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Not immediately on this Dremel machine, but on batteries from an environmental scientist: Ni-Cd are being gradually phased out due to environmental concerns over low collection and recycling rates. The cadmium is being dispersed in our environment, or worse in the environment of Third World countries, where many electric and electronic devices end their life in order to be 'recycled', when not fed into the proper recycling routes, but just binned. There, inter alia children burn the electrics and electronics waste in order to recover copper, gold and silver, but releasing nasty metals such as Cd and Hg into the environment and exposing themselves to these. Li-ion batteries are a step away from this problem, but certainly not the last answer. Research and industry are working on other solutions. As a rule, electric devices should not left to be charged unattended. Full stop. Physical chemistry tells you that during the charging process heat will be generated, which must be dissipated. If that is not possible for one or another reason, the device may heat up to ignition temperature. This applies to any kind of batteries. Li-ion batteries have a high charge per volume density and often are built into devices with poor heat dissipation capacity - which is the root cause of the problem. So there is no problem as such with Li-ion batteries, as long as you keep an eye on your device.

I think there were passages between the main deck-house and the after and fore deck-houses respectively. They seem to have served for embarking and disembarking passengers. The wood would have been laid onto the steel deck I would presume. The area around the main deck-house, inside the wheel-boxes, where the coaling scuttles are seems to have not been planked in wood.

Ilhan, without seeing the whole ship, your questions are not so easy to answer, particularly concerning the first two deck-views. Concerning the cross-sections, it appears to me that there is a steel deck all around that has a wooden deck on it (this was done for insulation purposes). There are angle-irons connecting the steel deck and the walls of the engine- and boiler-rooms as well as the hull plating. The wooden deck is off-set a bit along the hull to form a waterway. Usually such waterways were partly filled with cement to form a gutter - this prevents water from resting in the angles and causing corrosion.

Very nice nice work indeed in both, wood and leather ! I gather the leather would need to be greased in operation, to waterproof it and to reduce friction ? Actually, I don't seem to remember seeing yokes leathered, but rather the mast, or it had some battens added, where the yoke would be during operation.

Very nice piece of reverse-(or retro- ?)engineering 👍

Whether above or below deck depends on the size of the ship and the space available at the counter. In Europe most tugs I have seen seem to have the rudder quadrant above the deck under some gratings. In consequence the chain/rod would run along the waterways towards the steering house. Below are some pictures of RELIANT, when she was in the NMM in Greenwhich (apologies for the low quality, but the colour slides had so much degraded since 1979, when I took the pictures, that I had to convert them to b/w): For the most part the chain/rod runs in the open, supported by shallow stanchions. Only where people are crossing its way it runs in a steel pipe. Covering the chain/rod would only be necessary in fancy ships, where passengers would come into conflict with them. A simple box structure as in the drawings in a previous post would do the job. As the box would cover part of the waterways, the scuppers should be on the inside of the box in order to allow the drainage of the deck. Still it is not an ideal arrangement, as it could retain significant quantities of water on the deck.

@Chuck, what puzzled us is that the Gütermann Mara colour chart does not list colour No. 2899 for Mara at all.

@Messis, yes, that would be the principle. The lugs, however, would not have these rectangular ends, at least not in the direction of the block or rope. The pin does not need to have thread, a few ridges or incisions though would allow it to key-in better into the wood.

Polyester is not polyester. It comes in many different formulations and many seem to hold on quite well. I 'rigged' a couple of double-decker aiplane models with polyester thread as (once) used for mending ladies' tights when I was a teenager in the early 1970s. When I packed up the models at my parents' house in the mid 1980s, they were still ok without visible degradation in spite of being in the daylight all the time. I still have the same bobbins of polyester thread and use it from time to time, now some 45 years later, though it has been kept in a box, of course. It is always a bit of a dilemma with new materials. On the other hand, if no one tried new materials, we would still use wood and stone. Artists tried new materials, sometimes it worked out, and sometimes these are a conservator's nightmare. I am personally inclined to take a chance, if the result now is better than using 'traditional' or 'natural' materials. Natural plant- or animal-based materials in principle all are prone to degradation - there is almost invariable some form of life that can use these materials as a source of energy and will attack them, if the environmental conditions are right. Some man-made fibres are better in this respect, as there is no form of life that has the right biochemistry to break them down. Coming back to the Gütermann Mara thread: I looke a bit closer at the different sizes as per the technical and colour table linked above. It seems that size 220 is a 'single-fold' thread, i.e. it consist of a single thread of 135 dtex (which means that 10,000 metres of the thread weigh 135 g). Sizes 120 to 80 are two-fold threads of increasing thickness of the individual thread, sizes 70 to 15 are three-fold ones. The individual threads of the respective smallest two- and three-fold threads have nearly the same dtex number as Mara 220. This means that using Mara 220 to make a three-ply rope, you would arrive at same dtex number or weight as when using Mara 70 as a starting material. Assuming that polyester has a specific density of 1.35 g / cm^3, 10,000 metres of a thread of 135 dtex would give a volume of 100 cm^3. With this we can calculate the approximate diameter of the thread: sqrt (100 cm^3 / 1,000,000 cm / Pi) x 2 = 0.11 mm for Mara 220. For the other threads you can calculate this yourself.

