wefalck

I would make the drilling operation dependent on whether the hull above the waterline will be painted or not. If it is going to be painted, I would make some short cylinders from some material of about the same hardness as the wood. These cylinders then can be bored out to the correct internal diameter and then inserted into pre-drilled holes as per the suggestions. Using a reamer is a good strategy, but one might still see an a bit jagged edge, if the hole goes across two mor more planks. Forstner bit start from 12 mm - 1/2" I think. Using an ordinary twist drill might force planks apart. I think, I would make myself a sort of crown-drill from a suitable piece of steel pipe or from a piece of steel that is turned down and bore to the right size. On the milling machine I would cut saw teeth into the front edge and then harden it. With a slip-stone you can hone the breast of the teeth to give them a keen edge. Such a drill can be repeatedly sharpened/honed without changing the diameter. As there are several teeth cutting at the same time, it would not force the planks apart.

Those sharp stems and keels are the curse of steel (or plastic) hulls 😐

The prototype seems to use cap-nuts - it would be easy to simulate that by making two bolts with hexagonal heads that you stick into the telegraph from both sides. Making bolt and nut in one piece is an easy way to cheat, when the parts become too small otherwise. I have done this e.g. with fastening bolts for winches and the likes. Before I had a lathe, I used my little power-drill to make such bolts: first I turned a brass nail to size and shape; then I formed the hexagonal head with file-strokes, using the hexagonal collet-nut as a guide. By counting the number of file strokes on each side, I managed to produce reasonably symmetric heads.

Just pulled out my copy of Petrejus' book (the English version, the original was published in Dutch btw, which may explain the mix of units). On p. 261 there is a small-scale reproduction of the plans in 1:48 scale. In the cross-section one can clearly see how the masts are stepped on the keelson and one can also estimate the mast-rake from this. On p. 153 there is also a spar-plan that shows the mast-rake. Otherwise davyboy is right, that the captain had some descretion as to the actual rake and it may be changed as a function of the load in order to optimise the behaviour under sail.

Interesting proposition. Could you give some indications as to the technical limits of your processes, e.g. minimum diameter of parts vs. lengths, minimum wall thicknesses etc., as is done for e.g. 3D-printing or photo-etching ?

They used to be a standard implement in any drawing-office at the time when they worked with ink on transparent paper - as an eraser. Had one from my university time and re-assigned it to the workshop a long time ago. Keep the protruding fibres short, that makes the dust less of a nuisance - it is the long fibres that can become itchy in shirt sleeves etc.* Didn't know about the 2 mm variety and should look for it. There is another variety of about 10 mm diameter that is held together with a tighly wound thread and that is used by porcelain-painters to polish the gold paint after firing: I also use the pen for preparing wires for soldering. ---------------- * if you ever moved around linoleum flooring with glass-fibre backing, then you won't complain about that little bit of dust ...

I don't think a dedicated 'how-to-do'-book for this exists. And what for ? The process is not different from any other model of that kind. Perhaps you could be more specific on what kind of information you are lacking ?

3D printing does not involves 'sprues' in the same way as injection moulding. There will be supporting structures printed with same material or sometimes a different material. However, Pat's parts are acrylic resin and this cannot be drawn into wires. Acrylic resins are highly cross-linked polymers with no plasticisers in it. It can be thermo-formed, e.g. bent or vacuum-formed, to some extent, but parts need to be tempered afterwards, as otherwise stress-corrosion will occur. There are people, who have developped the drawing of styrene sprues into wires to an art-form, but I have serious reservations against their use. The plasticisers in styrene evaporate slowly with time, making the material brittle, as does UV irradiation. While this does not have too serious consequences on relatively massive and painted parts, thin wires are likely to become very brittle within our life-time. Such wires may also not be sufficiently well covered in paint to keep UV-light out. Considering this, I would go for metal wires.

If you can source it 'down-under', there are also pre-tinned copper wires that make the soldering easier. I got mine from the UK, from www.wires.co.uk.

Some years ago I got myself a hot-air soldering station as used in electronics. Together with soldering paste, it allows the 'touch-less' soldering of delicate set-ups. As the air temperature can be pre-set between 100°C and 470°C it is useful for other applications too. It cost around 50€ incl. shipping.

