wefalck

This day wasn't lost ... learned something: I didn't know about these French 'tremblers' as a specific woodworking challenge. The 'string'-steadies to keep whipping movements under control are particularly interesting and something to remember ! Thanks for bringing this to our attention !

The key-point for working on long parts in a lathe (either 'proper' or makeshift with e.g. a power-drill) is to have a fixed steady. The fixed steadies on metal lathes aren't really suitable, as their bearing would cut into wood. You can use, however, a style of steady that has gone out of fashion these days. Take a piece of plywood or MDF, think about a way of clamping it upright to your lathe bed (or work-table, if you use a make-shift arrangement) and drill a hole into it a centre-height. The diameter of the hole should be larger than the diameter of the parts you wan to turn. No you make two pieces of MDF or even hard card-board with V-notches and two paralle notches in them. These V-notches have to be placed exactly at centreline. With two screws and washers you can fix these 'jaws' over each other at the upright steady so that they jam the piece being turned (without realling jamming it). Sorry, I don't have a picture to illustrate this.

Interesting, didn't see this kind of fuse before. The ones use over here in Europe during that period were hollow wooden cones that screwed into the shells. The cone was perforated at intervals and a fuse like you see today on fireworks was reefed through one of the holes and led to the outside. The lower the hole one used, the longer the fuse would burn. It was ignited by the charge of the gun/mortar.

Preiser HO figures are the best on the market I think. As noted, they are nominally 1/87 scale, but the difference in height to 1/96 scale is wiith the variation of human height. Preiser also does various unpainted sets that are a good starting point for some 'surgery', i.e. conversions. Here is an example for what I did with some mid to late 20th century figures: http://www.maritima-et-mechanika.org/maritime/models/botter/botter.html#Creating_the_Staffage

Work on the ventilators continued. The ventilators for the officers' mess, which included also a Venturi-suction ventilator, where produced in the same way, but are a lot smaller with the head only 2.9 mm high and the shaft having a diameter of 1.3 mm. Milling one of the ventilators for the officers’ mess All ventilators would be taken down, when the 'battle ready' alarm would be given. To this end they are mounted on sockets that would be closed with a lid or plug. This socket was turned from Plexiglas and will be glued onto the deck. It will be painted black together with the deck, while the white ventilator with black interiors will be put into place at the final assembly of the model. Ventilators for the officers’ mess To be continued soon ...

Looks like a good, solid tool the clamp !

Impressive ...

The question was about fly-tying tools - otherwise I use a lot of surgical and dental instruments, tiny crochet hooks (they don't seem to make really small ones anymore - raid the sewing basket of an old aunt or so), etc. - I use fly-tying thread to make my own rope. Otherwise, I have not used any specific tools from this trade. The main reason is that they seem to be rather pricey, not to say overpriced for what they are. I can imagine that the the different types of 'third hand', or 'fly-tying vice' in their parlance, could come handy. But with price tags in the range of hundreds of USD or EUR, they are out of question.

Haven't seen this article or the model, but sewing sails at a 1/96 scale is likely to look grossly overscale: neither the fabric will be fine enough nor the sewing thread. Many decades ago, when I was a teenager, I wasn't happy with the kit-supplied vacuum-formed plastic sails. I had the idea of using them as mold to make my own. I failed then, not having access to suitable materials. I tried to use thin paper and paper-glue. With silk-span or thin paper and acrylic varnish one probably has a better chance - at least it works for flat sails.

Would love to have one, but they are extremely expensive these days. Not sure I have seen a geniune Holtzapffel in live action, but I think I have seen a Lienhard (in the watchmaking museum La-Chaux-de-Fond) and a Pittler (in the technical museum Berlin). Sadly, with CNC-machines ornamental turning has become a simple matter of coding, not cutting and selection of plates, playing with settings, etc.

Pat, some of these pins are excentric ... the holes in the ceramic soldering plate have a diameter of 1.3 mm and the pins have 2 mm diameter. I turned the 1.3 mm part onto the 2 mm pins using the above excentric chuck and sawed a screw-slot into them. I now can turn them with a screw-driver to jam the part. The pins are aluminium, so that the solder does not stick. I had the 2 mm aluminium wire to hand, but say a 3 mm diameter would give you a wider clamping range. You can do the excentric turning in an ordinary 3-jaw-chuck by putting a suitable shim under one of the jaws, btw.

