wefalck

Fabric glues in this age of organic solvent-free glues and paints seem to be acrylic dispersions, so your acrylic varnish may do the same job. For a reversible solution to shaping ropes one may also consider sugar. Back in the days before hairspray and -gel people used sugar solutions to keeps their hair in place. Just mix a bit of powder sugar into alcohol and brush on. It needs to be a dilute solution only - you don’t want to put an icing onto your ropes

Black vs. brown is really a question of period (and region perhaps). From about the 1840s on large quantities of coal tar became available from the production of city gas and coke for steel making. So from the middle of the 19th century on black became more dominant. A dark brown might be a good commercial compromise, as it can be ‚tarred over‘ on the model with black ink. I never use CA or PVA for stabilising knots. A fast drying varnish is preferable, as the stabilisation is reversible using a drop of solvent. I am using the kind of varnish that is used to prevent silverware or brass from tarnishing. It stays a bit flexible. I also use this to coerce ropes into the desired curves. I make my own rope from polyester fly-tying thread and did not have serious fraying problems, when soaking the end in the varnish. Similarly, I soak the area of a cut before cutting. One needs to use sharp blades or scissors in order to avoid squashing the rope, which leads to fraying.

Just a thought: if you use a ‚hot knife‘ to cut the rope after laying it, you have done the cutting and the melting at the same time. BTW: did you mean 275 F or 275 C ? I have a hot-air soldering iron that can be adjusted from 100 C to 400 C and should try it, while rope is still on the rope-walk.

It doesn’t seem to be too difficult to find Gütermann Mara over here in Europe in the detail trade. You mentioned color 2899, Chuck, but which is the other one ? In fact, Gütermann have a whole range of yellowish greys in their color-chart. You seem to have been using mainly their heavy sizes, what are then the final rope diameters ? Tempering the rope in the oven sounds like a good idea. Have to try this with my micro-ropes made from polyester fly-tying threads 👍🏻

Yes, this absence of straight lines for reference would be a real challenge for a cartesian mind and hand like mine ... quite strange actually in a country that was dominated by rational thinking and calvinist religion.

Deviating from actual brushes, there are other ways than the bow-pen of applying ink and paint in a controlled way. After the bow-pen came what is called in German a funnel-pen (Trichterfeder, not sure of the correct term in English), essentially a funnel-shaped device that fits into a pen-holder (it's the fourth from the left in the picture below). A spring-steel wire allows the tube to be cleaned from clogged ink/paint. The line-width is equal to the outside diameter of the tube. It is the predecessor to the fountain drafting-pen. Image taken from https://www.typotheque.com/articles/from_lettering_guides_to_cnc_plotters, a nice summary of the subject. While designed for use with inks, rather than pigmented paint, I know that it is still being used by porcelain-painters to apply lettering and in that realm still available commercially. I got a couple of them, actually. I would not use them with acrylics, as these just dry too fast, even though the airbrush-ready paints from bottles might be tempting. I think there is also white pigmented ink that dries more slowly. And, btw, normal pens as pictured above are also useful to apply paint to reasonably flat surfaces - but again acrylics don't work very well, unless mixed with a retarder. Further deviating from brushes and looking beyond the plate: women use little foam brushes to apply make-up. I got myself some through ebay (not wanting to steal them from my wife) and they are useful to apply paint to objects, particularly raised features, kind of 'rubbing on' the paint. I have used their big DIY brothers a lot.

Yes, have used pro arte prolene brushes for years, they seem to last quite a bit.

I gather on my side of the pond, but on the other side of the channel, it is called coach-lining, because it was originally applied to horse-drawn coaches and then spread to railway coaches and engines and finally to commercial vehicles, both steam- and IC-powered ones. It finally went out of fashion in the early 1950s I think. To me it always looked quite 'exotic', as only perhaps bicycles and motorcycles had such lining or stripes, say on the fenders, in continental Europe. At least German steam locomotives were painted black all over since the 1920s, a typical field of application in the UK.

Coach-lining seems to be a craft that has persisted much longer in the anglo-saxon world than in continental Europe, where it all but disappeared after WW2. Nowadays it seems to become more popular again, as it sort of merges into 'custom-painting' of motorcycles in particular and in particular in the USA. There the same 'one-shot' paradigm prevails. On the Internet there are videos of real good artisans in their field. It would be worthwhile to have a look at their 'lining' brushes and the paints they are using. The problem for us modellers is that we should excel in at least a dozen, if not more, crafts ...

I didn’t mean to say that smaller brushes dry out slower, what I meant is that due to the small volume one replenishes more frequently, thus keeping the paint moist.

Toyed with this idea at various times, but unless the background has a uniform and 'simple' colour that seems to be difficult to achieve, even, if you cut the decal very close to the lettering, thus minimising the printed area.

A lot of people make white decal paper - but that doesn't give you white letters ... A semi steady-hand option would be to print the outline of the lettering on a clear decal sheet and then fill the letters with paint, while the sheet is flat on the table. Should be a lot easier than doing it on the model and wou have infinite tries too.

