wefalck

In the first post FLYING FISH was mentioned. She was a three-masted ship, while Underhill mentions these vertical jack-stays some distance away from the 'jigger-mast' only for some four-masted barques(?). As the diameters of the iron masts increased it the traditional rigging of the spanker/driver with hoops became impractical and vertical jack-stays were rigged along the mast. The above jack-stays with ratlines provided access to this arrangement. As these jack-stays were only there to support men, they were probably shackled to mast-top and set taught in an eye-bolt/lug on deck either with a bottle-screw or lashings.

I am not into aircraft, but seeing those engine kits, I have been tempted for a long time to put one into a model of those speedboats that were popular in the 1920 and that used marinised surplus aircraft engines. Building a model of the smallest Dornier flying boats, a LIBELLE, has also been on my temptation list. They used inter alia Siemens Halske sh4 and sh5 engines as well as British radial engines.

Could be, like the solid soldering irons that one kept on a gas-cooker or similar. However, I have been more thinking in terms of the battery-operated hand-held gadgets for sealing plastic bags. They look a bit like a stapler, you press the ends together and the heating-wires are turned on, while you move the thing along the bag. I am thinking of prongs with a flat resistance-wire (as used in styrofoam cutters) inlay. I may have some suitable flat wire that I bought for a different purpose. Could be very simple and operated from a transformer with a foot-switch, so almost no moving parts - think of a glorified clothes-peg with very narrow tips. Perhaps I shouldn't have said this, but rather ran and patented the idea ...

On static grass seeding: when Faller or Noch (don't remember who) first came onto the market with these grass flocks in the early 1960s (before that it was dyed sawdust), they sold for it application PE bottles. When I was into railway modelling in my teens, I have never been very successful with them, but at that time the fibres were sticking too much to each other or I put too much into the bottle.

These are actually cutting tweezers from the watchmakers' arsenal. They are used for cutting watch-springs and such. I have had a pair for some 30 years now, bought from a watchmaking supply house. I use them all the time to cut fine wires and other thin hard materials, particularly when a close cut is needed, as the outside is flush. As the two cutting faces close on each other, but do not pass each other in a shearing motion, you cannot cut soft materials, such as threads. For this I also use Castrovejo-type micro-scissors, as used in eye-surgery. Over the past couple of decades hobby-suppliers have discovered these tools, but they may be buying industry 'seconds', so one cannot be sure of the quality. There are also traders (ebay et al.) who supply such tools that have not passed the quality requirements of brands and that can be a good deal (no hobby mark-up ...). The original question made me think and perhaps it would be possible to design some kind of heated tweezers, that would allow to fuse polyester thread to form eyes and such without having to make (fake-)splices (which are a challenge with very thin 'ropes'. The tweezer would need to have grooves in the end to shape the 'splice' without squashing the thread ...

It would be interesting to know what insurers said about this and when. There may be also records of cases in front of the various maritime boards that could indicate from when on navigation lights were use and from when on they became compulsory - ploughing through such records would be tedious though. Everything mechanical or that moves on a ship and that is exposed to the elements is prone to get stuck sooner or later. It will also require extra maintenance. I have never seen any gimballing or simialr device on ship's navigation lights. Their way of fixture and hoisting was as simple as possible. For cabin lights the situation is different. It seems that petroleum lamps were often suspended in cardanic frames.

Also keep the old masters' rule in mind: fat over lean - meaning it is ok to apply oils or enamels (provided the solvents are compatible) over acrylics, but not the other way around. The old masters started off with egg-tempera and finished in oil. The reason is that 'lean' (or hydrophilic) paints do not stick very well or at all to 'fat' (or lipophilic) oils/enamels.

