wefalck
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Everything posted by wefalck
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As these protrusion serve to preven the eyes of the topping-lifts from slipping inward, they should be 90° off-set compared to the direction of pull of these. -
I wholeheartedly agree that for an iron or steel ship metal (brass, copper) or some hard plastic (bakelite paper) is the material to go for. It best represents the metal surfaces. I found that thin sheet metal can sawed more easily with the saw-blade in reverse, at least for fretsaws. I haven't tried this with circular saws. In this way there is less a tendency to hook do to uneven manual feed. Nice metalwork on forecastle, btw. !
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My material of choice is a fast-drying solvent-based varnish that is sold over here in Europe as zapon-lacquer. In composition it is rather similar to solvent-based nail-varnish. Apart being fast-drying, i.e. within minutes, it has the advantage that you can undo any knots with a drop of solvent (acetone) should the need arise.
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One possibility to duplicate parts, such as the shell is to use a shaped turning bit. This can be ground from a piece of old hacksaw-blade. You would need a bit of a clearing angle, but no top-rake for brass. One would rough out the shape with normal turning tools and just give the part the final shape with the shaped bit. Coming on nicely, the model !
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Screw it well down, the base for the 3-pounder-QF - according to the video, when they first tried it out, it flew off the boat taking the crew with it ...
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Small bench-lathes typically had an external spindle cone in front of the spindle thread. The chucks or the back-plates then had a matching internal cone. I think your spindle nose is too short to add this feature in retrospect. When used with collets, the spindle-thread was usually covered with a brass ferrule as protection. Small watchmaking lathes only have internal spindle cones (as used for collets) and the chucks are mounted on arbors that have the same body as the collets (and are pulled in with a draw-tube). While this is too weak for heavy work, it gives the best concentricity for interchangeable chucks.
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I recently became aware of a YouTube-video that tells the story of the ships/boats on Lake Tanganjika: The images used are those that you showed in the first post. Any progress on the model?
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We shouldn't be too hard on the 'old masters', such as Boudriot or Marquardt, because they wrote their books at a time, when research was much more involved and difficult as it is often today. Today, we have a lot of resources at our fingertips, which they didn't have. Just a few days ago I edited a manuscript of Marquardt that will posthumously published in the German LOGBUCH and found several (small) errors through a quick Internet-search ... I suppose there is also a cultural difference between countries with respect how such details were treated. In general, the French seem to be much more prescriptive, while the Americans and Brits are more pragmatic and gave individual yards more lee-way. As probably no real practical examples survived, we have to rely on descriptions, textbooks and the likes, that describe how things should have been not how they have been in reality.
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You are absolutely right, that a threaded mount does not give concentricity, which is why there is usually some cone onto which a part is pulled with the thread. Or, on full-size lathes you mount an oversize 'back-plate', which then is turned to the exact size of a recess in the back of a chuck and which provides the register for it. However, this is not crucial for a 4-jaw-chuck, because you would set with the help of an indicator whatever feature (hole, boss, etc.) you want to run true. So, such chuck technically speaking does not need to run perfectly true. On the other hand it can be a bit irritating, when the body of the chuck does not run true ...
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The flag came out nicely indeed. If the glue is not too stiff, I would round out the sharp diagonal creases somewhat to give the flag a bit more volume. If there is no wind, the diagonal crease from the upper corner would hang down parallel to the flagg-staff, rather than sticking out at 45°. Conversely, if it sticks out at an angle, then because some wind is caught in it, billowing it out ...
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I agree that this is a very nice rendering of these straps ... but I don't like them as such, they look not very ship-shape, more like securing a load on a commercial lorry ...
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If Frankenstein made a bandsaw ...
wefalck replied to bruce d's topic in Modeling tools and Workshop Equipment
It's quite amazing what versatile machines were made in the past - now we have make do with simple, boring ones. OK, today we other methods to cut such compound curves. -
Richard, I think you were referring to the 'gallery' along the rails of Green Park at Piccadilly. I haven't been to London in summer for ages, but I think it still exists - we usually pop over from Paris for a pre-Christmas (shopping-)trip and to see friends, unless I have some business in the UK during the year. The last trip was atually just before the 'lock-down' in 2020 to visit the Model & Engineering Exhibition at Alexandra Palace - not quite the same anymore as it was in earlier decades. My colleagues in Nottingham (where I spent four years) used to say that the town-planners of the 1960s/70s did more damage to the British inner cities than the Luftwaffe. Radiating from the Docklands the whole of eastern London up to the old City changed its appearance, where there were still WW2 craters and no-go areas for tourists in the 1970s its all glass, concrete and steel now ... but we shouldn't dilute this building log with such nostalgic ranting 😉
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Thanks for your kind word about by engineering and photographic endeavours! I haven't gone back to Speakers' Corner in decades, but have the feeling that it is not as original as it was (or appeared to me/us) back in those days. I was there as a teenager and wish I had then the photographic experience and equipment I have now. A lot of picturesque aspects of London, such as the markets (Billingsgate, Covent Garden, Smithfield, etc.) have disappeared. I wish I had taken more pictures then (but film was expensive). Back in the 1970s and 1980s London's Clerkenwell Rd. (east of Farringdon) still was a paradise for precision engineering supply needs. I remember visiting the last watchmaking suppliers in around 1989 (Shorts Bros.), shortly before they threw the towel. And there were lots of model shops all over town, plus Model Boats down in Greenwich ...
