wefalck

What kit(?) is that ? The boiler seems to be very rudmentarily fitted, going by the drawings above. There is no fired door and the wood lagging should not cover the fire-box (where is it actually ?). There is no pressure gauge, etc.

What time of milling-cutter was used ? Must have been a ball-nose mill of 1 mm or less, I gather.

One has to also look at the alternatives the men had and how the conditions were on land then and there. Crews main recruited from the lower echelons of society - being an agricultural labourer could be equally bad and depriving, if you had a bad landowner. And it was even more difficult to escape, if you were a serf. Serfdom wasn't lifted around Europe until the middle of the 19th century or even later.

Maybe chrome-plating or spraying of the engine would give it a more 'contemporary' look ...

Will she be painted later a per prototyp e? Seems to be a pity to hide the nice mahagony under some paint ...

Fresh rust is FeOOH (ferric oxihydrate), which is brownish red and fluffy. This is easy to remove with a wire brush. However, I often had to deal with pitting rust, where the FeOOH was converted, due to subsequent dry storage over decades, into Fe3O4 by dewatering the FeOOH. Fe3O4 is of a dark brownish, sometimes metallic colour and hard. This is very difficult to remove with a wire brush, but cleans up nicely with the tea-leave method. The pits, of course, remain.

As I said in an earlier post, black tea, particularly the cheaper and more fermented varities, contains a lot of organic acids, the stuff that makes it taste bitter and sour, and look brown. The longer you let the leaves soak in hot water the more you get this stuff out of the leaves. Therefore, also using the leaves from your earlier cup'o is fine. These organic acids dissolve the the rust, bringing the iron into solution and keeping it there by forming stable chemical complexes. These acids are too weak to attack metallic iron. In practice, you have to first brush off any loose rust and degrease the parts in e.g. acetone or cleaner for motorcycle chains or another degreaser. Rust soaked with oil is not being attacked by the organic acids. This is particularly important, when you used creeping oils, such as WD40, to make parts move for dissambly. You then take a bowl or other vessel that allows the part to be completely immersed. It may be wise to use a disposable vessel as the deep black iron-organic compounds are very staining and stick to any rough surfaces. Also wear gloves and protect your clothing - it is almost impossible to get these stains out of clothing. This vessel you fill with a thick soup of tea-leaves and you completely immerse the part in it. Any surface that is exposed to air may begin to rust, so complete immersion is important. Leave for 24h and check the progress by taking the part out and rinsing it. You can basically leave it in as long as you like. Move it from time to time to bring the surface into contact with fresh solution. Once you are satisfied with the progress take the part out and brush it under runnging water e.g. with an old tooth brush. You may need to do this also in between for knurled parts to remove the conversion products. When clean dry the part immediately and very thoroughly. Compressed air is a good idea, if you have it. Otherwise, you can immerse intricate parts, such as knurls, into acetone to be sure that the water is displaced from all crevices. For simple, smooth parts you may be done now, but for intricate parts, where the conversion products have settled in crevices, you may need to apply a wire-wheel. I have used this technique for decades on my antique machinery, where it is important that you don't change the geometry of load-bearing surfaces. Just one word of caution: some people also recommend using Coca Cola for that purpose. This drink contains inter alia organic acids and phosphoric acid. While the organic acids dissolve the rust, the phosphoric acid will form solid iron-phosphates (a mineral called Vivianite) that are quite insoluble, once precipated on surfaces. You have to constantly remove and clean the part to prevent these phospates from precipating in crevices. They are virtually impossible to remove from there. This property is used in so-called 'rust converters', which are basically phosphoric acid solutions, in the automotive sector, where you want to convert the rust in situ into something that replaces the metal and sticks to remaining metal. These Vivianites are very hard, harder than the iron/steel and are difficult to grind down - not a good thing to have on surfaces that have to geometrically exact for mechanical reasons.

For the knurls, I would use tea-leaves and then a wire-wheel. This is pretty much what I used in 25 years of restoring watchmaking machinery.

When using 'sandpaper' you will probably change the shape of the part. So you really have to know what you are doing. The other 'abrasives' metioned are more compliant and are less likely to change the contour of the parts. Of course, it depends also on whether you work on old agricultural tools or on fine measuring tools. I gather we were talking about the latter. When you know what you are doing, you can regrind flat surfaces, such as the sole of planes, on a piece of fine wet-and-dry attached to a perfectly flat surface, e.g. a glass plate. I indeed used this technique in reconditioning machine tools. For measuring and machine tools it is also important to remove all abrasives residues carefully.

Cotgrave's French-English dictionary of 1672 notes that the term 'perrier' seems to be a corruption of 'pierrier'. Canon perrier describes a large caliber gun throwing stones. Perrier as such is translated with 'fowler', i.e. a gun used to hunt (water-)fowl. These guns were often breech-loading in order to be able to be loaded, when under cover. More modern dictionaries refer to the breech-loading variety as 'perrier à boîte', i.e. perrier with a can (the loading chamber). A perrier as such then is a plain swivvel-gun. By the beginning of the 17th century 'perriers à boîte' went out of fashion largely, because they were balistically inefficient and sometime more dangerous to the gunners, than to the enemy. The chamber frame was a dangerous weakness at a time, when materials properties where not understood well enough. Breech-loading guns only became a viable proposition, once the machining technology was advanced enough to produce parts with adequate tolerances and stronger materials, such as cast steel, became available around the middle of the 19th century.

