wefalck

I would let the white glue set to a rubbery consistency and then scrape/peel it off. Too early, then it smears around (as you noticed) - too late, then you may rip out fibres of the wood.

A classical book (for Germany) on this subject is: DITTMER, R., LIECKFELD, G., ROMBERG, F. (1911): Motoren und Winden für die See- und Küstenfischerei.- 2 Teile, 140+102 p., München/Berlin (R. Oldenbourg). The library of the Technical University of Berlin has a copy that I have seen. It doesn't seem to have been digitised yet. Then there is: ROMBERG, F. (1912): Der Ölmotor im deutschen Seefischereibetriebe.- Jb. Schiffbautechn. Ges., 13: 173-263. Also no digital version identified. Wolfgang Rudolph has also written a series of articles about boat engines as used around the German Baltic coast: RUDOLPH, W. (1996): Bootsmotorenbau im Deutschen Küstenbereich (bis 1945). Teil 1: Die Ostseeregion.- Deutsches Schiffahrtsarchiv, 19: 367-401, Wiefelstede (Oceanum-Verlag). RUDOLPH, W. (1997): Bootsmotorenbau im Deutschen Küstenbereich (bis 1945). Teil 2: Die Nordseeregion.- Deutsches Schiffahrtsarchiv, 20: 503-530, Wiefelstede (Oceanum-Verlag). RUDOLPH, W. (1998): Bootsmotorenbau im ostdeutschen Binnenland (bis 1945).- Deutsches Schiffahrtsarchiv, 21: 255-278, Wiefelstede (Oceanum-Verlag). RUDOLPH, W. (1999): Bootsmotorenbau in Berlin (bis 1945).- Deutsches Schiffahrtsarchiv, 22: 343-360, Wiefelstede (Oceanum-Verlag). RUDOLPH, W. (2002): Die Frühzeit der Bootsmotorisierung: über deutsch-skandinavische Kulturkontakte im Ostseeraum.- Deutsches Schiffahrtsarchiv, 25: 325-336, Wiefelstede (Oceanum-Verlag). And: SIEBOLDS, ., BLOCK, . (1907): Die Einführung des Motors in die deutsche Segelfischerei.- 148 p., (reprint 2010, Salzwasserverlag). As a reprint is being sold, Google does not list any digitised version that may exist somewhere. Many early motors came from Sweden (e.g. Bolinder) or Denmark, where the motorisation of fishing-boats began earlier than in Germany. If you search e.g. for 'Bolinder engine', you will get some images.

Shouldn‘t a Late 18th Century Cutter (this is, I assume, what HMS MERMAID is) have a four–siede gaff–topsail ? It would be suspended from a short yard.

There are detailed drawings in Middensdorf‘s Book of 1905 on masting and rigging (in German). He draws on his experience in rigging the Late Flying–P–Liners, which include the PASSAT and the PADUA, as well as the PREUSSEN.

There can be problems with copper-ions inhibiting the polymerisation of cyano-acrylates or other reactive glues. Glues that work on the basis of an evaporating solvent, contact cements, might be a better option, provided that the 'wood' side is permeable enough. Careful degreasing and a light rubbing with steel-wool to remove any oxides on the copper is a must.

A civilised looking emmigrant ship - isn't this a contradiction in terms

Check out 'dafi's' thread on HMS VICTORY: he reviews the changing paint schemes as per the latest research on her, analysing the various layers of paint. Depends on what you want: historical accuracy (if such can be achieved) or something that pleases as a piece of craft.

Iron most likely, or bronze.

It would be the pin and perhaps bits of brass sheet nailed over the hole for the pin. The sheaves where typically turned from lignum vitae, a hard and tough wood. Metal sheaves were used only on really heavy tackle, as that for anchors until well into the 19th century. Metals sheaves became then more common as chain was introduced into the running rigging. I am not absolutely sure, but I think metal thimbles in the strops were already in use in the 18th century.

The Romans cast thin sheets of glass unto sand-beds, but the technology was lost during the 'dark ages'. In medieval times glass sheets were produced by either blowing up a bubble of glass, cutting this into half and then spinning it out to a flat disc of up to 4 feet of diameter, or by blowing a glass cylinder into a mould, cutting this cylinder longitudinally, after the top and bottom have been cut off, and then flattening out the cylinder. Since the 17th century flat glass was produced by rolling. In the first half of the 20th century the main method was drawing sheets from a melt, while since the 1960s 'float glass' is the method for mass production, where by the melt is cast into a trough filled with liquid tin - the melt spreads evenly and the solidifying glass is drawn across the trough. Batch production by casting the melt onto troughs with liquid tin was also used at some time. While glass was expensive as such, quite large sheets would have been available in the early years of the 19th century. Of course, glass is prone to shattering due to mechanical impacts or thermal stress. For this reason 'muscovite' was used instead in various applications, e.g. in lanterns, the looking glasses in powder chambers or furnaces (where it is still used). Muscovite is a mineral belonging to the family of mica or sheet-silicates. Its name is derived from Moscow, where it is found in large, easy to cleave crystals. It was traditionally used in that region instead of glass and exported.

