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wefalck

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Everything posted by wefalck

  1. wefalck
    ... which means that you have to make the patterns first. As the colleague only needs one of each, he might just stop there
  2. wefalck
    That’s an ingenious way of making boat-shells. I would not have thought of using galvanoplastics for that. However, as you have the set-up already for e.g. the ventilators it’s logic.
  3. wefalck
    The machine begins to look like one 👍 The fishbelly-shape serves to stiffen the link against buckling, when longitudinal stress is applied, and to reduce the moving mass at the same time, compared to using the same width all along. Reducing these masses is important, as they have to be accelerated and then decelerated at each stroke. At this time engineers had only limited means to calculate the static stresses on such parts and basically no means to calculated the dynamic stresses. As you can often on say connecting rods in steam-locomotives, the interior has been thinned, leaving basically a bar on both sides with a sheet of metal spanned out between - effectivelly like a fishbelly girder-bridge. Such parts would have been moulded and cast. A question: why did you turn the pivot-pins and did not use precision ground 1/8" rod and ream the holes to size? And another observation: I tend to start-tap holes in the milling machine with head in the same position as for drilling the hole. This ensures verticality. I utilise the backlash on the vertical spindle, lowering the head to the bottom of dead move, advance the tap perhaps half a turn, then again taking out the backlash, and so forth. I usually do this only for a couple of threads, until the tap has securily grabbed, and finish off tapping away from the machine.
  4. wefalck
    Here in Europe, after Putin is turnig off our gas-supplies, we are firing up again old coal-fired power-stations that were kept on stand-by. Problem is that in many European countries coal-mining has been phased out, the only major European producer is Poland. Much of our needs now come from as far as South Africa and even Australia. Those guys running museum steam engines and the likes feel that in their pocket ... Back to the topic of machining now!
  5. wefalck
    A bit off-topic: it seems that at some stage RR made their own lathes - http://www.lathes.co.uk/rolls-royce/. I looked again at this page, because I thought that there might be a shot of Sir Henry' lathe, but not. You wouldn't remember what make it was?
  6. wefalck
    Well, as I said earlier, there are many different alternative truths and alternative terminologies. There is no good in having strong feelings about these things. I sometimes extrapolate from my native German language and there - to my knowledge, we only have the term 'Schnaumast'. Another thing to keep in mind is that our ancestors were much less obsessed with terminology than we are today. I gather this terminology-obsession is due to the various maritime dictionaries that began to become proliferated from the middle of the 19th century on in particular. Also, the increasing presence of the Navy in various societies fostered the obsession with terminology, I believe.
  7. wefalck
    In fact many railway steam-locomotives had such bearings. They need a lot of oil to keep them cool and are only suitable for relatively low speeds, as overheating could melt the metal Again, this avoided complicated set-ups for boring and honing of multiple bearings. I think they were also used on ships' propeller-shafts for the same alignment reasons. But I gather more often pock- or iron-wood bearings were used.
  8. wefalck
    By the colour of the material of the crankshat/beam bearings, I would also say that thei are bronze. In full-size practice often Babbit-bearings were used: the housings of the bearings were carefully installed in place and then the shaft put into place, wedging it tight so that is does not move and does not touch the housings; in a next step the ring-space in the housing was filled with molten Babbit- white-metal. In this way, the bearing surfaces were all aligned without complicated boring and shimming operations.
  9. wefalck
    Well, a snow (or Schnau in German) is a special variety: it has a sort thinner mast attached to the back of the main-mast, the snow-mast. The purpose is to allow the gaff to be lowered without interfering with the parrel of main-yard. Occasionally, multi-masted or even barques had such snow-masts fitted. The snow-mast largey disappeared in the second quarter of the 19th century, at least over here in Europe.
  10. wefalck
    Nice project, I will keep following it ... Talking about building logs: I have been following this YouTube channel for a while. That lady(!) is currently building one of the bigger Stuart kits, with lots of good ideas for set-ups of awkward parts etc. -
  11. wefalck
    For rigging work I use Castrovejo eye-surgery scissors. They come in various sizes and straight (pictured in one of the earlier posts above) and curved, which is good for close cuts. I also use a holder for broken-off pieces of razor-blade, again from the surgical department.
  12. wefalck
    I was also hurt by this crash (which seems to be a long, long time ago ...) and henceforth drafted my building logs in MS Word first, to be copied and pasted into the Forum. In this way I have a record of my respective contributions. However, I do not keep such records on comments I make in other threads.