And the show goes on ... The nascent ventilator was then transfered to the micro-mill for further machining. The mill had been set-up with the dividing head carefully aligned with the milling spindle using a round piece of cemented carbide. Aligning the milling spindles It was also fitted with the geared dividing attachment. The first machining step was to mill out the cowl, starting from the pre-drilled hole. Milling out the cowl In the next step the sides were milled flat. Finally, the vertical back of the cowl was milled round using the geared dividing attachment. Round milling the cowl back The top curve was ground on free-hand using a diamond wheel on the micro-sanding machine. The top cover was fashioned from a piece of thin copper foil soldered on. The excess was milled off in the same set-up as previously. Shaping the back of the cowl on the grinder Soldering on the top of the cowl The boiler-room ventilators are sitting on a base that is square and then tapers into the round of the shaft. This part was milled and turned from Plexiglas, so that it can be cemented to the boiler-room skylight. Finished ventilator and base This base will be painted white together with the boiler-room skylight, while the ventilator itself will be painted buff. This separation into two parts will give a clean separation between the colours. By then I will also have to try to find out, whether the inside of the ventilators was red or buff. Boiler-room ventlators on the boiler-room skylight The handles for turning the ventilators are still missing, but I will drill the respective holes on all ventilators in one go, so that I only need to set up the milling machine once for this. There is a dozen more ventilators to come, all of them significantly smaller than these two. To be continued soon ...

Actually no, it is the cover for a vertical boiler of an 1860s steam-tug: More details here: http://www.maritima-et-mechanika.org/maritime/models/steinhaus/steinhaustug.html

They are inherently more difficult to manufacture with high precision (the V-shaped jaw has to be very precisely aligned) and the jaws cannot be easily reconditioned. In addition, their use is limited to excentric turning, which occurs only in particular industries and application. So, an independent 4-jaw-chuck is more versatile and cheaper to make. Apart from armature-turning, ornamental or guilloche-lathes usually are equipped with such chucks. However, n the age of CNC-mills there is no need for ornamental and gouilloche-lathes anymore.

Well, as a geologist it would rather say: pumice is formed when a gas-rich lava is cooled down rapidly, so that the gas-bubbles that form, when the lava rises in the vulcano, cannot escape. Rapid cooling happens, for instance, when the lava erupts below sea-level or runs into the sea. The specific density is less than 1 g per cubic centimetre, so that pumice floats. Classical places for this in Europe are the Stromboli in Italy or the Greek volcanic island Santorini. Ladies are probably more familiar with the material, as it is used in form of little block to smooth heels. I found that with the pumice method one can quite well with the shine and the depth of the lustre. Difficult to photograph, but this is an example of a mahogany companion-way (1:60 scale) I did some 30 years ago:

If you want to have that deep, shiny, polished look, then shellac applied as French Polish is the thing to go for. Have done quite a few squaremetres in that way. In Germany we have the Clou product range, which is excellent. Not sure whether they export to other countries, as the French do with their expensive 'Luberon' range. The Clou sanding filler is actually a filled nitrocellulose lacquer, not in the resinous excretions of Kerria lacca (a kind of plant-living louse) dissolved in alcohol, i.e. shellac. On furniture surfaces I apply shellac with a bud, a piece of discarded (washed!) cotton underwear that is stuffed with cotton wool. When applying the actual final polish, you put stroke next to stroke with the saturated bud, and fast. Otherwise, you will get streaks and the bud will stick, destroying your previously built-up polish. Before commercial sanding sealer became available, the cabinet makers spread pumice powder on the wood and rubbed this in with shellac. The pumic acted as both, as sanding compound and filler. After this the actual shellac polish was applied. Cabinet makers, or rather the polishers, who were as special trade, made their own shellac polish from shellac and alcohol - which is why many of them seem to have been alcoholics - because in between they took a sip from the bottle (without shellac). Some of them also became blind, because of the impure ethanol that was used. For small parts, where you can't apply the polish in the usual way, I apply the shellac by brush and when dry, I rub it down with pumice powder that I pick up with a moist finger or cotton-stick. This removes all brush-strokes and thins down the layer. If it has to be shiny, I then burnish the surface with a dry cotton-stick. BTW, the above Clou sanding sealer in itself makes a good surface treatment, particularly for harder woods. I apply it with a brush and then rub it down with steel-wool. Gives a nice smooth satin finish, which is hard-wearing. I treated the beech work-surfaces on which my machines are set up in this way - but not my work-table, because there I may be handling with solvents that could mess up the table.