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The CHARLES W. MORGAN should have had such structure, so perhaps contacting Mystic Seaport might help? On the other hand, the stoves/baking oven on ordinary warships must have been very busy at times and I don't recall having seen such structure under their bottoms in contemporary drawings. There would be some sort of iron drip-tray around them to prevent the surrounding deck from becoming soiled.
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I prefer ball-cranks over handwheels, but didn't actually make any myself, because I found a source for small ones. However, I made quite a few ball-handles. Here is my procedure for them (you have to scroll about half-way down the page): https://www.maritima-et-mechanika.org/tools/micromill/micromill.html. I should add, that I made myself a ball-turning attachment about 15 years ago, which greatly facilitates such operations. The worst are those turning sleeves on the handles of crank-wheels, no feel for fine machining ...
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Indeed, that's what I meant. It is normal, that the distance between the davits is smaller than the length of the boats, because such heavy boats have to be suspended from their backbone, the keel, rather than the stem- and stern-posts. This procedure of swinging the boats first backward and then outward was standard procedure, described in instruction manuals of the time.
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Nice machining, as always 👍🏻 Again, I am surprised that Stuart make you turn the handwheels from stock, rather than supplying cast pieces - perhaps a question of cost. Personally, I am a great fan of ball-handles and similar - not only for aesthetic reasons, but also for reasons of comfortable handling. For my watchmakers lathe-project I made quite quite a few of them myself.
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Cover or not cover certainly depends on the kind of weather/climate encountered. As noted above, you want to keep the wood humid in order keep the boats serviceable at any moment. On the other hand excessive water in the boats (although there would be a draining plug in the bottom - cf. the well-know sea shanty) could lead to rot, particularly in a freshwater environment. Conversely, a hot and dry semi-tropical climate would lead to bleaching and cracking of the wood and any paint on it. So in more extreme climates you may need to protect the boats. In the first pictures of USS TENNESSEE shown above, you can see the spar (minus the bolsters) I mentioned earlier. In fact, on rigged ships, these spars may have doubled as reserve-spars. If I understand the topology of USS CAIRO correctly, than the davits would need to be turned in order to swing out the boats. You probably would need stays to steady the davits, leading from a horizontal eybolt in their tops to somewhere on the ship. There may be also a stay between the the davits, which helps to steady them in the secured position and to co-ordinate their movement, when swinging out the boats. Sometimes a number of knotted ropes werer hung from them to allow the crew to descend more easily into the boats. When the tarpaulin was on, they would be coiled and tied together.
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Sometimes davits or anchor-cranes had a ringbolt in them or they stropped a rope with an eye-splice around them into which the hook was hooked and the tackle set taught - on a well-kept ship nothing dangles or bangs. The ring reaching up through the tarpaulin was not my idea, but it was common practice as one can see on old photographs. The tarpaulin had to slots reaching half-way across the boat so that you could remove it wihout having to unhook the tackles (which would have been impossible anyway with the boat hanging on them). The slots were closed with an overlapping piece and laced up like a boot. There is also no interest in keeping the boat completely dry. To the contrary, every now and than a couple of buckets of water were spread in them to keep the wood humid, otherwise it would shrink and the seams would open, making it leaking initially while in use. The tarpaulin was just there to keep dirt and excessive salt out and the equipment in or protected.
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I can echo this ... I don't know anything re. the practices in the USN and in particular their brown-water practices. However, in other navies, boats were often stored hanging from the davits, rather than on skids. There would be a sort of spar connecting the two davits that had a couple of soft bolsters attached around them against which the boats rested. The boats were pulled against these bolsters using flat straps (braided fancywork or canvas strips) going cross-wise from the top of the davit to the spar. The liftign tackles were hooked into chain slings that consisted of two parts: a vertical one to take the actual load and a +/- horizontal one to the stem- resp. stern-post to prevent the longitudinal swinging. There may have been some sort of long chain-link penetrating the tarpaulin covering the boat.
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Yes, that is a nice Web-site. I knew it, because I wanted to identify a working model of a vertical mill I have and was hoping to find it there.
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Nice machining, as always. This long hole through the cross-slide would have absolutely frightened me - it can easily deflect ... OK, this is only a model, but two things wondered me about the cross-slide, that there don't seem to be a provision for a gib-strip and that there is no spindle-nut, but the thread is cut directly into the meat of the saddle.
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I am impressed by both, your impeccable workmanship (as usual) and your perseverance in those difficult times.
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