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wefalck

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Everything posted by wefalck

  1. wefalck
    I don't know for the RN boats, but he German ones were originally painted black and later in the War in dark grey. I would assume that the decks assume after a short while a dark grey colour, similar to older tarmac, due to weather and wear.
  2. wefalck
    Yes, I have had such a slide since the early 1970s for my SLR (Novoflex, together with the bellows and all that gear), but getting the iPhone focus to stay at the place where you want it to is not so easy, as it tends to adjust itself all the time ...
  3. wefalck
    One problem I have with close-ups and 'macros' using the iPhone is that it is very difficult to target the focal plane - there no really good manual focus.
  4. wefalck
    Cutting thin(!) copper sheet with a steel ruler and a cutter on a cutting-mat should not be really a problem. Don't try to cut through in one go, but in several passes. A pair of old(!) scissors should also work. Straighten out the strips/plates by rubbing them softly with a cork on the cutting-mat. You may also need to sand the edges slightly with very fine wet-and-dry paper to remove burrs. If you have a table-saw, you can also stick the copper sheet with a glue stick to some thin MDF or plywood and then cut the strips with a fine-toothed saw-blade.
  5. wefalck
    I am virtually always seated when working, but then I have only miniature machines. When considering the height of benches for machines, one has to consider from which angle you would be mostly looking at the work, so that one can watch both, the surface worked on as well as the cutting tool (this being a lathe tool, saw blade, abrasive disc, etc.). When working seated on details, one may want to consider also arm-rests as e.g. jewellers use in order to relieve your back from bringing your hands up to eye-level for prolonged periods of time.
  6. wefalck
    Not sure, whether this was also correct for the RN, but in other navies at the beginning of the War, they ripped off deck-planking and Linoleum, particularly also on interior decks, in order to reduce fire hazards. This certainly did not improve the living conditions, but in war-time there are other priorities. Steel decks were typically painted in oil paint mixed with sand in order to improve the foothold during wet wheather. Or they used some wild concoctions containing cement, marine-glue etc. with coarse sand.
  7. wefalck
    OK, this has all nothing to do with USS CAIRO in 1862 and we shouldn't dilute the building log with small talk ... at the end of the Cold War and after the Sovient Union disintegrated, Russia didn't need much of its Pacific and Northern nuclear fleets anymore and the submarines were laid up around Wladivostok and Murmansk. After some time, many of the surplus submarines were cut up and scrapped, keeping just the central reactor sections afloat. The reason was that Russia didn't have the necessary defuelling and decommissioning capacities and capabilities then. In the late 1990s the IAEA in Vienna organised a funding programme with international donors to ensure the proper defuelling and decommissioning of these reactor sections, as they were deteriorating and threatening to leak radioactive contamination from the primary reactor circuit. A colleague and friend of mine at the IAEA ran this programme in the 2000s. I myself have been involved with programmes to help the Russians sorting out the environmental contamination aspects of this.
  8. wefalck
    Yep, you can knock out the brass inserts. They are a tight press fit with a dove-tail. I made some hardwood and Novotex inserts that simply could be hammered down (with caution), while in the case of brass or aluminium, you would need to file-/mill-on the rough dove-tail shape. If you don't get it completely right, you can probably also use Loctite or CA to fasten them, but I prefer it the old way. I made some flat jaws to work as a miniature hand-vice, but also milled recesses into the brass inserts to hold my bakelite micro-blocks while shaping and stropping them.
  9. wefalck
    (Semi-)sunk Russian nuclear submarines in the North gave dozens of my colleagues for years a lot work
  10. wefalck
    When it is about holding blocks during 'stropping' one can think about alternatives to hemostats. One can fiddle a wire loop through one of the bores and fix this wire somewhere on the workbench - this is akin to the full-size practice. For larger blocks, where the bores are big enough, one can also drive a headless steel-pin into a piece of wood and hold this in a vice or similar - the block then is hold by this pin while working on it. During manipulating blocks for shaping, people make themselves wooden clamps with a recess at the front to hold blanks. The principle for such clamps, albeit in metal, you can see at nos. 6 and 7 in the image below: It may also be possible to modify a wooden clothes peg for the purpose.