Thanks, gentlemen. Two-jay-chucks are/were very common in the armature turning business to hold castings of valves etc. for machining. This one is the only one for a watchmakers lathe that I ever came across. It is certainly shop made, but very well. In principle an independent four-jaw-chuck can be used for the same purpose, but it is rather tedious to set up. I found it useful for turning cranks, excentrics, and the likes. If you need only a little 'throw' it is sometimes easier to just slip a shim under one of the jaws of a three-jaw-chuck

I began to work now on the various ventilators. These are not of the usual form, but have rectangular cowl. I first drew a layout for the cowl in order to photo-etch them, but then thought the assembly of these two or three millimeter high cowls would be too fiddly. Images showing different types of ventilators on board of a WESPE-class gun-boat As the ventilator-shaft would have to be turned anyway, I decided to machine the vents from the solid. Photo-etching mask for ventilator cowls The first attempt was in Plexiglas, because it is easy to machine and the cover part from polystyrine foil could be easily cemented on without traces using dichloromethane. It turned out that at thin wall thickness required, Plexiglas would be too brittle and delicate. Setting up rectangular material in the 4-jaw-chuck Turning the ventilator shaft Drilling out the cowl For the second attempt I used brass. While in the case of Plexiglas I began with a rectangular piece held appropriately in the independent 4-jaw-chuck, I started now with a round brass bar held in the excentric 2-jaw-chuck. If I did not have such an exotic chuck, I could have started off with a larger diamter brass bar and milled away the excess. Setting up a brass rod in an excentric 2-jaw chuck As a first step the ventilator-shaft was turned to size, leaving also the two re-enforcement rings. The piece was then turned around and taken into a collet of the appropriate diameter to drill out the shaft to such a depth that the bottom would not be visible. Turning the re-enforcement rings Drilling out the cowls To be continued soon ...

Just another thought: wouldn't these life-boats on a lake-steamer normally be protected by a tarpaulin-cover ? So perhaps you make four solid hulls according to the lines plan and cover these in thin strips of wood to simulate the clinker planking and the just put the tarpaulin over them. That saves you doing all the details of a wooden open boat. Or perhaps to do one to 'show off', namely the one that would be ready for emergency lowering, while showing the others covered ? I have nevera actually laminated a hull, but if you did it over a positive form, it would not involve too much material.

Brass thumbscrews seem to be difficult to come by on ebay indeed, but you can get them quite cheap in steel: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_odkw=thumbscrew+M3&_sop=15&_osacat=0&_from=R40&_trksid=m570.l1313&_nkw=thumbscrew+M3&_sacat=0 Luckily I have a domestic source here in Paris , which is quite unique actually.

It is a bit on the large side for home-application, but you could create two clinkered solid half-hulls and then take copies of it by thermoforming or resin-lamination, if you want to forgo the joy of making real clinker-boats ...

I could add to the list of references: BEAUDOUIN, F. (1975): Bateaux des côtes de France.- 394 p., Grenoble (Editions des 4 Seigneurs). Unfortunately, I don't have access to my copy at the moment and cannot check, how useful it would be for the region/boats in question. BTW, the Musée de la Marine in Paris is closed for refurbishment. Not sure what is in their archives, but certainly they had no models etc. on show of relevant boats. If they have something, it may come from the collection Admiral Pâris started.

It is the aluminium-profile below. Found it at some stage in the basement of my parent's home and have no idea where it came from and what it was meant for. The overall width is 25,4 mm, i.e. 1". I used it to make various jigs and little tools, where one would need T-nuts to hold down things - the T-slot is just the right size for M3 screws with hexagonal heads as T-bolts. For instance the little gadget below screws to the T-slot of the cross-slide table of my watchmakers lathe and allows to cut to length small profiles etc. The material is held down by the black clamps.

I found that I carry a good pocket calculator around with me most of the time: my iPhone It does everything you likely ever need, including square roots and sinus and cosinus.

I gather a metal base is there for the weight, but a tile on some wooden base-bord would be another option. I have a bunch of aluminium T-rails (one could use also curtain rails) and was thinking of utilisising them for exactly that purpose.