There are four principal ways how a glue or cement connects two pieces: - it acts like a tenon between two parts and in this way locks them together positively; this works for rough surfaces with open structures, such as wood. - the cement/glue displaces the air between two parts and the atmospheric pressure pushes the parts against each other; this works best for large, flat parts and requires a smooth surface, such as metals have. - the glue/cement interacts at a microscopic level physico-chemically through e.g. the Van der Waal's weak interaction - the cement in fact is a solvent and dissolves the surfaces - in the case of plastics, that are effectively welded together. In practice, one may have a combination of two or more of the above processes. For instance, you can dissolve the surface of styrene and press it onto some wood, where the soft plastic keys into the wood structure. Or when glueing metal to wood with epoxy, the epoxi will key into the wood, but the metal is pressed onto the epoxy by the atmospheric pressure. When there is an oxide layer on the metal, this oxide layer may also weakly interact physico-chemically with a glue.

Sails are more or less white/grey, i.e. have essentially 'non-colours' in a physical sense. This means that they would attain a certain hue that depends the on the surrounding lighting, reflecting the light that falls onto them. Artists would try to represent this, if they were reasonably good artists. Beginners or 'naive' painters would tend to represent the actual body colour. This applies in theory to any coloured surface. Its appearance would be different from the true body colour and it has been the objective of artists for century to represent the appearance as well as possible, rather than the true body colour. The lighter the body colour the more pronounced this effect is going to be. As colour photographers (before the age of automatic electronic white balancing) knew, there are certain hours of day, where these effects are more pronounced, namely early in the morning or before sun-set, you have a warm, yellow-reddish light, while at noon everything appears to be more blueish. This atmosphere the painter may have tried to evoke by giving everything a certain tint. So, from a painting you can probably deduct, whether a part say was blue, red, or yellow, but what the actual hue may have been one cannot be too sure. A blue may have been in fact something greenish blue, a red may have been actually a reddish brown, or a yellow an orange, etc. And, indeed, it is know that painters have embellished the subject, say by giving the impression that decorations where gilded, while in fact they were painted in yellow ochre on the real ship, etc.

One could also argue, that the advantage of PVA-glue is that it penetrates deeper and therefore keys better into the wood, while epoxy cements stay more on the surface. The latter are stronger as a material, but do not key into wood so well.

At the shipyard outside the actual museum there is a little building, where they show the tanning process. Somewhere I have a picture, but I didn't put it onto my Web-site. I you look into the above reference book on sail-making from 1843, it talks in detail about the process and that greasing sails was expressedly forbidden in the Royal Navy.

Well, I wouldn't necessesarily trust painting - artistic license and ideas about colouration. Artists are not interested normally in the 'true' colour of things, but in how they appear under given conditions of weather and light. Ship portrays, usually painted by semi-trained or self-taught 'commercial artist' may be a bit more reliable, because those commissioning these paintings where not so much interested in artistic rendering, but rather in a representation of how they see their ship. Then they may have also preferred an idealised appearance, while in reality ships and sails may have looked more tatty and ragbag.

Jan, I believe there is, for instance, somewhere in the Zuiderzeemuseum an explanation of this process. Boiling the sails in the solution is but one step, but smearing them with a tallow-ochre mixture makes them water-repellent and covers them against UV-radiation. See also: https://books.google.fr/books?id=XvgDAAAAQAAJ

