weight. The sheets are somewhat brittle and thin sheets can be easily broken into pieces. Unlike 'styrofoam' it is not dissolved by the common contact cements. To the contrary it can be glued very well with these, CA cements, or cements for acrylic glasses. Once I have the current project finished, I am planning a somewhat innovative approach for a small-scale model, where I will cut the frames from PLEXIGLAS, fill the spaces with Rohacell to aid fairing and incease stability. The hull will then be planked with either strips of styrene sheet or of phenolic resin sheet. I am not such great fan of styrene, but it can be quasi welded to the PLEXIGLAS frames using ordinary styrene cement or dichloromethane.

They are certainly not a brand, but probably a watchmaking supply house. We had a similar discussion in another thread a few days ago. Watchmaking threads do not fit neither into the metric nor Imperial threading systems. So you will not find easily any hardware, screws or nuts, to go with them. Personally, I would not use such threading plates for two reasons: if one frequently thread-size becomes worn, you have to replace the whole plate and they are more unwieldy to use than individual dies. These plates were primarily designed to work-over damaged screw-threads - you just screwed down the screw into the plate, not to cut completely new threads. Another application was to cut a short new thread onto a piece of brass wire held in a pin-vice, e.g. when repairing the hinges in pocket-watch cases.

Not sure what the nose thread of that lathe is, but using the thread-size and 3- or 4-jaw-chuck as search terms will certainly turn up a few options on ebay & Co. To my knowledge, PROXXON themselves offer such chucks in metal (cast aluminium) and plastic.

You will never know what will happen to a model in the future, but as was noted above, any structure made from wood is not very forgiving with respect to dramatic changes in humidity. That's a fact of nature and there will be other parts of the model than the hull that are likely to suffer. So, as long as you are in control of it, try to keep it in the same kind of environment. Plywood is made to counteract exactly that problem by having layers of grain running cross-wise. Hence, you could use pieces of plywood as fillers. Not so easy to work, however, Otherwise, a fine-grained not too hard tropical wood will do as well. Making the filler pieces just as thick as needed and running the grain along the ship, as noted before, will minimise the force the filler pieces can excert on the framing. In general, it is a good idea to use a wood that is a hard or softer than the plywood bulkheads, but not much softer. If the wood is too soft, such as balsa, fairing becomes more difficult and you kill the effect that you are trying to achieve - to make fairing easier. If the wood is too soft you will get a sort rippling effect, the harder bulkheads protruding. If the wood is harder than the plywood, you are going to have a tough time working it down. Many years ago I built a steamer-model with bulk-heads sawn from brass sheet and filled the space between them with an acrylic foam. This is essentially foamed-up acrylic glass and made by the manufacturers of PLEXIGLAS. This foam is very stable and doesn't shrink. It is used e.g. in aircraft construction.

Traditional French Polish by rubbing-in pumice with shellac is a bit outdated for a project like this. A cellulose-based wood filler does the same job. However, rubbing down gently a varnish coating with pumice powder and e.g. a humid cotton ball takes out any traces of wiping- or brushing-on the varnish. It leaves a matte to satin finish that then can be polished to a gloss using polishing wool (as you would use for a car, for instance). This procedure reduces the thickness of the varnish to a minimum and gives a very even surface.

Well, my Canadian friends roll out the barbecue, when the temperature rises above freezing . We central and northern Europeans are used to well-heated places in winter - strangely enough the southern Europeans don't seem to mind the cold in their houses, although it can get pretty cold during winter nights - uncomfortably cold actually. Chacun a son gout ...

Isn't 12°C a bit on the low side ? I would be freezing to death in such conditions and most varnishes and lacquers seem to be set for a tempature range between 15°C and 25°C. Apart from that, the hull is looking just gorgeous 👍👍👍 Wouldn't want to keep it as a kind of sculpture and make another one for the real boat ? 😏 Otherwise, I think she will also look very elegant in white above the waterline ...

