wefalck

Doors were low to keep the heat in the house and beds short, because people slept in the fetal position, also to loose less heat compared to sleeping with stretched out limbs.

Indeed, there are considerable regional differences today and were presumably in the past. I recall the sensation (hightened by the fact that it was a time of civil unrest) of walking through the streets of La Paz (Bolivia), a gringo towering above everyone, while only being just 180 cm tall - quite a difference to walking the streets of say Amsterdam, where I felt rather diminutive However, like in real life, not only the absolute height would be important for the scale impression, but also the proportions. While certainly there is a distribution of proportions across a given population, some peoples tend to have longer limbs and shorter bodies, while in others it is the inverse. The latter would appear smaller than the first group. Head length to body length ratios are also important, a big head making a person appear to be smaller. In this context it also interesting to compare artists' rendering with real life. There have been periods (e.g. during the 'gothic'), when people, particularly gentle-folks, were portrayed with a 1:12 ore more head:body ratio, while in real life it is more between 1:8 and 1:10. This reflected aesthetic concepts, as well as class distinctions. So the story turns around, as better fed gentle-folks in any population would grow taller than more deprived classes subject also to hard labour.

Good work as usual ! For the seizings I tend to use a clove hitch with half-hitches added as needed. To me this gives a more prototype appearance.

Is anyone aware of such a small CNC-mill/router that can be controlled from a Mac ? The guys that make the Shapeoko 3 also make a thingy called Nomad that seems to work with Macs, but I found it too big and pricey. Most small, cheapo machines only seem to made to work with Windows ...

In the days of pocket calculators (now almost gone) and smart phones scale conversions shouldn't be an issue. Simply take your calculator and divide the prototype measure (ideally in the same units as you will be using in model construction, e.g. millimetres or inches) and divide this by the scale you are working in, say 1/60. In this case divide everything by 60. If you are on inches and feet, unfortunately, the story is not so simple, unless you use 'thou(sands of an inch)' - converting into 1/16ths, 1/32nds, etc. needs one more calculation step. I agree, for those, who are not metric, a ruler might be simpler

There are various UK-based small manufacturers who offer white-metal figurines in O-scale suitable for the 'Victorian' period. Have a look at this trader's Web-site for a start: http://www.scalelink.co.uk/

Making served eye-splices is a challenge that has bugged me for years, particularly in smaller scales. Looking at your method, I was wondering, whether one could not serve first a short length, then form a 'false' splice by stiching the loose end two times through the standing part, set the splice with lacquer or glue, and then continue to serve the standing part. This would result in a less bulky splice, as it would be served over only once.

Nail varnish is a solution of cellulose nitrate. The same stuff, zapon, is used to protect metals, such as silver and brass, from tarnishing and can be bought in DiY stores cheaply. I have used it for decades to fix rigging, because it can be dissolved again with a drop of acetone and corrections made. Beware, today there are also nail varnishes based on acrylics. These cannot be dissolved again very easily.

Indeed, dafi made a lot of experiments with fly-tying thread for small scales ... Personally, I found the Veevus-brand from Denmark the best: http://veevus.com/. They have various useful colours, such as greys, tans, and of course black. Also they go down to 16/0, which is useful for making really small-scale ropes. Usual disclaimer: I do not have any business-relationship with the company other than as a customer. I got the stuff from various ebay-sources btw.

Crisp ...

Personally, I would follow the advice of the others and use fillers between the bullheads of the kit ... Solid hulls can have long-term problems, depending on what wood was used and how they were constructed. If you use a single log of some wood with prominent grain it may warp, depending how it was cut from the tree. A layered, bread-and-butter construction avoids this, but then you might as well use the bulkheads of the kit. In bread-and-butter construction with time the layers may also come apart and should be screwed together in addition to the glue. For stationary models, when you don't want to show the interior, I would always go for fillers between bulkheads. This makes a very solid and rigid construction and allows good fairing of the hull, if the fillers are softer than the bulkheads (but not too soft).

Pat, that looks like neat progress ! May I ask a counterproductive question ? Why were the davits made from white metal ? If they were brass, it would be indeed a lot easier to solder bit and pieces on. Normally, the davits would have a sort of short piece of tube at the end, in which an eye-bolt swivvels to which the block for the boat-haliard would have been shackled. The swivveling motion is needed so that the tackle is not being twisted as the davits are swung out. The stays would be attached to the top of the eye-bolt, rather than the davit itself. I have seen the cleats for the boat-haliard attached to the round davit by tight wire windings, just as cleats would be attached to shrouds with a thin line. That can be easily reproduced with say 0.05 mm copper wire. I did not examine very closely the images of your prototype, whether such solution would be correct in this particular case, but I think it would be appropriate for the period.

Ooops ... I would have probably re-enforced such masts with a steel wire of suitable diameter right away. If you are lucky, you might still be able to drop a wire in that just sticks out a bit over the fracture and lift the upper part over it, so that it serves as a locating pin before glueing the parts together again.