That's a standard solution for stops on old-time machine tools. The stops on my antique milling machine are constructed like this. I stops like this for me lathes, but used M3x0.5 mm screws.

Never use sandpaper on tools, what idea ! For mild de-rusting I use used tea-leaves. The cheaper the tea the better, because you need the tannin, which is a complexing agent and will desolve the ferric oxihydroxides, vulgo 'rust'. Then you can use steel wool of various grades. For polishing one can also use a fine rubber-bonded abrasive block or similar wheels in the hand-held drill. Be cautious not to damage or change the shape machined surfaces that have function, such as sliding ways on tools. One should be able to change the points on a compass. Sometimes they are sort of rivetted in, but one can pull them out using pliers. To function properly the points would need to be ground. The points on the marine-type of compasses can also be ground back into shape on a stone. The inner sides have to be flat and matching and the outer sides have be ground to a point.

There are many photographs of square rigged ships with yards 'cockbilled' in small European ports moored alongside quays or in packs at posts mid-river. The reasons was to not foul each other's yards, when moving around. For instance, in many southern Baltic ports the Scandinavian wood ships were moored vertical to the quay - like modern yacht fashion, but with the bows to the quay, so that the timber could be discharged from the bow-ports. They have invariably their yards cockbilled to allow as many ships as possible on the quay. The degree by which a yard can be braced up depends on the position of the yard relative to the shrouds. In more modern ship the iron cranes and parrels were designed to put the yard further away from the mast in order to clear better the shrouds. Until the middle of the 19th century the degree by which particularly lower yards could be braced was quite limited, perhaps 20° or so.

It may be a good idea to trace/photocopy all parts before building. Then use the kit-supplied materials and when you think that you got the hang of it, you can use the patterns retained to cut the material for another model. Not sure it would be worthwhile to go for expensive stuff such as pear or castello - you also need the equipment to work it !

OK, the Italian is pretty clear. I think they mean that rather than using undiluted glue to dilute it with water. The picture doesn't say anything about soaking the planks completely.

The kit seems to be quite well thought-through - for instance, the notches in the frames, which would have been in every frame of the prototype, are only in the two extreme and the middle frame - this makes for good alignment without forcing. I gather the kit is an interpretation of the Oseberg-Ship and for this a reconstructed plank diagramme would be available. So, the laser-cut planks should fit reasonably well. If you are going for the 50-50 method, keep the planks humid as long as possible so that the glue does not set, while you are manipulating them. Overthinking things - also called procrastination - I am good at too. This can be a wise-approach, when building from scratch, but a kit has already been thought through, e.g. with respect to the building sequence. Hence, one can approach this quite relaxed.

... but also consider that sometimes instructions get lost in translation 😬

NO ! You will end up with rigid planks. Planks are normally soaked in hot water, offered to the hull, held temporarily in position until dry in order to keep their shape and the glued/dowelled. There is a technique, however, by which the planks are soaked and then directly glued on using white glue: when in the correct position the planks are dried and the glue set using a hot (temperature-controlled) soldering iron. I still would not necessarily soak the planks in a glue-water mixture, as the open time for manipulation would be rather short before the glue sets. You may have not finished adjusting the plank before the glue sets.

I made some excentric cam-action pins from aluminium-rod to fit into the holes of these ceramic soldering plates:

Ceramic self-closing tweezers can be got for less than 5€ for three these days in China. They should work even for silver soldering. You can buy the tips seperately and I got some to equip my home-made third-hand with them.

My knowledge of 17th rigging is limited, but I could imagine that the rope in question could aid in gathering the sail for stowing along the spar.

With our modern mind-set, which is framed by efforts to increase utility and efficiency, we tend to analyse artefacts in that way, which may be rather misleading. Our ancestors had much less capacity to predict due to the absence of the concept of a 'model' and the lack of methods to quantitatively measure e.g. performance. They may have observed that certain features work better than others and these may then have been slowly adopted - but, as a ship is made up of many different components that interact with each other, such new feature may not have worked everywhere and all the time. Errors or underperformance can be costly in an economic sense or in armed conflict. Hence shipbuilders and seamen were conservative, they preferred to err on the safe side. I gather for every successful innovation that has been recorded in history, there were scores of less successful ones that have sunken into oblivion. So the question of an 'optimal' bowsprit angle can only be answered, if one sets a range of boundary conditions. We can guess the boundary conditions of old, but often we cannot be sure. Traditions and customs can be very pervasive boundary conditions that are not accessible to modern rationale. So, most often we can only observe the facts and can only speculate on the 'why' by trying to understand the 'how'. As to the near-horizontal bowsprits of the late 18th/early 19th century cutters: this may be due to the fact that they often had a running bowsprit, which would be more difficult to manage, if inclined. Also a horizontal bowsprit increases the area of foresails. As to the pitching: the pitching movement is not only determined by the length to breadth ratio and absolute length, but also by the amount of buoyancy in the bow and stern. A ship with good buoyancy at the ends and flaring bow-sections tends to have shorter, but perhaps harder pitching movements and keeps the 'head out of the water'.

To me that looks like a late 15th century swivvel gun. I don't recall seeing any such breech-loading guns in the early 19th century. The only 19th century guns that were loaded according to a similar principle that come my mind are the French mitrailleuses of the 1860s/70s.

Have to remember the term ‘bezel wire’ ...

No problem, Keith.