I don't want to add to thread-drift, but I am currently earning my living in trying to put reality checks onto the policy-making. This means that I am working on possible solutions to obtain all the raw materials needed for the policy-driven electrification of our societies, in particular battery raw materials. We will be facing serious shortages and geopolitically motivated curtailing because the processing capacities for e.g. lithium and rare earth elements are almost 100% located in China ... And then, what we do in Europe and North America may make us feel good, but all those emerging economies around the world will have to rely for a long time on internal combustion engines - not the least because in countries where there is barely enough generating and distribution capacity for domestic consumption, there will be no capacity for electric cars in the decades to come. However, I am here to relax and enjoy and not to be caught up by my professional concerns and worries 🤨

Acrylics seem to dry very fast, but in reality it can take days or weeks for them to fully harden. However, they are normally not as hard as the enamels, say Humbrol. So, if you anticipate to have to remove/correct any washes, this may be indeed an issue. On the other hand, one element of the hardening process of acrylics is that residual water in between the crosslinking molecules is slowly diffusing out, so that would be prevented by varnish, particular if it is an enamel-based varnish and not an acrylic varnish. Watercolour paints do not dry waterproof, so any attempts to apply more 'weathering' would dissolve the previously applied paint. Sometimes people call gouache also 'watercolour' because the solvent is water - in this case the paint dries upt more or less waterproof. Personally, I got quite used to do washes with acrylics. You can build up layer upon layer quite quickly, so you can approach the desired effect gradually. Of course, if you don't like the effect in the end, that's not so good news. Having said that, I sometimes do apply intermediate layers of acrylic varnish to give me a bit more leeway, when I think I need to correct. Matt or satin acrylics have a slightly rough surface obviously and even fresh washes do not come off completely. Here the varnish helps. Plastic- and figure-modellers these days seem to be quite fond of these intermediate or separating layers of varnish, but I think even when applied with an airbrush, there is a risk of flooding details or loosing crisp edges, so I rather try to avoid this.

BTW, I think the drawplates for wires have a slight chamfer at the small side to prevent the wire becoming marred or cut, when not drawn 100% perpendicular through the plate. The drawplates for dowels obviously don't have such chamfers, as it is the sharp edge of the hole that cuts.

Indeed, a nice paint-job. I like these rough thick layers of paint on the inside of the boat, real workboat-like 👍🏻 Why do you say that acrylics would need to be 'sealed'? The enamel paint surface would be slightly water-repellent, which is why you need the detergent. Acrylic paint surfaces are more hydrophilic, at least the satin and matt ones. You can work on them without detergent. I actually used watercolours straight from my watercolour-painting box, the solid ones, but then I am working in small scales.

I have an A3 one and matching heavy steel-ruler for general paper cutting duties. On the bench, I use a small A5 size one, which is easier move around, and a also a heavy glass plate. There is a trade-off between the soft, selfhealing mats that are nice to the cutters/scalpels and the more precise cutting without distortion on the glass-plate, but which is dulling the blades quickly. Wood is ok for chopping operations, but the woodgrain can divert you blade when making longer through-cuts.

Jewellers' draw-plates technically are a different animal from those draw-plates for wood: they don't cut the wire, but flow-form it - that's why you have problems with materials that don't 'flow', such as wood, you just squash it. I am wondering how long the draw-plates for wood will last, when using them on bamboo. I gather it depends on which part of the bamboo-stalk they are used, because one reason why bamboo is so hard and stiff is, that the cells contain silicium dioxide (meaning quartz or glass), a mineral harder than many steels. Depending on the hardness of the plate, it may wear considerably.

0.8 mm square copper wire indeed seems to be the smallest square wire commercially available. A short while ago I was able to buy a miniature jewellery rolling mill. It is actually meant for enlarging wedding rings and such, but I will convert it for rolling (soft) round wire into tiny square, rectangular or half-round wire. CuNi-wire is available in a wide variety of dimensions as flat wire - it is being used in heating elements. A while ago I got a good selection of old stock from ebay.

Personally, I would have turned this from the solid, with apropriately thinned out edges ...

Thanks again, gentlemen, for your praise ! @Keith Black: A Preiser set of unpainted figures, in N-scale, will be the starting point for making the crew. Lots of carving, sculpting and micro-surgery, I expect. @shipmodel: I had been toying with the idea of using such monofilament, but I don't like its sort of light translucency (which would require painting) and I am not sure, whether simulating chain by double-twisting the material would work with this material. Perhaps I should give it a try with thermosetting the twists with my hot-air gun.

