wefalck
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Everything posted by wefalck
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Looks like a forged iron poop-deck rail, rather than a 'rope'. -
The steam-pumpers would normally short sections of suction-hose, which are quite stiff, on racks alongside the chassis or another convenient place. There would be also one length of pressure hose per nozzle. Most of the pressure-hoses would be carried on a reel on a two-wheeled trailer towed behind the pumper and/or on separate carriage that would also carry some short lean-/hook-on ladders. In addition, there would be a coal- and perhaps a water-cart to provide clean boiler feed-water. The whole train may be completed by a big extendable ladder on a turn-table on a separate carriage.
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It is really coming together nicely. There would be two types of hoses: suction hoses and pressure hoses. Suction hoses were made from rubberised canvas and were kept open (round) internally by a spiral of bronze (I guess so, as stainless steel was not available yet at that time). The suction hose is used to take water from surface water courses - at that time in most places there was no water-mains to supply hydrants. In 1:72 scale I imitated the look by winding thin copper wire around a soldering wire of suitable diameter and painting the whole thing. In your scale you might try to find a suitable spring or make one and slip it into a heat-shrink tube. The tube than can be shrunk cautiously onto the spiral, coiled and then painted. Pressure hoses also would be made from rubberised canvas, but would be flat, when not in use. In this way more length can be store on a reel. Fire-station usually have a tower in which these hoses are hanged freely to dry. They are then powdered inside with talcum to prevent the rubber from sticking together. The woven shoelace might be indeed a good representation of such pressure hose, when not in use,
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Just checked on the Internet. This kit seems to have been modelled after one of Chapman's drawings. So it would be indeed mid- to late-1700s. During this period and even more so in the Baltic virtually all substantial parts on a ship('s deck) would have been made from wood and preserved with wood tar ('Stockholm tar'), giving it a light brownish colour. Iron work (no steel !) would be only some forged iron bands, rings, etc. Although iron has been mined in Sweden for centuries, it was still comparatively expensive due to not very efficient mining methods and high cost of fuel (charcoal) for turning the iron-ore into metal. Cast iron was still quite rare at the time and mainly restricted to high-value parts, such as guns. In the case of the kit, these metal parts, bitts for instance, then should be painted in a light wood colour and then given washes with say burnt umber in order to simulate the Stockholm tar preservation.
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I am using razor-blades, the ones with a reenforced back. And I am using them as they come. Seems to leave smooth, flat surfaces.
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We had this discussion at a different place already not too long ago: different, very light-weight silk papers are available from art-supply houses. Very fine silk-cloth is also available as printing screen, again through suppliers for the art-trades, printers, or through ebay in fact.
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For fine finishes, particularly after having applied sanding filler, I also use steel-wool of various grades. It gives an nice satin finish - but make sure to remove also the little steel splinters !
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Such sails need to be shaped (mostly) during the process, not afterwards. Glueing on the bolt-ropes with either white glue or acrylic gel gives (initially) a somewhat flexible joint, so that the sails can even be furled. If the bold-rope comes loose in places, it can be easily attached again. I have been making sails like this for 30+ years.
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I don't think the ship were actually sailing while butchering a whale. The drag from the carcasse would have been a lot of strain on the tackles with which it was worked. Apart from the fact that in the course of the 19th century labour became increasingly expensive and, therefore, crews had to be reduced and the sail plan of vessels adapated to this, one has to keep in mind that a whaler would have to be managed by a very much reduced crew while the whaleboats were out hunting. Not sure, whether there are any statistics, but I would assume that loosing a whaleboat and its crew was not uncommon - in the fight with a whale or when bad weather developed, while the boats were out. Therefore, the whaler would need to be able to be sailed with a reduced crew. As a matter of fact, a full rig does not seem to have had much advantage over a barque rig and only on certain points to the wind. On most points the square sails would blanket each other and be ineffective. This is why the last big square-riggers were almost always barques.
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Thanks for the link. I am slowly scrolling through that log, very interesting to see the master being built.
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Can one see the original somewhere on the Internet ? A Google-search only turned up model pictures of other builds from this kit. I am curious as to what kind of boiler was used. There must have been some way of checking, whether enough water was in it. Once could also use test-taps at different levels - perhaps the vertical row of the four taps? These fire engines had boilers, where most of the water was in water-tubes, which ensured quick heating up, but still there is a minimum level of water that has to be kept to prevent the tubes from burning through.
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Are there no water gauges at the stoking platform ?