... much more than I achieved these days

Well, as was discussed in the other thread on this subject, if you can push more than the thread itself through the blocks, the holes in the block are too large, or the thread is too thin for the size of block. The sheaves were made a tad wider than the rope and the slots in the block-shell was just a bit wider than the sheave to have the sheave running easily in it. If the sheave and slot were wider, there would be a risk of the rope jumping out of the sheave and jamming in the block. Both, the sheave and the shell have to guide the rope. So, the best thing is to just stiffen the thread with a bit of fast-drying varnish (e.g. nail-varnish). You can also smooth the hole with a fine jeweller's broach - depending on the size of the block, you may want to round the edges of the drilled hole with a very fine round file in order to simulate the sheave.

Actually, some white glue or fast-drying varnish might be better ... also for the fingers . Not sure, why I wrote 'CA', as I don't really like the stuff anyway.

Somehow, I didn't see this before ... not my scale and period, I guess. The printing material is acrylic, if I am not mistaken. So either dichloromethane, a special cement for acrylic glass, or ordinary 'plastic glue' (which typically contains dicholoromethane as solvent) should do the job. With the pure solvent, dichlormethane, acrylic parts can be welded together seamlessly and without traces.

Perhaps the Chinese are not so used to Imperial measures and don't have the right gauges. I never systematically checked my drills, but doubt that the metric ones would be off by more than a few 1/100. On the other hand, I tend to buy 'professional' stuff from workshop clearance sales on ebay - needs patience, but when the opportunity arises, I stock up.

That is some artisanal talent 👍 I also would have thought of how to do this on the lathe. BTW, I had seen the 'pulling threads' somewhere before and think it gives better results than sewing on the sails. I was wondering, whether one couldn't splice the thick thread to the end of one to be pulled or to twist them together with some CA glue to make them easier to pull through, than the double thickness of the thicker thread

You mean the diameter is not correct ? I never seem to have had this problem with metric ones, though there are certainly somewhat larger tolerances in cheaper drills. However, I think for modelling purposes we can tolerate these tolerances.

You may have to post this question in the digital modelling section of this forum. In order to show a geometrically correct projection of the spiled planks onto a 2-D-plane, your program would need to be able to calculate the distances between e.g. the frames and the angle at which the spline-curve of the outside shape intersects with the frames. TurboCAD does not have such functions. You would need a specialised CAD-package for that, but I don't know which one would do it. I gather one could do it the 'pedestrian' way in TurboCad too. You would need to measure the lengths (in 3D space) of the upper and lower edge of the planks between each frame and the height of each of the intersecting points above a reference plane. You then can draw the respective sections of the edges, starting from the middle, in the right orientation as projected onto a 2D surface. Not sure though, that you would be able to achieve sufficient precision that way.

A lot of French ships of that time did have half-lid gun-ports and stowed their guns that way on the upper deck. Below is an image of the BELLE POULE (1834) in the Musée de la Marine in Paris that shows the same arrangement (sorry for the pixelated image, but the lighting for conservation reasons was a bit dim): And indeed, the model of the CRÉOLE in the same museum has this arrangement. It is not Johann's invention.

This days, when one has the right CAD-software, one can do this directly in the numerical model.

