wefalck

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.

Unless some of the mouldings are painted white, one could cut thin stripes from water-transfers (decals) or buy such stripes, if available in your part of the world.

I gather in the part of the World I am currently living in, the 'golden' would be pronounced something like 'do-raad', with a short, open 'o'. BTW, why are these vents collade 'dorade-vents' ? Haven't heard this term before.

Somehow I liked the bright steel parts. Many older museum models have such parts left bright - does work for a model, but not possible, of course, in real life.

Marcus, I believe 'maritiem digital' is a sort of portal through which one have access to (some) material from various museums, including, I think, Rotterdam. I have not looked at it for some time though. Concerning the varnishing, I found this always a bit garish on the Dutch boats that have been converted into yachts. Must be some sort of fashion, but in reality doesn't say anything about the quality of maintenance. A thick layer of varnish on a model too looks much like a cheap souvenir model, where also 'glossy' seems to be taken as a sign of quality. I gather something a bit more glossy than satin would be right. Personally, I would apply some cellulose-based woodfiller, rub this down with very fine (0000) steel-wool and then polish with a felt-wheel in a power-drill. On the hard wood you used this should give a nice sheen whithout adding a perceptible layer of varnish.

A certain standardisation and composing gangs of men of different levels of knowledge and experience. Most parts were too heavy to handled by one sailor alone, so one would group experienced and unexperienced sailors together. Experience comes very fast with the nine-tailed cat being around ... There were no formal qualifications and exams for sailors of non-officer grades. They were moved on in hierarchy, if their superiors were satisfied with their qualities.

One notes also that the mesh is not square, but rectangular. I will try to pull in one direction every second wire from the fine wire-mesh I bought for this purpose. The wires are only 0.04 mm diameter, so it will be a challenge.

First they looked like made from those binders for plastic bags, these plastic strips with a wire imbedded ... however, it is now clear that the ridge is an etching artefact: the attack of the etching agent does not only happen perpendicular to the metal sheet, but also sideways to some extent. It is particularly pronounced, when etching in a tray and can be reduced by the commercial spray- or foam-etching processes. I have actually tried to play with this effect to achieve certain 3D-effects. Javier, not using magnifiers may be a wise decision 😏 - when taking photographs, I recognise very well this sobering effect ...

@Pat, I have been thinking of a similar route for the mill/lathe. When I looked at this a few years - technology may have evolved since, the 'shutter speed', i.e. the number of frames per second, was a bit to slow for machine work. You get the image with some delay. That would not matter though for inspection work or slow manipulations. I also had at some stage a screen projector, i.e. a microscope that projects the image onto a screeen. I thought of using it in the same way as the mentioned digital version. Perhaps it was not adjusted well enough, but in the end I did not find it very useful, also because it took up a lot of bench space. So it was sold again. @Valeriy, you are right the grating in your picture looks quite new (where was this taken ? There must be other places with Krupp-klones or original Krupps around the former Russian Empire). This particular one looks like a restoration. However, as one of the few detail pictures of the WESPE-class guns shows, this is the original pattern: This pattern of grating can be also see on the large-scale instruction model that was made for the Danish navy at about the same time: Krupp was happy to sell his guns to Denmark who has been in war with the German states only a dozen years earlier. The Danes armed one of their first armoured battleships with these 30,5 cm guns. The good thing about this is, that the Danish archives in this way preserved some material on these guns. The lower carriage, however, is different from that of the WESPE-class, because it was housed in a revolving turret, rather than in an open barbette. @paulsutcliffe - thanks for your kind words !

Very clean work. I like this combination of wood and metal ! Did you glue the steel edge to the lee-board ?

Ahh, haven't thought about sinking a round mill into the wood block and then cutting it into half. Yes, of course, you also need symmetrical parts persumably for both sides of the deck-house. You are right about the machineability of cast Plexiglas (type GS as opposed to XT for the extruded one). My father used to work for a daughter company of Röhm GmbH, the original manufacturer of Plexiglas™. Thus I had access to the material and their extensive application handbook, which deals with all sorts of machining and (hot) shaping etc. Therefore, also a certain affinity to that material. Being chemically close to acrylic paints, I found it also paints well with these. Actually, etching fluids are not particularly 'toxic', but, of course, they can eat holes into tools, workplaces and the skin. I am rather cautious working with them in a rented city appartment ... that's why I will give this work out this time.

Michael, the link was to an external Web-site that has some drawings on it that came originally from the Admiralty's archives in Berlin. Well, being short-sighted, I have sort of built-in magnification +4, but that is not good enough anymore at my age (62). I am no using various types of protective glasses that are also available with magnification. For normal bench-work I have plain set that has some loup-inserts at the lower rim. Another pair, for smaller work, has overall a magnification of +3 and for even smaller work I have a set of head-band visors with something like +5 magnification. On the lathe I use a loupe with a light built in for delicate work, which is mounted on an arm like an architect's lamp. I also own one of those pair of spectacle-frames with little +20 microscopes mounted on it, like the ones surgeons use. While it sounded like a good idea, it turned out to be impractical for bench or lathe work, at least in my configuration. The microscopes are designed for a working distance of about 50 cm, which is ok, when you are standing over a patient in an operating theatre, but too long for working seated at a workbench - here 30 cm or so would be better. Also, the field of vision is rather small. In consequence, I have never really used it. A few months ago I acquired an antiquish binocular microscope on a pivoting arm that is clamped to the work-bench. The original 20x magnification was too much and I got another set of 10x oculars, which give a better balance of field of vision and depth of field. It is a nice piece of old-time British instrument manufacturing, but I still have to get used to it and find the right adjustment for the eye-pieces. Some people use these also for lathe work, but I think its main use will be for assembly- and detailed paintwork. I wanted to use it together with my micro-milling machine, but somehow I can't get it into a useful position without breaking my neck.