For those shields you could use a segment of a ring of paper, sheet-metal or styrene. It’s the surface of a truncated cone and you will have to calculate the necessary radii.

… those to the uninitiated rather unspectacular details consume indeed a lot of time 👍

Thank you very much, gentlemen, for your appreciation ! ********************************************************** Installing the ship’s boats 3 The installation was movd further to completion by tidying up the loose ends and producing the bunts for runners of the boat tackles. The runners are about five times the distance between the head of the davits and the waterline long, plus some extra for handling. However, as the rope is slightly overscale the runners were cut a bit on the short side in order to make the bunts not too bulky. The actual runners were cut above the cleats and the bunts were formed over two clothes pins driven into a piece of wood and have a loop pulled out with which they can be hung over their respective cleat. Note that the runners for the ‘ready’ boat are not arranged in bunts but in coils, ready to be thrown loose so as to allow the boat being lowered quickly e.g. in a case of man-over-board. Again, working from the inside out, the next items to go on were the stays for the davits. Luckily, the stays are drawn in the lithographs so that their points of fixation are known. I had to deviate a bit from those drawings, as they pertain to the longer, turning davits for the boats stored on rack, which belong to a slightly later period. The stays are supposed to keep the davits aligned, rather than helping to swing them around. It was a bit of a trial-and-error procedure, before I came up with a protocol for making miniature fake chains of exactly the right length and with loops at both ends. The chains would have been shackled into ring-bolts at the head of the davit. No way of making shackles in this scale, so I just tied the fake chains to ring-bolts with fly-tying thread. Some people may think now that’s it, but in fact there still is quite a long to-do list for little details: - davit for the stern-anchor - flag-poles and flags - for the gun: tampon, wiper, rammer, and two gun-sights - and the … crew! To be continued ....

... but this thing is just a miniaturised mitre-saw, not a 'chopper', i.e. there is a saw-blade with teeth. From an engineering perspective, this thing is not a terribly intelligent design, as it lacks a proper adjustable guidance for the saw-blade. If anything, there should be a gib-strip to control the clearance with which the saw moves.

On a real ship the waterline may have looked really awfu, hand-applied bottom paint just by eye ... I gather for many ships a good approximation would be that the bottom paint goes up to below the wales (as Roger already pointed out) at it's deepest point. From there it would follow a horizontal line forward and backward to the stem and stern respectively. Well not exactly: in most cases the waterline was given a slight(!) curve upward towards the stem and stern. This has two psychological/aesthetic reasons: for one the hull looks more dynamic and the ship faster in that way and then, particularly larger wooden ships tend to 'hog' with time, meaning that the ends begin to hang down, because of the stresses on the hull in the sea; an upward curve of the painted 'waterline' compensates for this.

It all depends on the 'chopper' you have. When I was a student, during vacations I worked in a DIY store and one of my tasks was to cut picture frames to order. The foot-operated 'chopper' would cut mitre notches for frames as much as 50 mm thick ...

Just out of curiosity: why would there be yard to which only the foot of the top-sail is attached and then above it another yard for the square fore-sail? It seems to be a rather strange arrangement with on first view no practical advantage ...

I think actually, that much what could be (only) achieved with galvanoplastics in the past, can be achieved today with 3D-printing. The complex shape of the exhaust-manifolds can be modelled and then printed on a 3D-printer. However, the then to-scale-thickness of the end-tubes is difficult to achieve in anything but metal. If it was me, I would design the 3D-printed manifolds for inserting short pieces of metal tubing, because in photocured resin, the end-tubes would be still too thick-walled and very fragile.

There was/is a Russian/Ukrainian (I don't remember which ...) colleague on this forum, who made galvanoplastic ventilators and similar hollow parts. I also know of railway modellers, who 'grow' rivets on metal with this technique. In galvanoplastic, you make a wax core, cover it in a silver paint to make it electrically conducting and then galvanically deposit copper on it. The way then is melted out. It was once a very common method to reproduce medals, small objects and even architectural decorative items (in the latter case using zinc). Basically, if you are set up to do your own photoetched parts, you could also do galvanoplastics.