I wouldn't buy these old-fashioned plates with many different thread-sizes on them. They are ok for cleaning up threads on used screws, but what do you do, when some of the more frequently used sizes get dull ? These drill-tap combinations are meant for on-site fitting jobs involving short through-holes. For sort of engineering applications they are not really useful. Down to about M1.0 or the Imperial equivalents one distinguishes between hand-taps and machine-taps. Hand-taps have a longer tip with partial threads to provide a better guidance when cutting free-hand. Hand-taps also normally come in sets of two or three with differing depth of the thread, so that one doesn't cut the full depth of the thread in one go - this improves the quality of the thread and reduces the risk of tap-breakage. Machine-taps also come in versions for through-holes and as so-called 'bottom-taps' for blind holes. The latter have a very short tapering of only two threads or so. The best taps (in my opinion) are the ones that have spiral flutes, not straight ones as most taps have. They only seem to be available down to M2.0. The spiral flute seems to leave more 'meat' in the core, hence, they are stronger. They also jam less, as the swarf is moved upwards like for a spiral drill. Industry offers dozens of varieties of taps that are optimised for different types of materials, but these are generally only available from M1.0 or even M3.0 upwards and tend to be very expensive. In both the metric and the Imperial thread systems each tap has a related drill size. However, I tend to make the holes 0.1 mm larger than required in hard or tough materials, if the screw does not need particular holding power. This reduces the likelihood of tap breakage. BTW, jewelers thread sizes are a matter of their own, they don't fit into neither the metric nor the Imperial system, and date back into those dark pre-norm ages. When tapping, I tend to start the tap manually in a machine in order to ensure that it is started concentric to the hole, but finish the tapping by hand, holding the tap in a drill-chuck or pin-vise. It is also a good idea to work the lathe by hand, when tapping or doing external thread-cutting. Most small machines are not strong enough for this and don't have propper stops or clutches to disengage the tap when a certain torque is exceeded. I fitted my lathe spindle with a hand-crank for this purpose. Unless you really buy a well-known brand, there is no guarantee these days that you get quality. As someone noted above, Asian manufacturers flood the market and European/US American dealers buy from them the same stuff that small Asian traders near the factories sell through ebay. So I am getting my needs from these sources now. I don't have that many threads to cut, so that the expense of a branded tool would not be economic. Sure, you may feel the difference, but is it worth paying five or ten times the price for a hobby application ?

In the mean-time I had a go at it and experimented with various papers. While it is easy to get the toner to stick to the brass, getting the paper off is another matter. We don't seem to have here in Paris the kind of advertising papers, so I experimented with other other types of papers from my stock. I tried a heavily sized paper that took on the toner well and resulted in crisp print-outs, but desintegrated poorly, so that I could not get off the paper. I then tried very thin silk paper (as used, for instance, for wrapping china for removal packaging) that seemed to disintegrate better, but found that it still sticks heavily to the areas with the toner and does not come off cleanly. Did you actually use parts of your advertising paper that was printed on or only clean parts ?

It seems that the proportions between lower mast and pole where changed, lowering the point where the shrouds/stay attaches. I gather there may be at least two stops on the pole, namely one where normally the lower topmast would end and then another one near the top to provide a rest for the respective stays and backstays. I didn't around to do this, but I wanted to sift through my literature a bit more to see, whether one can find some more data on this kind of masting. It was very common to mast steamships as two- or three-masted topsail schooners, or as barques that had fore- and main-mast with poles.

This discussion actually concerns an interesting paradigm (shift) in shipbuilding that occurred twice during the 19th century in commercial shiipping, namely the function of the hull and where it actually ends. As a lay-person one would instinctively think that the hull should end with the top of the bulwark. However, when one carefully looks at the way how ships were constructed, the hull as a structural element ends at the upper deck and the deck itself is not merely something dropped in, but is a structural element in itself. It seems that shipbuilders conceived the hull of commercial ships in the 19th century as a closed and (almost) watertight space. In consequence, anything above deck-level did not contribute significantly to the buouancy and seaworthiness of the ship and could be (and was at occasions) knocked away. Raising the frames above deck-level, which was done frequently in smaller and coastal vessels is a change in construction philosophy. In a way it also exposes the upper part of the frames to the forces of overcoming seas, which could structurally weaken the hull. Of course, the pre-19th century ships, particularly naval vessels, did not have this sort of sealed volume of buoancy the flush-decked commercial vessels had. With iron- and steel-ships that were subdivided with water-tight bulkheads this construction philosophy disappeared again.

Ilhan, for the moment I don't see any solid bulwark that may require stanchions. Much of the deck seems to be surrounded by rails. Only the forward area seems to have some sort of half-high bulwark. The cross-section drawing seems to indicate that frames are lead up to the raised after-deck level. As the level of that deck coincides with the top of the half-high bulwark, I would conclude that the frames are actually forming the bulwark stanchions (perhaps not all frames, but only every second or third). So there would be no need for stanchions to support the bulwark.