@vaddoc, not really, I have been looking around, but have not really found anyone, who has the whole range of colours. However, I have been looking specifically for size 220 (10 tex), being the finest. Thicker ones may be easier to find. One On-Line-Shop that seems to have quite a range is: http://www.tokokurzwaren.de/Naehgarne/Industrie/Naehgarn-Guetermann-Mara-220er-5-000m.html Although the company is called Gütermann, one may need to search for the variants Guetermann or Gutermann as well. I may write to company after the holidays to ask them for retail sources. @Chuck, are you sure about the colour No. 2899 ? The colour-card quoted above (https://schlemming.de/download/Farbkarte Mara.pdf) does not list this one.

Messis, I may have mixed up something here, but I thought you were working on the late 19th century Imperial German yacht HOHENZOLLERN. Then one would have found bands with cast-on lugs around the mast, as autogeneous welding was not invented yet. I suppose you were rather referring to the SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL, which was built in 1966, at a time, when welding had become a commong practice in shipbuilding. It looks, as if she had steel pole-masts with eyes and similar items welded on. These 'eye-bolts' were not bolts, but lugs from bar, that were welded to the mast. I only found this colourful image of this kind of lug: There would be different ways to make them. You could, for instance, take a brass strip and hard-solder as many pins onto the narrow side as you need lugs. Then drill the hole for the shackle-bolt and saw off the invidual lugs. You now can shape the lug, while holding it in a pin-vise. With the pin you can secure your lug in the mast. Drill a tight hole an apply a small amount of CA to it. Depending on the degree of freedom of movement required, either the shackle bot or the shank would go through the eye.

Checked a couple of specialized shops in Berlin, but they did not stock Mara. One will have to order it on-line unfortunately.

Have a look at how EDT solved this on his YOUNG AMERICA. On steel mast one would have also metal reenforcement bands. They would have eyes that are formed from metal straps. The blocks were shackled to these eyes. I can look up some drawings in a contemporary textbook on this subject over the weekend.

Perhaps not enough, only had a eastern Frisian grandmother

I used ‚icing‘ with wallpaper glue for modeling braking waves for over 40 year now and had never any ant problem. But then I always lived in a European city environment with little wild-life

I didn‘t like the original, too much Art Noveau, which is kind of out of place in this context. Kortes‘ solution is much more appropriate, I think.

Whenever there is a force on a part, one should indeed go for a mechanical connection as well and not just glueing. It is always a good idea to look at how it is done on the prototype.

Personally I prefer a warm light in my workshop - as a hobby it should be a ’holistic’ relaxing activity and not production in an industrial setting. I know that some modellers, particularly the figure painters go to great lengths to create a day-light setting, but as noted above, in central and Northern Europe and North-America we tend to prefer warm light for our homes - in Southern Europe one sees more frequently ‚cold’ fluorescent bulbs and tubes in private homes. For historic reasons I am still ‚mixed’, warm fluorescent and LEDs, but will switch over to the latter as when the former need to be replaced. I replaced the incandescent spots in my architects’ lamps with LED spots, but am not satisfied with the light distribution. Eventually I may go for large LED globes. I am also considering a large 60 x 120 cm LED panel above the work-table. A rule of thumb seems to be to multiply the wattage of LEDs with 9 for cold and 8 for warm ones to estimate the equivalent incandescent bulb.

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.