wefalck

The purpose of an independent 4-jaw chuck is to very precisely center stuff, round or square, to the point you want to have it on. So this is not defect due to low price, but intentional. It is tedious to center stuff, e.g. with a feeler gauge, but the most precise way, sometimes more precise than with self-centering chucks. wefalck

These wargaming figurines in general look more like garden gnomes than normal humans, their proportions are not good at all. Some years the United States Post Office made a rather customer-unfriendly decision and stopped what was called 'surface mail'. Stuff did take 8 to 10 weeks to arrive in Europe, but with a bit of planning it didn't matter and it was a lot cheaper than 'airmail'. It is quite strange, as you can get stuff from China for almost nothing ... not a good move in a globalising economy. wefalck

You can gain height by rigging a tackle (or using the braces) at the opposite yard arm to tilt the yard. You loose some clearance off the ship's side though. As noted above this was a common arrangement to load/unload at the quay-side. wefalck

Sounds pretty dangerous in anything but a dead-calm sea. Harland describes/illustrates exactly the same procedure as popey2sea described. wefalck

Not specifically for the ENDEAVOUR, but this book give a detailed description of how it would be done: HARLAND, J. (1985): Seamanship in the Age of Sail.- 320 p., London (Conway Maritime Press). wefalck

My God, what are you going to do with such a huge lathe, turning soup dishes ? What modellers need (e.g. for masts) is a good centre distance. And remember: you can wood on a metal lathe, but not the other way around. If you only have money and space for one lathe, get a metal one, though they are a bit more expensive. wefalck

Actually, it is almost certainly not stainless steel. Stainless is not normally used for such things, too difficult to machine and usually cannot be hardened easily. If it is for 'one-hand operation', than it is a different animal from the plastic chuck for the Proxxon: it means that it is a centric 4-jaw chuck, all jaws move in and out together. Such chuck is really only useful for square stock. These days you can get quite cheap chucks of all kinds from Chinese sources. Check on ebay. The Sherline ones are quite good and come with different threads in the back, so you may find one to fit your lathe. wefalck

I didn’t like the sewn-on fore-stay in the end. So I went and fabricated a minute hook from copper wire. Once the hook is tinned and soldered together it is actually quite resistant against the forces on it during the rigging operation. The now correctly attached fore-stay Lucky me that I am not dafi working on his VICTORY and that I don’t need hundreds of them ... wefalck

I still found time to begin with the rigging. Work will progress only slowly since the parts are rather delicate and the work is rather nerve-wrecking. At the prototype one would install, of course, the fore-stay first. The fore-sail would be attached with its iron hoops. In my case, however, the hoops have already been sewn onto the sail, a work that would be largely impossible to do in situ. Therefore, the fore-stay has to be installed with the fore-sail attached to it. Form a modelling point of view sailships of the late 19th / early 20th century are quite difficult to rig. In previous periods ropes were often either spliced directly into eye-bolts or sewn on, which both are quite easy to reproduce in a model even at small scales. In later times, to the contrary, shackles and hooks became ubiquitous. It made the rigging and repair easier, but making shackles or hooks of 0.5 mm or 1 mm is quite impossible (the smallest shakles I managed to make are about 2.5 mm long). Just the fore-stay of the botter is hooked into an eye-bolt of the mast. Wire with a scale diameter would bent open under the load. So I had to take a shortcut and to sew it on. Reeving of the fore-stay deadeye with the help of a tripod There were various methods of rigging the fore-stay of a botter in use up to the end of the 19th century. I chose the somewhat old-fashioned method with a dead-eye. The lanyard was made from a rope made on my own rope-walk: three strands of Veevus fly-tying thread 16/0 in golden brown. The colour was chosen because the lanyard would have been tarred. I wanted to put a real wall-knot onto the end, but the fly-tying thread works almost like wire and is well nigh impossible to splice. The fore-stay deadeye The first picture shows my rigging aid: a small tripod that came from deceased father’s estate and was used to suspend a pharmacist’s balance (not sure sure what he ‚above’ would say to this re-use ...). A wire loop suspends the dead-eye so that it keeps clear. To be continued after my vacation ... wefalck

You cannot compare the Unimats with the DB250, the first are metal-working lathes (meaning that they have cross-slide), while the second is a wood-working lathe that only has a hand-tool rest. wefalck

Thanks, gentlemen. The dilemma one finds oneself in is that the paint-job on the original may have been pretty rough, so it should look rough on the model as well. However, most of the time a rough paint-job on the model looks just like that and reflects badly on the modeller. The art is to make a neat paint-job looking rough ... not so easy wefalck