May be the changes in the plans reflect the changes the original may have seen over the years, while in preservation ? Wasn't she made fit for the sea again in 1976 ?

Very clever tool that little thing to find the centre or quarter a tapering spar. Have to remember this

Excellent work, as always. Like the 'iron'-work. Using an end-mill to drill obliquely into surfaces or into curved surfaces is a good practice I am also using often. One has to be sure, however, that it is an end-mill that cuts across the centre.

I think Sherline sort of developed their proprietary standards for a lot of things, such as T-slot sizes and spindle cones. However, they make variants of their accessories according to other standards, such as chucks with a 12x1 thread for the Unimat and 14x1 for other small machines. They also make spindle tooling with the cone for the WW watchmakers lathes. The key point too watch out for are the distances between holes/slots for fasteners that need to match the distance between T-slots of tables. Interestingly, while their lathes and mills are not bad at all, I found Proxxon rather poor in what they offer in terms of accessories, such as rotary tables for instance, and spindle tooling. I think they also have a proprietary spindle cone. At least the spindle does not take ES type collets, but something slightly different. While Sherline and Proxxon parts have a good finish in general, most things that come more or less directly from Chinese sources seem to need some finishing and adjusting treatment. If you don't mind to do this (like me) and have the necessary, you can a good starting point for a quality tool at a price for which you might not even get the materials in some countries, if you were to make it from scratch.

As to the Sherline motors: I liked them and they had a good price-performance ratio, so that I fitted two to my watchmakers lathe and the other to my historic milling machine. The older one I fitted around the year 2000 to the lathe and it is still running with its first set of carbon brushes, while the newer one developed problems after about 10 years (don't know how many hours it was actually running). Sherline asks around USD50 for a pair of simple pieces of compressed carbon with a sping attached (which would be also beyond the exemption levels for tax-free importation into the EU - I shopped around Europe, but no one seems to stock these spare parts). So I got some of the right size from a far-east source at a fraction of the price. However, the collector was eating the brushes away very fast, so that I had to dismantle the motor (for which I needed to buy an imperial size wrench) and found that the collector had lost several lamellae and the windings were cut - a total write-off. Right from the beginning this motor never seem to have been running as quietly as the other one that I have. I suspect that there was manufacturing problem with the collector as the root cause ...

For space reasons I tend to work on models for which the plan at the model-scale fits onto an A4-sheet. If needed, I clip the plans onto a cheap A4 drafting board (hardboard with clips) that I can toss around the workshop. The original plans would be on the computer anyway.

I think these questions cannot be answered categorically. Points to consider: - the glueing of styrene is rather a welding, so painted surfaces do not stick together - you have to able to carefully remove all the flash, ejector marks and sometime reshape parts, when the moulds have not been carefully aligned; this may be best done, when the part is detached from the sprue - when using enamel paints, there is no need for priming, as these paints usually slightly dissolve the styrene and therefore stick very well - the fewer layers of paint, the better; this includes primers - for a static model, that is not handled, I would carefully degrease the surface with dishwashing liquid and then even paint directly with acrylics (railway models are handled frequently and the railway modeller, therefore, would give you advice to the contrary) - the amount of paint coming out of a spray-can cannot be controlled very well and using these is better left to large surface areas, such as hulls - some parts are, indeed, easier to paint, when on the sprue, but this only works, when the area where the parts are attached can be hidden - notwithstanding the glueing issue, it sometimes better to assemble parts of the same colour first, as you may need to clean-up excess glue and fill-in seams; the paint may also hide seams - if possible, parts of different colour are better painted first and then assembled

I usually have success with either acetone or nitrocellulose lacquer thinner. For short lenghts, I may also roll the wire between two smooth pieces of hardwood until the lacquer peels off.

Can you risk this ?

I seem to have seen comments on the Internet that many of the machines where not thoroughly cleaned before assembly or burrs not removed carefully. Swarf or grinding dust in bearings and on load-bearing surfaces can cause havoc. Therefore, it seems to be good advice to dissamble any such machine completely, clean and degrease carefully before re-greasing/-oiling, assembly and adjustment. The advice to treat Chinese machinery as being in an 'advanced state of machining', rather than as a ready-to-run product seems to be a wise one. I never bought a complete machine, but only bits and pieces of accessories (e.g. chucks), and this advice seems to have been a good one there too.

Didn't go up in the building-log, did you discuss your plating arrangements somewhere ? BTW, I like your attention to detail !

If these additional axes are 'disturbing' the main x-y-z-axes, such as a column that can be inclined, or a head that can be rotated, you will have a heck of a time getting them aligned again, after you used this feature - and you have to check every time you are using the mill that nothing has moved ... such features are probably ok on Schaublin-quality machines, where there are also positive locks for the main positions, but on these little machines they are more of a nuisance. However, I have seen on the Internet people providing for positive locking using taper pins etc., which allows them to quickly align heads etc. A tilting table and a rotary table that can be mounted horizontally or vertically are more desirable additional axes.