Sorry referring to a mishap, but the broken sky-sail yard made me think again of a question I wanted to ask for a while: what is the smallest diameter yard you think you can produce in this way. I have been rather wary of breaking wooden yards and masts and started to make them from steel rod with turned-on bands - works well, but drilling for the eye-bolts is difficult. Brass drills more easily, of course, but is not really stiff enough. However, your successes make me re-think ...

Thank you, gentlemen, for your kind words ! @Pat, some ten years ago I did dabble with home-etching. I wanted to develop this technique for me into an ad hoc workshop technique, kind of chemical machining. Rather than developing A4 sheets of dozens of parts, I wanted to do parts as I was going along. I am not working from a pre-prepared set of buildings drawings - there is a set developed by a very good modeller and professional ship-engineer, Wolfgang Bohlayer, but it was drawn some 30 years ago and since a lot of new information has become available. Rather, I develop the bits and pieces en route, interpreting original drawings and photographs. In addition, messing around with large volumes of corrosive liquids in a rented appartment is not necessarily something one wants to do. So, I worked with (large) stamp-sized masks and in old film-containers with say 20 ml of solution at a time. With some experimentation, I got the processes reasonably right. The main challenge, however, was the quality of the masks. I never really managed to get the black sufficiently dense and I tried all sorts of printers, laser as well as ink-jet ones. I gather my parts were also rather ambitious, trying to get the most out of the technique with surface etching, rather than simply 'cutting out' parts. Thinking, that for small parts a simple UV-lamp would be sufficient didn't get me very far. Results improved, when I bought a proper exposure box (as used by electronics amateurs for making printed circuit boards). So, this time I will leave making the mask and the actual etching to some professionals. This means I have to make a lot of drawings in order to fill at least an A5, if not an A4 sheet to make it cost-effective. Still it will be a challenge, as I will be getting to the limit of the technique. For instance, the minimum width for parts is the thickness of the sheet-metal. That is why the wire-mesh can only be surface-etched. Originally, the bars in the grilles would have a diameter of around 5 mm or so, which translates to around 0.03 mm. Another advantage of the home-etching is that one can choose sheet-metal of different thickness for different parts. For cost reasons I will have to settle on a single thickness of 0.2 mm and am designing the parts with this in mind. Below is a picture of what these gratings look like on one of the russian-kloned Krupp-guns in the Suomenlinna fortress: Quite flimsy parts at 1:160 scale ... @jdulaney, I quoted that site at the beginning of my post and the original drawing of the gun originates from there. Indeed, the site points to WESPE-page on my own Web-site.

Very nice sheet-metal work on a type of vents that was new for me. The real challenge for me would have been the making of the hollow hardwood formers ...

It has been again several months since I wrote something here. However, don’t think that nothing has happened since. After the funnel I turned my attention to the lower carriage of the 30,5 cm-gun. This is a complex assembly of steel plates connected by L-beams and held together with rivets. Some years ago a detailed Imperial Admiralty plan appeared on the Internet: Source: www.dreadnoughtproject.org Together with the description in a contemporary textbook (GALSTER, 1885) these drawings formed the basis of some reverse engineering. A problem with the above drawings is that many parts are drawing onto each other, semi-transparent and with dashed lines. Sorting out this maze into its three-dimensional element was not easy and some part will remain a matter of interpretation. I had hoped to get away without etched parts. Trials with embossed styrene-sheet to simulate the rivetting, however, were not very successful. The embossing distorted the miniscule parts. The rivetting is very prominent and can be seen on a large demonstration model in the Naval Museum in Copenhagen or on some russian-kloned Krupp-carriages in the Suomenlinna fortress off Helsinki. The rivetting can be much more precisely rendered with etching and one avoids the added difficulty of having to cut out minute parts. To begin with the frame of the carriage with sides and ribs from sheet-steel was designed. The L-shaped reinforcement profiles including their rivetting was then drawn. Next in the line was the housing of the training mechanism. I will not fully build this mechanism as it will not really be visible on the finished model. It will be only made in its rough shape that is needed to support the various axles and rods that will be visible. Also designed were the various parts of the hydraulic recoil mechanism and its linkage to the upper gun-carriage. Various other small parts, such as the housings for the sprung buffers that limit the movement of the upper carriage, were designed as etched parts to be folded. The lower carriage runs on four wheels that are guided by rails that have been turned on the lathe already a long time ago. These ‘castors’ are attached to the underside of the carriage by housings of sheet-metal that have no right angle in them and are set at an oblique angle to the carriage. These parts were developed from the various projections in the drawing above and then checked by printing them as large paper parts. A lot of work were also the many operating platforms resting on consoles fabricated from L-profiles. Unfortunately, the exact shape and position of the consoles cannot de deducted from the above drawings for all of them. The model in Copenhagen and the originals in Suomenlinna have lower carriages that differ in detail. I will provide two alternatives for the grilles made from wire mesh on the etched fret. The more elaborate version will consist of etched and folded frames with inlays of a very fine steel wire-mesh. If it does not work to cut the wire-mesh to size – some of the platforms are onyl 1.6 mm wide – I will have solid platforms into which a mesh-like structure is etched as fall-back option. Elements (operating platforms) for etched fret Also the charging-crane will be built up from several layers of etched part – to get the necessary thickness – and turned parts. The same approach was taken for several other small parts that would be difficult to machine or work on by hand due to their small size, while still requiring a precise geometry. I still have to design a host of other parts that have to go onto the etched fret in order to make it worthwhile to be given outside for having the mask and the etching done professionally. To be continued soon ...