Not really, when needed I get them from the electronic bay ... wefalck

I am mainly using so-called 'disposable' short end-mills. They are a few Euro the piece. So if something goes wrong, one doesn't loose tens of Euros. I use the short ones, because our machines are not stiff enough to cope with long tool overhang. For wood, 'secondhand' carbide mills are good enough. they come in sizes up to 3.2 mm (1/8"). They are often rather cheaply to be had and, therefore, also disposable. Disposable mills make sense, because re-sharpening requires special equipment few people have. wefalck

In wood, it should in general run as fast as you can, giving you a better surface. The feed depends on the wood. In some woods you may need rather low feeds, or it will burn. Wood is a poor heat conductor and cutting generates a lot of heat. Some woods are very difficult to mill, more difficult than metal or plastics - but I am not really an expert on milling wood. When milling metal with carbide, it is usually better to do this dry. Carbide is very susceptible to heat stress and unless you have one of those flooding-type coolant systems, you will not be able to produce a constant coolant stream. Applying a bit of coolant here and there will shock the carbide and may lead to breakage of the delicate cutting edges. You can apply say WD40 before the cut, but don't blow it on during cutting. wefalck

I didn't read all the above answers in details, so apologies for any duplication. HSS is tougher than carbide, meaning that it is more forgiving with the light machines we use. Carbide keeps the edge longer, particularly when milling wood. I think for doing a lot of woodwork, I would use carbide. It has to be run at higher rpm than HSS. Depending on the price you are prepared to pay, you may not have much to chose between 3 or 4 flutes. Three flutes are usually cheaper. Three flutes also give more room to the swarf, so it is better with materials that make long bits. The more flutes the better the finish on steel usually. Ball nose mills tend to be rather expensive and are only needed when you want a round corner. They are also used in CNC copy-milling, when free-form surfaces are to be shaped. Otherwise zylindrical mills are used. If you want to do plunge milling, you need a bit that cuts over the middle, i.e. once cutting lip extends to the centre of the mill. Most cheaper bits are like this, but you have to sure. When milling a slot, plunge-milling a series of holes is only a moderately good idea, as you may end up with jagged slot, unless you use a smaller diameter bit first. Don't attempt to mill a full-depth slot (depening on the final depth), but take out layers. The tangential forces may to much otherwise wor the bit and it will brake. You may have to experiment with rpm versus feed to get it right. In general, with our hobby machines, it is better to reduce feed, though this may be at the expense of surface finish. Feel free to ask more specific questions when they arise. It is difficult to give recommendations, when you don't know the parameters of the machining job, e.g. material to be machined, diameter of slot to be milled/size of surface to be planed etc., type of machine available etc. wefalck

An old artists' rule says: fat over lean only. So, no hydrophilic (i.e. watery) media over lipophilic (i.e. oily) media. The museums are obsessed with the longevity aspect. Understandably, but if the Old Masters would have been pre-occupied by this too much, we wouldn't have oil-paints today. As long as new materials, such as acrylics, do not contain plasticers chances are that they quite durable. A serious conservationary problem (or may be not ) is that modern artists are not so well-trained in technology anymore and experiment with all sorts of mixtures of materials that may turn out to be incompatible. The lesson is: keep it simple and don't mix too many techniques. wefalck

Thanks, gentlemen, but I still have another working week ahead of me , not too bad actually, as I am working from home (in France, believe it or not, the universities really close and are shut for almost the whole month of August ...). As it hasn’t been so hot today here in Paris and the sweat didn’t trickly onto the desk, I tackled a job that filled me with some apprehensions: painting the registration number onto the botter’s main-sail. This is something that can easily spoil a whole model. Finding an easy way to produce white lettering or other markings on a model would deserve a modellers’ Nobel Prize. Any procedure I could think of requires several, sometimes elaborate, steps. There are virtually no printers that can print white. In the past there was one or the other thermotransfer printer, but they seem to have disappeared from the market. Owing to the fact that you really need heavy pigments to arrive at good coverage, ink-jet printers are not really a feasible technical route. Recently OKI came onto the market with a laser printer that uses white, yellow, cyan and magenta toners: http://www.okidata.com/procolor/711wt. I don’t know anyone who has one already and for that price, I would rather buy some other machinery. Printing on white decal sheet is also not really a practical option, as you will never match the background colour, at least not with the murky terracotta I used for the sails. Then I thought about stencelling. This would mean to etch a stencil first – too much work for just two markings. Technically speaking, a good option would be tampon printing. This is routinely used e.g. to apply the lettering on model railway rolling stock. Again, you need to etch a cliché first. For one offs, you could use a drill press as transfer press. You would also need to find some chunk of silicone rubber to make the tampon. All these options are too involved, though I will be watching this laser printing thing. Some day they may come out with a consumer version of it. Main sail with registration number painted in. So, in the end I resorted to hand-painting. I took out my old lettering stencils that hadn’t been used for decades and marked the lettering on the sail. I then used a short-haired 5/0 brush and white airbrushing acrylic paint. I had also experimented with a pen, but the brush allowed more control on the somewhat uneven surface of the sail. I painted the main strokes of the letters/numbers and then added the serifs. They will have rounded corners, but the lettering was touched up with the base colour of the sail to get sharp outside corners. Finally the sheen was equalized with a light touch of matt acrylic varnish. wefalck