  11. wefalck
    Love those traders and work-boats of old ! Nice rendering !
  12. wefalck
    Nuclear submarines are steamboats (with a low carbon footprint) after all
  13. wefalck
    I am quoting from memory, but the focal distance was less then 1", which makes it difficult to access details on a model and to illuminate the objects.
  14. wefalck
    Yep, have one of those too. However, the 'macro' lens turned out to be too macro for our purposes.
  15. wefalck
    Indeed, the 'magnification' is only done by software: when you save the photo you have just taken (not the screenshot), you get a normal-sized picture. When you 'zoom' the (i)phone just saves the cropped image, but the actual resolution stays the same. I do not bother with these fake zoom functions, but take a picture as close as the focal distance permits and then do all the cropping and post-processing in e.g. Adobe Photoshop. In order to avoid motion blur from your trembling hands, it is a good idea to get a Bluetooth remote control (as the come e.g. with 'selfie-sticks') - then you don't need to type on the phone. Some selfie-sticks also convert into table-top tripods, which reduce the blur even further.
  16. wefalck
    Good ! So, hopefully you will be back here in the not too distant future 🙂
  17. wefalck
    Checked on 'hansard' yesterday, as confusing 'u' and 'n' is quite frequent, but none of my dictionaries knew this vernacular term from Normandy ... learned something
  18. wefalck
    Well, when I wrote the above article, I had a minimal toolkit, just a pair of pointed tweezers and fine sewing needles. My smallest blocks were 2.5 mm long, if recall correctly. You can fiddle a wire through the bore in the block and attach then the wire firmly to something on your worktable, e.g. a pin driven into it. In this way the block doesn't jump around. You then form the fake splice away from the block and pull it down to the block as close as you can. Secure the splice with a drop of varnish and cut the loose end as close as possible, then roll the splice between your fingers after having detached the block from the wire loop. No magic, just quiet patience.
  19. wefalck
    I agree with the others: a job well done !
  20. wefalck
    He's got a screen printing facility for which apparently he wants quite a bit of money. While screen printing in principle is a good technology, today there are probably digital technologies that do the same job with similar accuracy for less money ... just contact him, discuss and decide ...
  21. wefalck
    The gentleman, who runs http://www.schiffsmodellflaggen.de/ is in his nineties and only sells remaining stocks, as he wants to close down his business. Hence, not everything may be available anymore.
  22. wefalck
    It's OK, didn't have time to make an excerpt myself. Most commercial 'rigging threads' I am aware off are glorified sewing threads and they do not separate very well into individual strands. This doesn't matter too much: with a sewing needle you stich just through them, which is good enough. Once I am happy with the position, I dab the 'splice' in a bit of matt varnish and roll it between the fingers - this makes it look like the real thing.
  23. wefalck
    I actually never understood the concept of a 'first' model, where one gets bored after a while and cuts corners. Either you toss this into the bin (with all the effort wasted) or it will be there as a constant reminder of not having done it right. When I built my first ship-model as an adult, which was semi-scratch), I had literally no source of advice, but went to the library and found books on how things were done in detail on real ships, I used this is guidance. And I tried to reproduce the bits and pieces as well as I could with the tools and materials that were available to me 40+ years ago. Today, one can get well-founded advice easily, access to tools and materials is to much easier now (though certain types of materials have disappeared from the market since), so that the need to 'cut corners' out of ignorance is greatly reduced. It's only one's lazyness and impatience to battle with ... and this is sad for those who genuinely want to help and provide the advice they wished they had in earlier times ...
  24. wefalck
    If you download this article I wrote in 1980, on the second page there is a sketch (no. 13 and 14) for how to make fake splices and how to tie in blocks: https://www.maritima-et-mechanika.org/maritime/tips/FALCK-SM-5-80.pdf This was written at a time, when there was no Internet to ask questions, but one had some books on full-size practice and then deducted some useful practice for modelling.
  25. wefalck
    And keep in mind, that with blocks, no knots are needed anyway, just 'fake' splices that are easily achieved with an ordinary sewing needle ...

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