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wefalck

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Everything posted by wefalck

  1. wefalck
    We keep fingers crossed then !
  2. wefalck
    Yes, it looks more railway tunnel-like and not just like a hole in the mountain 👍🏻
  3. wefalck
    This all begs the question: What next?
  4. wefalck
    Just out of cultural curiosity: how did the 'doctor's buggy' got its name? I now that in 'Westerns' doctors are often portrayed as driving one, but I am sure there would be more numerous people having/driving one. Nice job on the model btw.
  5. wefalck
    As always, it is probably a question of scale. I used in 1:60 scale some wooly knitting thread, twisted it tight and then soaked it in varnish. Once dry is was roughend with sandpaper and then with a thin needle the respective rigging line was threaded through. Looked convincing enough to me. Sorry I don't have a picture to hand at the moment.
  6. wefalck
    We lived for a couple of years near a branch-line during the last days of steam back in later 1960s Germany and used to play around the embankments. One day we had to alarm the adults as indeed some shrubs/weeds had caught fire after a steam-train passed. It seems that this, however, was less likely with coal-fired engines, while wood- (or peat-fired, as was the case for a period in Bavaria) always had those bulbous spark-arrester chimneys.
  7. wefalck
    On harder woods I use single-sides razorblades as scraper (the ones that have a reinforced back). However, getting things smooth around knots may indeed be difficult. What would help is to treat the surface with a sanding-sealer. That would harden the soft fibres around the knot, making sanding/scraping easier. Another good way to smooth the surface is the use of different grades of steel-wool in between coates of sanding-sealer. However, there is no point then applying lineseed-oil, as it would not penetrate the wood treated with sanding-sealer. There may not need to be a need for further treatment, as the wood treated with e.g. cellulose-based sanding-sealer and rubbed down with fine steelwool takes on a nice satin shine.
  8. wefalck
    Very nice indeed 👍🏻 Did you sculpt the figures yourself? They are very well animated.
  9. wefalck
    Use Paasch‘s ‚From Keel to Truck‘ and forget about GoogleTranslator …
  10. wefalck
    Well, the 'hog-chains' are there to prevent exactly that, the 'hogging' of the boat. It has the same function as the girders/trusses on a bridge above the way. Shallow hulls without (external) keel may not have sufficient strength against bending/hogging, so they need these trusses in the same way a girder-bridge needs them. These trusses are not necessarily chains, but could be iron rods or connected wooden beams. A girder structure of wooden beams could be hidden in the constructional arrangements of superstructure without being so obvious as in the old-time river-boats. Extending the trusses/hog-chains beyond the pivotal pole of the derrick, however, could limit its range of movement. So I would doubt that in a real case they would have been extended further, though from a mechanical point this would be advantageous.
  11. wefalck
    Well, real life's necessities come in our modelling way - even as pensioners it seems. Good that you can see light at the end of the tunnel. Builders always take longer than they originally claim they would. I have something like that lurking behind the horizon as well ...
  12. wefalck
    Sorry for having tread this loose ... you could run a pair of chains (or solid bar stays) from the forward end of the canopy over the boiler further forward, say towards a point at the hull left and right of the mast.
  13. wefalck
    This is indeed how the trusses are led on riverboats and other shallow boats that do not have a strong keel as backbone. Incidentally, such trusses already occur on ancient Egyptian boats ...
  14. wefalck
    Yep, installing chains properly tensioned is not so trivial, as they do not stretch. On the other hand, in full-scale they have the same problem and one would normally have a turnbuckle there. Looking at the design, I was wondering, whether there shouldn't be another set of chains on the other side of the deckhouse - its structure alone would not be able to balance the strain from the sponsons, I think.
  15. wefalck
    I think, I have seen representations where the forecourse on the lee-side is brailed up, as it would blanket the foresails, but here it is clearly a triangular sail set (flying) to windward. One thing I noticed is that we tend too framed by navy rules and regulations, where everything was supposed to be done 'by the book'. In the merchant navy the master basically could do whatever he saw fit and if it worked, the better. If something went wrong, however, he may have had to explain himself in front of a court. So in practice, one probably saw all sorts of strange arrangements.
  16. wefalck
    There is a lot of hype about AI and no one usually knows what it really means 🤪 I am using ChatGPT quite a bit in work to get an overview over a subject that I don't know (very well) to give me directions where to dig deeper. It gives the sources now, so one can verify them. The subject coverage seems to be quite variable still, with niche subjects, like ours, being hit-and-miss - as more people ask the right question the system learns and begins to return better answers. ChatGPT becomes really a challenge for our university teaching - while unreferenced Google results were relatively easily to detect (by a Google search 😉), this has become now more difficult. I changed my tactics and tell my student to use it explicitly 😈. When I first plugged my exam questions into ChatGPT, I was flabbergasted, that it came up with the correct answers, even for things on which the students normally failed ... One needs to cascade through various rounds of refinement when posing questions to either Google or ChatGPT in order to arrive at more probably results. Nevertheless, I don't use it very often for our subject area (yet). Back again to LULA now ...
  17. wefalck
    Sorry, I don't want to dilute the thread, but I am curious, when a broom would be a 'push-broom', rather than just an ordinary wide broom? Below is an image of Berlin street-sweeps from around 1910, who seem to push fairly wide brooms:
  18. wefalck
    I have seen triangular forecourses, but set in the middle of the yard, with the foot pivoting on an eyebolt in the deck. I think in German it is called 'Faulenzer' = idler. It was used on courses werde frequent gybing was required, as it involves less work. Haven't seen such half-forecourse, however, before.
  19. wefalck
    A distance diagnosis on the wood is difficult ... Looking forward to how you will walk the tightrope between imitating the haphazard look of the real thing and an unintended look of shoddy workmanship.
  20. wefalck
    What's a 'push broom'?
  21. wefalck
    This attention to historic detail is just exemplary ... 👍🏻
  22. wefalck
    May the idea of firing at an angle is a bit overrated. In order for the guns to be effective, the ships had to be so close together that it didn't really matter at what angle you fired, there would be something to hit in almost any direction. In addition, the movement of the ship made precise alignment of the gun quite futile in practice. For chasing guns the situation might be different. In any case, firing such guns under battle conditions was almost as dangerous for the gun-crews as for those that may have been on the other side of the gun. There wouldn't have been much space on a gun-deck to stay out of the way of a recoiling gun and any whiplashing tackle.
  23. wefalck
    I gather it depends on the master and his safety consciousness ... there are/were well-kept boats and others ...
  24. wefalck
    That's an interesting utilisation of secondary mineral resources this dredging in Susquehanna. However, their coal-washing upstream must have been pretty wasteful and I am not sure about the environmental impact of both, discharging of large amounts of suspended matter and the dredging of the river bed ... What always fascinates me are these makeshift and improvised vessels (and logging trains for that matter) in the USA. We don't seem to have seen such things to that extent in Europe judging by the pictorial records. As a modeller you can let your creativity run free.
  25. wefalck
    "... and pile it as haphazardly as possible on the deck." ... well that would be a hazard and would not normally be done unless a ship is temporarily moored to a quay. Everything that can move needs to be tied down, otherwise it may be lost or become a threat to the crew when shifting around. The crew would do this in their own interest.

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