wefalck

Pat, I work a lot with acrylics (Plexiglas™, I have an affinity for it as my father worked for a daughter company of Röhm GmbH, one of the major producers; he developed inter alia acrylic varnishes for tablets) and have the benefit of owning a complete copy of Röhm's technical manual for working with acrylics. The problem when turning, milling or drilling acrylics is that the material has a comparatively low heat conductivity. So the cutting energy cannot be dissipated quickly enough and the material heats up above the melting point. So you have to chose the right combination of feed-rate, cutting thickness and rpms. In practice the best strategy when turning is to reduce the cutting thickness per pass. The tools also need quite an acute cutting angle, as you would use for wood. A tool-bit for brass wouldn't work. The tools should, of course, also be very sharp. So, general purpose carbide turning bits wouldn't be a good choice, HSS is much better in this case. If you get the parameters right, the part should come out almost polished - I usually get a nice satin finish that is better for painting anyway. Turning down a 10 mm acrylic rod to 1.8 mm is a chore ... would you have access to acrylic cement somehow ? I am using Röhm's (now part of Evonik) Acrifix 192, which is essentially unpolymerised acrylic glass. It polymerises quickly when exposed to day-light and particularly UV light and then has the same mechanical and machining properties as acrylic glass. You could turn your brass ferrules a tad longer than needed and then fill them in with the cement. Once polymerised, you can take them back into the lathe, face them off neatly and then polish the face. For acrylic rods, have you tried architectural modelling supply houses ? Here I can get 2 mm rod.

Somehow the gallion appears to be too low above the waterline ... we have Marquardt (occasionaly) on this Forum: http://www.segelschiffsmodellbau.com/ and one could pose the question there.

I bought some of those eye make-up sponges quite a while ago, but never had an occasion to really use them. However, I have used their larger brothers a lot for domestic DIY purposes and they work very well, particularly with acrylics, where you don't have a lot of time to equalise out brush-strokes.

I am all for building machines and accessories myself - if they can do something a commercial product cannot do or cannot do with the desired precision. Wood has its (beautiful) uses, but makeing machine tools from it is one of its less desirable uses. When I saw the original post, I was thinking that there x-y-tables and drill-stands out there on the market in exactly the right dimensions that would cost just a bit more than the materials that go into such a home-grown machine. I would rather spend the time to tweak these into something reasonably precise - as one may need to do with these Chinese products.

... the original question concerned the 1812 practice

Actually, an interesting question to which I don't have the answer is, how the tarpaulin was tied down on men-of-war up to the early decades of the 19th century. From around the middle of the 19th century on, a system of metal or wooden clamps was used, behind which the tarpaulin was fixed with battens that were tightened with wedges. On transoceanic voyages on merchantment the battens were even nailed down. The coamings around the hatches on earlier men-of-war were to low for such a system. Another way is to have a fitted tarpaulin that is shaped like a box cover and that has eyelets in the vertical parts that correspond with small eyebolts screwed into the coamings through which a line would be reeved. Somehow, I have feeling that this is rather Victorian and beyond naval and yachting practice.

Not sure what 'quarters' are ... Anyway, whenever the weather allowed hatches at this period would have been covered with gratings in order to provide fresh air and light. In heavier weather, the hatches would be covered with tarpaulins battened down tightly over them.

I think that internally stropped blocks appeared around the middle of the 19th century and were certainly quite common in the last quarter of the 19th century. There were also blocks with external metal strops (used e.g. for catting anchors), but they were abandoned in favour of the interally stropped ones, because the metal axle is shorter in the latter, leading to less breakage. One could add to the nice drawings above, that the chocks would have had bronze inserts as bearings for the axels; similarly the wooden sheave would have had a bronze bushing. Internally stropped blocks may have had cast-iron sheaves, particularly when the running part was wire.

I gather, at this period and in yachting context, the blocks would have had an internal 'frame' or cage of wrought iron. The wooden shell is only there to keep the blocks from becoming entangled and shaving. Blocks with rope strops or external iron strops would be rather unusual on a yacht of the 1880s. What scale are you working in ? If you are referring to the 1/16 scale, as your 'current build' seems to say, then there is nothing to prevent you from reproducing the prototype practice. That saves all the worries of hooks or eyes becoming detached.

You don't say what scale you are working in. In general, kit-supplied rigging thread is not very suitable. I would look into making/getting a rope-walk to make your own rigging material. At smaller scales the very fly-tying yarn you use for your bottle-ships would be a good starting point. For other materials, there are a lot of suggestions here in the forum. Coming back to your actual question: in real life, the standing rigging would not look like drawn with a ruler, but would be sagging under its own weight, forming some sort of shallow catena. This is not so easy to reproduce in a model, it can turn out looking like sloppy workmanship. In general, the standing rigging shouldn't be used to pull masts etc. into position. The masts have to aligned properly all along. Prototype practice of course is different and the standing rigging may have been used to 'trim' the masts. On a model changing temperature and humidity may throw your mast and rigging out of 'trim' or worse, can even break a mast, if set too tight. They are not strings on a guitar. So, I would set the rigging just tight enough to look neat, nothing more.

Look at how a real wooden ship was constructed. This should give you some ideas. I suppose the false? plywood deck is going to be planked over ? So there would be waterways all around the deck in front of the frames/stanchions. The space between the stanchions would be filled by 'filling' pieces. Details of the construction would have to worked out for the period and origin of your prototype.