First of all, thanks to all of your for friendly comments John, there are a couple of reasons in general for using plastics and not wood: - I think metal in models is best represented in models by, well, metal, of course, and by plastics, because they don't have any surface texture that needs to be covered up - similarly, at this small scale any wood grain, whether painted or left plain (varnished) would be grossly out of scale. - while I appreciate that some people manage to get very clean and sharp edges out of wood, this is much easier for small parts in plastics or metal; turning and milling leaves a surface that requires little further manipulation. - plastics are homogeneous and don't split or rip along any grain, though bakelite as such is rather brittle, particularly the thin sheets. - styrene and acrylics can be glued, or rather welded, nearly without any trace using dicholormethane - it is extremely difficult (for me at least) to get really high quality hard-wood and then confection it to sizes that are useful - plastics don't dust when worked Each of the plastics has different properties, making them suitable for different parts or applications: - Plexiglas and bakelite (hard paper) are so called duro-plastics, meaning they do not contain plasticisers and are very stable over decades, if not centuries. They are also very stable against UV light. - Styrene is a thermo-plastic and contains plasticisers that will slowly diffuse out, making the material brittle over decades. It is also less UV stable. - Plexiglas is easy to machine and you get very clean and sharp edges; it files and sands well; it is of medium hardness; unfortunately, it is not normally available in sheets of less than 0,8 mm thickness; otherwise one can get sheets, blocks, rods etc.; the best quality is the one cast from monomer, not the extruded one. - bakelite is the hardest and stiffest of them, but brittle in thin sheets; owing to this it is more difficult to machine, but it sands well; it can be obtained in sheets down to 0.1 mm thickness and sheets up to several cm thickness; other formats are generally not available; rods that are on the market are reenforced with fabric (e.g. Novotex), rather than the one with paper, I am using. - styrene is the softest of them and dents easily; it is difficult to machine cleanly and does not sand very well; it is commercially available in a wide variety of dimensions, very thin sheets, rods, strips, and other profiles. I hope this sufficiently explains my materials choices.

Indeed, 'tanning' sails was only a practice on small(er) fishing boats that rarely had the opportunity to dry their sails properly, because they were worked every day. The process involved soaking them in a solution made from bark and then smearing them with a mixture of red ochre (hence the 'rust' colour) and tallow or oil. This made the sails rathre stiff and messy to handle. They would not furl very nicely and indeed furly will to some extent damage the 'tanning'. In some parts of Europe, notably around the Mediterranean, it was also practice to paint the sails of smaller craft with all sorts of designs of apotropaic character, wishing good luck to the vessel, or as a signature of the owner. It seems to have become fashionable among some modern 'tall-ships' to sport coloured sails, but this was not common in the 19th century. Not sure, whether at this time they had already cotton sails in the USA, but from some point in time on US American ships tended to whiter sails than their European colleagues, that had sails made from hemp.

Not sure, which part you are talking about, the filler piece behind the stem ? In real terms these Viking ships were build in a rather different way, namely 'shell first', i.e. without any internal structure, which was added afterwards, after the planking had proceeded to some extent. The stem was in fact a complicated carving with a stepped rabbet into which the individual planks fit. I would suggest that you trawl the Internet for photographs of the preserved prototype and of replicas to help you understand, how it should look like from the outside. You then can decide how to reproduce this best with the material available in the kit. You will have to somehow reproduce the stem with the rabbet as landing for the planks.

As someone said above: predictably good 👍

Just wondering, why you didn't then make the bulwark thicker right away ? I thought the idea was to have it to near scale thickness. Yes, indeed, she is coming on very nicely !

Personally, I also prefer 'real' books and have a library with some quite rare period books. However, some books have never been reprinted and, therefore, are largely unknown to the modelling community. There is also a space issue for some of us. There is a good paperback reprint of Biddlecombe by Dover and there are several reprints of the 'Lever' - I have an US American, hard-bound one from around 35 years ago. When you do Google searches on the title/author, it usually turns up the holdings in GoogleBooks, Abebooks.com, as well as the ones in archive.org. There is a bias towards English titles though. When you look for French titles, you better go to the site of the French Bibliotheque Nationale.

Did you buy them already ? Always check out the Internet first, there are now many historic books available for free as eBooks. I don't have any of Peterson's books, but seem to have heard that there are quite a few mistakes in them and he generalises from Swedish practices as represented in the models in the Sjöfartmuseum in Stockholm. Perhaps some other Members can comment on the reliability of the books ? From the selection of books, I assume that you are mainly interested in the first half of the 19th century ? That's important to remember as rigging practices evolved considerably.

Good advice from Jaager. As you work, you will feel the need for certain types of tools, say to hold something, to cut something, etc., because your toolbox doesn't have right stuff. That's the point to buy - or to make yourself, btw. Analyse carefully what operations you try to perform and how your existing tools don't do, that gives you ideas of what to look for. There are a lot of useless 'modelling' tools on the market. Sometimes the idea is good, but their make is poor, sometimes they are outright useless. It is also worthwhile to browse jewellery and watchmaking supply houses, fine tool supply houses, dentists and dental technician suppliers, medical suppliers, manicure/pedicure suppliers, etc. Their market is usually much bigger than ours and they often have the same stuff in better quality (and sometimes at lower prices) than 'modelling' suppliers. Ebay is your friend too.

I noticed that you didn't use a stem-post with rabbet to run the planks into. I suppose you will 'fake' (I hesitate to use this word these days ...) it by putting a false stem in front of it ?