Custom-printed decals would be my first thought. However, you need a special printer that is able to print 'white'. It is a while since I searched the market, but then there were only one or two models around for home use. There are various suppliers for custom-decals for modellers though. Not sure how good the market for these still is, but there are also dry rub-on letters, e.g. by Letraset. Dito. for lining, inclduing curves - check out model railway supplies. It would be probably an overkill for just one or two name-boards, but one could also etch a stencil from thin brass and then spray-paint with it the lettering. Finally, there is a steady hand ... 👹

Also noticed a few years ago that the booming market for nail-'artists' (perhaps better artisans) provides many interesting articles for modellers. In fact, it seems that they initially borrowed tools and materials from the modelling scene and then developed further. The larger market then has brought prices down. As noted, lining and dotting brushes are particular of interest. Brushes are one of those items, where it is better to go to a shop and try them out. You put a bit of saliva on your finger tips to we the brush and form a tip. However, self-service racks in many art-materials shops have led to brushes often being damaged by negligent would-be customers. It happened to me that I had to walk out of reputable shops because they just didn't have (anymore) what I wanted. In desperation, I tried mail order and got a batch from an UK supplier. One or two of their brushes were not ok, but they refunded the money when I mailed them a picture with the defective ones. Winsor & Newton also do a series of short synthetic brushes, which have some advantage for detail work, though they do not hold as much paint as the standard ones. The fact that they hold less paint requires more frequent refilling with fresh paint, which is better with acrylics that would otherwise begin to dry in the upper part of the brush. Since my wife gave me one of those mugs with paint-brush soap, I have used this, but before that I used the special washing powder for wool, which is very effective and keeps the brushes elastic.

It is good practice (which was not always followed, of course, depending on how much the mate/master cared) to tighten all rigging in harbour and as far as possible at sea. Any unnecessarily loose rigging will wear and spar etc. will bang around, when the ship is moving, which can be a nuisance to one's own crew and the neighbours. This may be only modern yacht practice, but halliards and other ropes running along masts are usually tied together and away from the mast in order prevent them slapping against the mast when the wind gets into them, the noise of which can be ennerving. Tying together halliards, sheets and so on in a triangle in mid-air seems to have been navy practice. Apart from looking neat, it also keeps the ropes suspended and hence drier than when hanging/lying somewhere coiled up.

You are getting better and better, Pat ! Just to put on my 'know-all hat': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutta-percha This rigging warrant is a find we all dream of, when we are researching a ship. The last war, floods and neglect due to lack of interest sadly destroyed so many records in my home country ... particularly the pre-1900 navy is not very well documented, not speaking of merchants ships.

Quite daring to do the moulding once the piece is in place - or a sure hand !

I think Valparaiso was not hit so much by the earthquake. I don't remember seeing anything particular, when I was there in October 2011.

How do the tin-clad houses below/opposite the museum in Valparaiso look like now ? A couple of years or so ago the area was devastated by a fire. The museum is worthwhile a visit.

There some reasonably price micro-motors now on the market from the usual Chinese sources. Know some colleagues who have one and they seem to be happy with it for carving etc. I have been thinking of adapting one to my micro-mill, but for the moment I was happy with the top speed of 5000 rpm of the current arrangement for Plexiglas and brass. Wood may need indeed higher speeds. Nice adapatation by the way. Does the big mill have a light enough 'feel' on the handwheels for such delicate work ?

Busy smithy and excellent output !

If one spends already a whole working day in front of the computer, one may want to look at something different and may want to have a different haptic experience ... Spending 600 $, even Canadian ones, on a model seems to be an awful lot of money ... never spent more than maybe 100€.

Back on old MSW there were some Russian guys who made some simple single-lip milling cutters from hardened silver-steel/drill rod or HSS toolbits and shape-milled with them the main oulines of blocks on the PROXXON FM50. Not too difficult to make such cutters.

Try a set of eye-protection glasses with magnifying glasses. They usually have +3 diopters and I can wear them for hours - they also prevent nasty things from flying into your eyes ...

A lines drawing done in pen and ink or even a print-out has a finite line width and a certain contrast ratio against the paper. Scanning these approximates the lines with pixels, resulting effectively in a loss of contrast, as line is degraded into a more or less wide cloud of dots. Any software that is supposed to convert the cloud of dots into a chain of vectors has to interpret this. The precision of this interpretation will depend on the angle the original line had respective to the axes of the scanner. So you are bound to have lots of artefacts and deviations. The worse the smaller the original drawing was. Personally, I am going down the same route as mtaylor. It may feel tedious in the first place, but it is probably more efficient than trying to remove all those rogue pixels before sending a drawing through a vectorising program. You, as a shipmodeller, are also much better in deciding what is a reasonable line and what not than the vectorising program. I have done this for years using a mouse. As I will be getting an iPad with a stylo for Christmas, I am looking forward to do this kind work now on a tablet. Still have to find the right CAD software, as it seems that there is no iOS-version of my favourite EazyDraw for the MacOS.