Made a fly-cutter for the mill over the weekend: I could have turned the blank on my lathe, but I was able to source some 6 mm-lathe blanks in the USA at a reasonable price, which saved a lot of shop-time. Worked on some skylights for SMS WESPE that were milled from a solid piece of Plexiglas/Perspex and it works like a charm - if sharpened properly.

Yep, have a set of them and also use them on the lathe ...

The carbon was 'lamp-black', i.e. the very fine sublimated combustion product from different types of (vegetable or animalic) oils. Lesser qualities - and would think these were used in the prototype, were also made from charring wood or bones (while ivory black sounds like a contradiction in terms, in fact it was made by charring ivory). Have a look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_black. In China and Japan ink for drawing and writing was/is prepared on the spot from rubbing ink-cakes in a shallwo vessel and then adding water together with gum arabicum as a binder. This would also be an option, if you don't like ready-made inks.

First a question: what's WOP ? There would be no problem applying thin washes of acrylics over say nitrocellulose-based wood primers/fillers. As said above, thin layers of dilute paint are the secret. In fact, I am using the paints that come pre-diluted for airbrush application. As to 'permanent' markers: my experience is that in the long-term they are not so permanent. The term 'permanent' mainly refers to the fact that they are not water-soluble. The ink or pigment used mostly is organic and hence eventually will break down under UV light. Striktly speaking 'india ink' is not an ink, which is a dye in a suitable solvent, but a very dilute suspension of colloidal carbon particles (soot). It is the carbon, the soot, that makes the ink so permanent. The carbon will not break down, like organic inks, under UV light. India ink should also work over nitrocellulose primers.

On the prototype, such fittings would have been bolted on. So why not use some suitable nails in pre-drilled holes ? I still would use some adhesive to first attach the parts and then pre-drill the holes. The additional nailing sorts out any differential movement from temperature-induced expansion.

I think some misconceptions on how planks are/should be running come from the fact that model-builders start from narrow straight stock. This is not what happened in real life. There are a few boundary conditions that determine the width and shape of each strake. They are partially structural and partially aesthetic: - You want a continuous strake running along the sheer - You want continuous wales that may or may not run more or less parallel to the sheer - You want, if at all possible the same number of strakes all along the hull The latter condition is not so easy to meet, particularly in full-bodied ships with sharp waterlines. Here the circumference of the hull will change a lot from bow to stern. You can accomodate this by a varying plank width, but you may not have trees wide enough and bending planks across the width is very difficult. So you may end up with lost strakes etc. The keel may be the only straight element in the whole hull. Now in order to bring the garbord down to the keel, you will have to bend and twist it. In addition, while the lower edge may be straight, but the upper edge certainly cannot be straight, so that you can meet the last bullet point above. In essence, you may have a double curved plank that is bended and twisted in itself. Trying to fit a straight narrow plank as garbord will result in the above mentioned problem that its end will end up somewhere half up the stem or stern. You would need to develop a cardboard template for the garboard, and possibly a couple of planks above it, in order to cut a plank from a wider piece of wood. Starting planking in sections, top-down, bottom-up and perhaps from the wales up and down is the solution to the conditions mentioned in the first two bullet points. BTW many modellers (including myself in my earlier years) tend to think of the bulwark as part of the hull. However, from a structural point of view it is not. Structurally on ships the hull ends at the sheer plank and is closed with the deck. The bulwark normally does not have a structural function and is somewhat expendable (we have all read about bulwarks being knocked off in a gale). In (open) boats the situation is different, of course.

Does this question pertain to USS CONSTITUTION ?

The trouble with all these 'cancer' studies is that it extremely difficult to eliminate so-called 'confounding' factors. We never know the whole exposure history of the individuals concerned, they may have been smokers, they may have had other exposure histories, there may be a mix of substances, etc. etc. So it is almost impossible to pin down a single substance as cause.

I found that wifes are far more careless when using potentially dangerous chemicals such as bleach ... and resistant to advice

What about e.g. (machine)gun barrels ? There are dozens, if not hundreds of parts that are round and will come out much crisper, when actually machined. I wouldn't be able to live without a lathe (anymore) regardless what kind of models I would build ...

This could be an inherent design problem with these 'continuous' machines. Perhaps you can unwind the individual threads and then gather several unwound threads as a strand. On a machine with fixed distances between both heads, you would, of course, run multiple threads as one line, zig-zaging backwards and forwards between the heads, which automaticlly puts the same tension on all strands.

I had seen this before and it is quite amazing. For the parts of a vessel that are permanently under water such complicated joints with many angles and corners may be not such a good proposition, as there would be many places prone to attack by rot. On the prototype the joints would have been tarred before assembly, which would be not so easy to do successfully with the complicated patterns. Besides, such joint are very costly to make, requiring a lot of fitting ...

Even when working on platic kits, you may still need a lathe ...

You don't say what finished sizes of 'ropes' you want to arrive at, but I see that you are working in a 1/90 scale. This may require some rather thin ropes in places. For these you may want to look into 'fly-tying thread' as used by the fly-fishing fraternity. They are man-made fibres. My preferred brand, due to sizes and colours available, is Veevus from Denmark. You can fish such threads in the wellknown bay.