I gather it is a bandsaw ...

I can understand Pat's pre-occupation - the child has to have a name. However, I found that the contemporaries were much less concerned about putting things into drawers, or even the right drawer. You may find that one and the same rig is referred to differently in different sources. Somehow it seems to be our modern pre-occupation to classify ships and ship-rigs 'properly'. As she seem to have had a main-course, I would probably call her a barque. Without a main-course she would be a jackass-barque. The two-piece masts on the other hand are more typical for schooners than for barques, but on steamers they tried to simplify the rigs and reduce weight a-top.

I don't know what kind of putty they used then, probably some kind of lineseed-oil based one, but some extravagant yacht-owner were known to have their boats repeatedly docked, to be puttied and sanded smooth in order to get the last fraction of knot out of them. The original GERMANY was most likely not welded, as this technique became only really available in the 1930s and then it would have been acetylene and not electro-arc welding. If the plating is thick enough, the oil-canning is less likely to occur. Also close-spaced frames make it less visible.

P.S. one could also take say a 5 or 10 mm thick piece of metal or hard wood, drill a hole of the right diameter through it at the edge and then mill it down to half the diameter - you get half-round channels, voilà.

Pat, perhaps one of those dapping-blocks with half-round grooves would help: You position the strap symmetrically over the groove (you can use a piece of tape as stop) and then push it down with a suitable piece of round rod. Finish the loop with round pliers while the rod is still in the loop. As you have a mill you can mill a half-round slot also in a piece of metal or hard wood, using a ball-nose end-mill or a round burr. The diameter should be the inside diameter of the loop plus twice the thickness of the etched brass.

It seem to be a standard 'tool' in emergency wards - a couple of years ago I cut myself badly, when trying to cut a tile (the artery in the wrist was a near miss) and when the Spanish emergency ward finally accepted me (I had myself to neatly bandaged, so they thought I had already been looked after), the lady there just dabbed some CA into the edges of the wound and pulled them together. After a couple of weeks the CA around peeld off. The good thing about this is that it doesn't leave extra scars from stitching. Still looking for the real 'super-glue', something that you can apply at your leisure, position the parts at your leisure, and then 'tell' the stuff to cure now. The UV-curing acrylics that dentists use and that have appeared in DIY stores some years ago, go into that direction, but only work, when the UV-light can get to the stuff. I hate CA (though I use it from time to time) and still have to manage to finish a bottle before it cures ...

There are two extremes: the ones that want to show they skills in working with materials and those, who want to create a real-life impression of the ship. In the first case obviously one would show the bare materials, while in the second everything that was painted on a real ship would be painted on the model. In between there is a whole spectrum of combinations. Having said this, there seem to be also certain 'fashions' or 'conventions' in ship models. For instance, there is no obvious reason why in kits the keels and the stem are in darker wood than the planking, but people seem to be used to this appearance and buy such kits.

Toolmakers in the old days used what was called the 'button-method' to precisely locate drill-holes in jigs. The buttons were hardened bushings to guide the drills. Perhaps an adaptation of the method could be used by making a template for the 8 mm-hole from some not too thin brass (or even steel), which then can be clamped at the right place and would prevent the drill from wandering off. Did you use standard twist-drills or wood-drills ? The wood-drills have the two cutting edges sort of inclined from the periphery to the centre, rather than the other way around. In other words, they cut first on the circumference, which gives cleaner holes and reduces the risk of ripping out fibres.

I would do such work on the lathe perhaps. One would need to figure out a work-holding for the cross-slide. If one has a quick-change tool-post, one could hold the square brass bar in that, which has the benefit of limited adjustability in Z. If have done template and scraper cutting that way. Otherwise, as the head of the Sherlin mill can be swung into the horizontal, it should not be too difficult to mount the vise in a way that you arrive at a similar configuration as for the Vanda-Lay mill. Or I did not understand very well the geometric constraints.