  13. wefalck
    Jon, I think the subject can be a treacherous field. Today, we seem to have a relatively clear terminology, even though there are differences in usage between the US, the UK, and continental Europe. However, if you go to historical records, the terminology tends to be less clear. The same ship may be referred to in different records by a different classification. In addition, there were in the past various rigs, that we today would consider sort of hybrid forms and that do not fit our modern terminology very well. The hermaphrodite brig is a good example, as already the name indicates, something 'in between'. Arguing about terminology is rather futile. I don't have strong feelings about the subject and only stumbled about it here, because for me the 'brig' is one of the relatively clear definition, because it is a vessel with two full-rigged masts, i.e. masts with top- and top-gallant masts. As soon as one of the masts only has a top-mast, things tend to become more complicated. And don't think of the Mediterranean, where the so-called Polacca-rig, i.e. where at least mast and top-gallant were one piece ... Carry on with the good work and research !
  14. wefalck
    Too bad, if you are not on FaceBook and are wondering what is going on ...
  15. wefalck
    Pat, good to see more progress here and welcome to the club of close-up-photography-haters Could it be that the booms were actually stowed somewhere on deck? Lower stun'sails typically were only set on long-haul tacks, in a chase etc., so actually not very often. In harbour they may also have been used as boat-booms, i.e. the boats were tied to them - there would a safety line running above so that the crew could run along the boom and then climb down into the boats using a rope ladder. In any case, it seems to be more likely that this gear was stowed on deck, where it would be also less exposed to the action of the sea.
  16. wefalck
    It's actually a sort of intermediate between staining and applying translucent washes with an airbrush. This is an established technique among plastic modellers. There is nothing wrong with that. It's just that the model was quite poorly built (look at the gaps under the capping rails) and the colour-scheme reminds me of those 'decorative' or 'tourist' models of old ...
  17. wefalck
    It popped up on my YouTube recommendations and I watched it - not impressed, to be honest ...
  18. wefalck
    Ah, I like those small mid-19th century merchant vessels! Will be following further progress. Just wondering, why you call her a brig. According to the terminology I learned, she would be a schooner-brig, because she has one full-rigged mast and a schooner-mast with a top-mast only, no square sails and no topgallant-mast. A brig would have two full-rigged masts.
  19. wefalck
    Again, another very nice 'Baron' ! I love those small sailing craft from the southern shore of the Baltic. Some years ago I organised the annual meeting of our German Association for Shipbuilding History in the Nautineum, a museum of Baltic maritime history on Dänholm Island, just off the old Hanseactic city of Stralsund: https://www.nautineum.de/sammlungen/fischerei. The have a nice collection of regional boats and the centre-piece is a (replica) Zeesboot. In fact, quite a few of these have survived (through the GDR days) by having been converted to pleasure boats.
  20. wefalck
    Masochist, well that's probably true ...😈 It would take me years to get that far building it the traditional way ... I would probably give up, getting lost in the complexity of the project.
  21. wefalck
    Try art-suppliers or (Internet) shops for paper and book restorers, they use such paper to double up damaged pages, for instance. Did a quick search: https://store.bookbinding.co.uk/store/category/95/456/Conservation-Grade-%26-Weight/ There must be many more shops like this.
  22. wefalck
    Not bad, but I think at that time the oil-skins and the south-wester would have been a dark grey or something like this.
  23. wefalck
    Kevin, I think the picture is misleading, because it was taken against the light, at around midday with high sun, and a bright background - then all sails look rather dark and all shadows blueish (as you can on the shaded white stripes on the hull). In reality the sails are off-white.
  24. wefalck
    As far as I remember (I have seen her a couple of times) the sails of AMERIGO VESPUCCI are (off-)white, so I am not sure that it is a good idea to tint them in some unsual colour. Would certainly give the ship a 'Disney' appearance 😲 Where is the problem with 27 sails, the only limit is your patience ... The thinner the paper, the better. In fact, even the thinnest silk-paper is likely to be too thick, when considering real scale thickness. Furled panneled sails are possible, but you may need to make them somewhat shorter in order to bring the furled volume to the scale volume. I have done it, but you may be struggling with seams breaking open (I know this from experience). One could explore another strategy for those tighly furled sails in navy style: when furling, the sail would be embedded into a sort of pocket formed by the top-part of it; this is to keep water out of it; for the same reason the sail is stowed on top of the yard; one could sculpt this 'sausage' of sail in polymer clay or something like this and just wrap short lengths of silk-paper around it to simulate the panels.
  25. wefalck
    ... and chosing the right materials 😉

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