When this structural work was completed, the plinth was treated with a mahagony stain. After a light rubbing down with steel wool, it was ready to be varnished, again in mahagony colour. A treatment with wood filler and shellac in several rounds would have been better, but with age one gets a bit lazy. Plinth and glass case joined. I had to interrupt the work on the glass here until after my summer vacations: I realised that I bought 3 mm brass angles (for 2 mm glass), but actually used 3 mm glass, which requires 4 mm angles to cover the edge joints. I won’t have time to buy the angles before going away. To be continued ...

Thanks for the kind comments ! Just a quick note in case someone is interested: this design is only possible with Plexiglas, as drilling through silicate-glass would be a bit tricky to say the least. In the past I used a design, where the glass tightly fits into a groove of about 6 mm depth formed by the baseboard and the frame and was not secured any further. In the image below I sketched the construction used here (left) and how I did it for silicate-glass (right). Cross-section of vitrine construction to be continued soon ... wefalck

I am not a natural fibre specialist, but when a bundle of fibres takes up humidity, it swells. As the mass of the fibre substance doesn't change, this means that, when it becomes thicker, it must become shorter. This effect is further aggravated in a laid rope, as you have more fibre length between two points. Try this out by making fast one of your ropes on one end and at the other end put a spring-balance (or just a spring) in between. Then you can measure the elongation and force excerted. Not sure, whether this is useful suggestion, but when your ship used wire rigging, you may want to resort to wire for the model too when you live in an environment with significant changes in humidity. wefalck

It is a method regularly used in archaeology. However, you need the bath, a transformer, Voltmeter etc. A lot of equipment for the occassional job. wefalck

Reading the FAQs section on their product Web-page it seems that the solution contains a reducing agent and some phosphates. Actually, the tea-leaves are also a reducing agent, which is why the solution become black (from iron(II)) - and they are free ... wefalck

On the subject of tempering: some time ago I bought an electrical hot-air soldering gun; the airflow temperature can be set from 100°C to 450°C; I found this very useful for tempering not too big metal parts as there is no risk of overheating. wefalck

Rust is iron turned into iron oxyhydroxide, which means that you lost metal. Not sure it is worth de-rusting files and drill bits, as their cutting edges are likely to have suffered. My method for antique tools is to soak them for a few days in used tea-leaves. Collect your tea-bags over a few days, rip them open and make a sort of slurry from them into which you immerse the iron parts. The biiter-tasting dark brownish stuff that comes out of the tea-leaves (which is why you take the bag out of your cup in time) is a collection of high-molecular weight organic acids that are good complexants for iron(III). They help to dissolve the iron oxyhydroxide and keep the iron in solution. In fact, the solution turns pitch black with time (you may want to keep the filtered solution as a nasty black stain for wood, btw). After a few days of immersion you take your iron parts out, rinse them thoroughly and then dry them quickly, e.g. with a hair-dryer to prevent them from rusting again. This process removes the rusted iron, but it doesn't bring back the metal, of course. So, a rusted cutting edge is lost forever. Some people also use Coca Cola (probably the best use for it), but the phosphoric acid in it converts the rust into iron phosphates, a form of iron that is sparingly soluble and quite stable. It is essentially the same process that is used in so-called 'rust converters' sold for mending rusting car bodies. For tools this is not particularly useful, as you will have a black crust sticking ferociously to the surface where the rust has been before. This crust is difficult to remove even by harsh wire-brushing. Apropos wire brushing: I would not use steel wire-brushes on cutting edges, as this may blunt the edge. wefalck

What's wrong with slack standing rigging ? In real life it would not be as tight as a tight-rope - it is a bit of a misconception we are used to in modelling. Rigging always sags a bit under its own weight, because you would pull out all fastenings or push the mast throught the keel, if you would try to tighten it, as we do it as modellers by aesthetic habit. The difficulty though is to get the slack into the right direction - downwards. wefalck