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Things are coming together nicely ! It shows how fragile and spidery the engineering designs were at that time. I gather today one would make this much more compact. The suspension system (the 'shock absorbers') is actually quite interesting and I wonder how it really worked. Somehow it looks as if it were just a stack of leather discs. Most steam-fire engines I have seen in preservation have the boiler suspended from a ring, which in turn is supended on leaf-springs above the axles. However, looking at my pictures of the one preserved in the Stockholm technical museum, it seems to have a similar arrangement of 'shock absorbers', but in wood:
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I gather various museum have models that were submitted together with patent applications ...
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Thinking about it, and as the lowest hook is actually at the level of the hearth, the hooks may also serve to install/store a 'couvre feu' (curfew), to prevent embers from falling out. These would have been probably just sheets of iron. Amalio will know probably more ...
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Presumably for a roasting spit. In the Danish Rigsarkivet they have numerous drawings of galleys, not only Danish ones, and some show mechanisms for a mechanical turning of the spits. The galley is a major fire-hazard on a (wooden) ship and seems to have preoccupied significantly the navy responsibles, judging by the numbers of drawings and contemporary models that have survived.
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OK, as I am not going into commercial production, I am staying with my shop-made manual mill - but laser-shaping of the sheave would be nice.
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I gather you’ve used some kind of jig that allows you to zero-in each, the mill and the laser, for the consecutive operations. I understood that you index the billets manually in order to mill the four sides, correct? The milling wouldn’t be difficult with a ball-nose mill. Laser-cutting the sheave certainly lets you go down one almost order of magnitude in size.
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Well, I missed this thread since last summer. Don’t have a suitable laser-cutter, but thought by adding a 4th axis, i.e. an indexer, and modulating the laser power, one could do exactly that … You don’t have to worry about breaking milling cutters and could down to dimensions, where it would difficult to find suitable cutters. I am thinking of 1 to 2 mm blocks …
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This is going to be a brilliant model and the 'fake' metal looks really good. OK, with hindsight, but I wonder, whether it would have been possible to 'joggle' the vertical joint in the boiler-lagging. In this way, the outside diameter would have not increased due to the extra thickness of the overlapping material. I had to check the imperial thread sizes, but to me they are not actually that small at 1.2 mm and 1.8 mm diameter. Anyway, it may have been a good idea to re-thread the cast parts with an appropriate die to remove any flash or distortions. In theory, one can also use a very fine triangular file to remove flash and burrs, but it is not so easy to find a fine-enough file for these fine pitches. The problem is that you do some sort of pressure-forming, when screwing the nut on and that requires a lot of force to move the material.
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It's the 5th painting in the list: https://www.invaluable.com/auction-lot/arr-frank-j-h-gardiner-british-b-1942-20-c-c0040f1930 BTW, I just saw that it was auctioned by Charles Miller in London. He is a nice knowleagble and helpful guy (ex-Sotheby's if I remember right), you could send him a picture of yours and ask his opinion.
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This method certainly results in a quite accurate copy of the curve. However, it appears to be rather elaborate. In effect what you do is, you trace onto a rough-cut template a line that is parallel to your target curve. So, there may simpler methods to do this. Boatbuilders fitting planks use parallel scribers for this: they clamp the new plank into place and then trace the edge of the already fitted plank onto the new one below. Perhaps a compass where the legs can be locked in position could be used: at each frame location you draw an arc onto the template and then connect these arcs with a tangent line, which should be an exact image of the target curve. Or take a short, rectangular piece of wood, put a short piece of dowel as a handle on it, hold this against each frame and draw a short line onto the template on the opposite side. Finally, connect these lines to get the image of your target curve.
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When you take it out of the frame and look at it at an glancing angle you should be able to see some texture in the paint, particularly in those areas that appear to have been worked over indeed in gouache (e.g. the blue bulkhead panels, the coat of arms, the white heads of the waves, etc.). Gouache form a matt layer on the paper. If you go down this list of paintings in past auctions by the same painter: https://www.invaluable.com/artist/gardiner-frank-joseph-henry-bz4rerv65l/sold-at-auction-prices/, you will see in Lot 20 a very similar landscape in the background. You could also compare the style of the sea and other features. This painter is not be confused with the better known Derek Gardner, who paints similar subjects.
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The stems / ram-bows of iron ships are quite pointed actually. I would guess that the outer edge was not more than perhaps 4 inches wide, which means that it would be only 1/16" in 1/72 scale. Not sure that this will be stable enough in plywood. I would cut the profile of the stem from aluminium and glue it into a slot cut into the plywood. As matter of fact, it may be worthwhile to make also the stern-post in that way. With such a big model, you have to think about the stability of the 'backbone'. These ram-bows became very fashionable after their use was partially successful in the Battle of Lissa between Austria and Italy and the Italian Re d'Italia was sunk in this way. Until the end of the century virtually every naval ship was given such bow, even small units such as torpedo-boats.
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