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wefalck

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Everything posted by wefalck

  1. So it can use G-Code? Somehow I had the impression that the driver that comes with it is made for bit-images.
  2. Well, soldering is a basic skill any shipmodeller should attempt to acquire (not that I am real master of it myself ...) and I owned a soldering iron since my early teens. They cost just a few euros/pounds/dollars/yens/etc., so there is not big hurdle to take for some basic equipment.
  3. Just read on their Web-site. It feeds indeed a nozzle coaxial to the laser-beam to blow out burnt material, so that it does not obstruct and scatter the laser, thus making the cut narrower with less charring (my interpretation, not their sales-pitch ...). However, if I read correctly, it works from bit-images, not from vector graphics. I wonder, how well it would be doing on lines oblique to axes of the machine and on curves.
  4. Heavy and siege artillery pieces were usually broken down into several loads, as not only towing-capacity was limited before the around the mid-1930s, but also the load-bearing capacity of roads and bridges, not talking about moving them across fields. The Austrians had a 38 cm siege howitzer designed in 1916, which was broken down into four loads: Barrel 38 t, carriage 33 t, and two lower carriage/foundation trucks of around 37 t each. It took 8 to 20 hours to prepare the foundation in soft ground and several days on rock. Assembly of the gun took 6 to 8 hours. One of them is preserved in the Army Museum (Heeresgeschichtliche Museum) in Vienna. If I remember correctly, they used a diesel-electric tractor to have enough torque on the wheels.
  5. Jewellers (silver-)solder rings on a cone-shaped carbon-rod. While, it is not carbon, but graphite mixed with clay, one could perhaps use a lead-pencil mine as mandrel for soldering. They come in various diameters or one could just sharpen an ordinary pencil and put this into a vice for soldering. Solder paste would be the way to go. I am wrapping (soft) wire around a drill shaft, pull it off and then cut the rings with a scalpel on a glass plate. In this way the kerf is on the inside of the ring, where it is less visible even when not soldered. In this way I can produce rings with 0.3 mm inside diameter, if needed.
  6. What laser-cutter do you actually have?
  7. What always puzzles me is, how utterly impractical from both, the handling and the maintenance perspectives these ships must have been - dressed to impress ...
  8. I wonder sometimes what is more difficult, to build a model or the real ship/boat? Measuring parts should be easier on the smaller parts than on several metres long pieces of the real thing. But then accessibility and measurement tolerances are an issue in models. Well, 18 to 20°C would be far below my comfort zone ... at least for working sitting down.
  9. Nice, clean turning! Steel?
  10. When I read this correctly, then only plans for 'ground trainers' are offered, which I would interpret as non-flying - would reduce the risk considerably. I am not into flying, but seem to remember having read that in the 1930s and even into the 1950s glider enthusiast build their own gliders - the Wasserkuppe mountain in Germany was one of the centres for glider flying at the time. And you can see various videos on YouTube etc. where people built oversized 'drones' and fly with them (of course they are not drone anymore then ...). Due to tight airspace-regulations and a lack of free space this seems to happen more in remote areas and not in Europe.
  11. Well, failing that, we would be content with some progress report on his railway adventures ...
  12. Looking very nice, well done 👍 One thing that puzzles me, however, is the orientation of the saw-blade versus the rollers. I would have expected that the rollers feed (planks) into the saw-blade ... And a little technical detail: the ends of leather drive-belts were attached with special metal 'agraffes' and they don't overlap. If they did overlap there is a jump and slip on the pulleys. Sorry to say, but I am bit disappointed over technological progress - a boring electric motor and not a little horizontal steam-engine, the boiler of which is fed with saw-dust and off-cuts
  13. Acrylic paints are complex emulsions with either water, or alcohol or a mixture of both as solvents. They may also contain surfactants as emulsifiers. Emulsions are very delicate things and can easily break down when using the wrong solvents, resulting in curdling with resulting clogging of the airbrush for instance. In such cases they also do not form the cross-linked network of acrylic molecules that form the paint layer. It appears that Vallejo uses a relatively simple system that can be diluted with water, dito. for the German Schmincke paints. I do not have experience with products of other manufacturers.
  14. If the intended purpose doesn't work out, you can always turn it into some workshop diorama - thinking about lathes, milling machines, overhead line-shafts and such things ...
  15. How will the saw be driven? Seems to call for a horizontal steam-engine ... I love this project. These wooden buildings have a lot of character!
  16. Aren't you afraid that adding the stays later might pull (ever so slightly) the shrouds out of alignment and, hence, also the ratlines?
  17. That's quite a high-tech stand ! ... somehow it reminded me of those eerie-looking outside braces doctors use to align broken legs ... Perhaps the camera is challenged with the illumination and contrasts, but I found that the underwater body doesn't quite stand-off from the mounting board. It seems to make it difficult to appreciate it's wonderful lines and the artful planking job.
  18. I am wondering, musing about the physics involved, how the recoil would be distributed ... part of it obviously would act backwards (depending on the type of locking mechanism) and part of it sideways ...
  19. The question is also of what period we are talking. CUTTY SARK for instance has a release gear fitted, which allows to safely let go the chain without using a sledgehammer. This kind of release gear, where the chain is hooked up to a rotating bar with thumbs sticking up, was used until stockless anchors came into use that pull up into the hawse-pipe. The bar has a lever at one end that is rotated by hand to lower the 'thumbs', thus relasing the chains.
  20. I can't work when my blood-sugar levels are down and I am hungry ... hands are shaky and I can't focus mentally ... Nice shipwrighting btw.
  21. Concerning the submachine gun that fired around the corner: it is a German MP40 and apparently this kind of barrel extension was actually experimented with for urban warfare during WW2. Today, with video-cameras, GPS etc. for aiming it might work ...
  22. Or, perhaps we are the intelligent ones that survived ... 😇 Considering the 'fully comprehensive insurance'-attitude of modern attitude, the future development of our gene-pool is quite worrying 🤔
  23. ... and even, if he wasn't barefoot, leaning onto the ladder with the bare forearms isn't such a survival idea either 😲
  24. I am not an expert on the Vickers, but I think your photographs shows a tripod-mount as 'heavy' machine-gun for land-use. There, the tactical situation is different in the sense, that when you combat attcking infantry, you only need small changes in elevation, as the enemy is approaching or for spraying enemy positions at greater distance, you don't want to change your elevation once you are sure that you hit those positions. Hence the elevation screw. In naval combat situations, your own boat and that of an enemy are moving fast, hence you constantly have to adjust the elevation to keep the target under fire. I think naval light guns, including machine-guns had some sort of friction-brakes on the pivots and horizontal bearings. One sometimes sees little hand-levers with which these brakes can be adjusted or completely locked. These friction-bearings probaly are just split rings that can be pulled together with a screw that is operated by the hand-lever.
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