wefalck

Check out jewellers' or lapidary supply stores. They have all grades of grinding and polishing pastes and sticks, as well as buffing wheels. Tripel or Tripolis (as it seems to be called in the USA) is a fine clay that came originally from Africa and is usually sold as sticks bound in wax. Rouge or Paris Red is iron oxide finely ground and is sold in sticks bound with wax to be applied to buffing wheels, as compacted poweder in tins (like the ladies' rouge), or as cream in tubes (as polish for silver and brass). Vienna chalk is usually sold as compacted blocks for rubbing, but may also be the active component in creams Tin oxide is sold as powder and is used with a drop of oil on a glass or hard steel plate to give a mirror finish to watch components Grinding and polishing is the progressive removal and flattening out of surface roughness. At each step a homogenous surface has to be achieved, deep scratches left in a previous step will not go away in the following step. It is important to always move in one direction, cross or circular strokes lead to irregular patterns that will not result in a mirror finish on larger surfaces.

Dealing with very bluff bows/sterns and butting of bottom planks against wales or other planks higher up on hull are two different technical resp. geometric issues. If you have a hull with a rather square main cross-section, but relatively sharp ends, the girth amidship is much longer than the length of the rabbet in the stem- or stern-post. This results in a problem when planking: a) if the planks have to have a reasonble width at the ends, they must be very broad in the middle; b) if they have a resonable width amidship, they become two narrow at the ends to fasten them properly. There are two solutions to the problem: you can either work with stealers amidship or you can run some of the planks up to other planks higher up on the hull. This seems to have been a common Dutch practice. Petrejus discusses this issue, for instance, in his book on IRENE on p. 53 ff. (English language version). Bending the planks on these very bluff bows is indeed another technical issue and requires a lot of heat, wedges and tackles ...

Nice ironwork on the pumps and belaying pins !

The dual-colour LED panels should be used with some caution I think. If you have two light-sources of different 'temperature', it will be rather difficult to correct the white balance - you can do it only for one or the other light source. I am curious, Gaetan, what gadget you found to suspend the panels from the ceiling. For taking pictures from inside models or from a 'deck-hand' perspective, there are now also cheapo 'intra-oral' cameras on the market, essentially endoscopes on a short stick, rather than on a long flexible shaft.

Not a lot of head-room ...

Yes, David, these Kirsanov chisels are really beautiful - but rather expensive. I am tempted, but probably won't actually need them. In fact, I had already purchased some HSS-rods of 2 mm diameter to grind them into really small chisels to be set into some 6 mm walnut-dowel I have and some nice turned brass ferrules. AON, there seem to be so many different variants of building boats that look similar from the outside. Its like with plumbers and electricians, who by default consider the ways of others strange or outright faulty

I posted all the photos I had in the thread by 'bruce d' that prompted this project:

Real boatbuilding in miniature 👍 BTW, that chisel in the previous picture looks very precision-ground, is is carbide ?

Talking about switches, I saw a guy on YouTube, who controls his machines from the smartphone or devices/services, such as Alexa/Siri (Homepod). Not sure what happens, if the WiFi cuts out. I am using momentary foot-switches on all my machines.

Greg, your fears might be justified by all what I heard the director saying ... bizarre for a museum that is essentially funded by the French Defence Ministry to forget about its naval history and to develop into an 'Ocean' museum. Never let 'professional' museum educators their hands on technical museums or they will be doomed. I trust, however, that NEPTUNIA will keep up its standards. We, that is the German equivalent of the NRG, also exchange articles with them to reach out to a broader audience, who might not speak so well (or at all) the other language(s).

The material as such is not important, but what they look like in the end. Plastics or metal can be made looking like wood with the right painting technique. Sometimes plastics can be a better choice than woodt, particularly when one does not have access to very fine-grained hardwood. I noticed on your deadeyes that they do not have the grooves that leads the lanyard smoothly out of the bores. If it all possible, you should file this in. It will look a lot better.

I got a life-time supply via ebay - sometimes suppliers/hospitals etc. sell off blades cheaply in their original packages of 100, when the best before date for the sterilisation has expired and they cannot be used any more in a medical context.

There are not shipmodelling, railway modelling, figure modelling etc. techniques, there are techniques for particular tasks that can be applied here and there, as the need arises

For priming/filling wood I use a nitrocellulose base product (German brand Clou). It often suffices, when a satin finish is required, the second being rubbed down with 0000 steel-wool. Can be polished to a higher sheen with e.g. felt polish wheels - almost invisible coating. For high-gloss finishes bleached or unbleached shellac solution, either ready made (by Clou) or dissolved as flakes in denatured alcohol for special applications - can be used as cement (as watchmakers traditionally do). The traditional varnish to prevent silver and brass from tarnishing is 'zapon varnish'. I use it also for various other applications, where I need a fast drying almost invisible varnish, e.g. for stiffening ropes or securing knots. Can be softened again with a drop of acetone. These days I normally apply paint with the airbrush, only details, figurines and the likes are treated with a normal brush. Being a 'miniaturist', I only need minute quantities of paint any time, as mixing up such small quantities for air-brushing is difficult, I prefer them readily conditioned for air-brushing - saves a lot of time and trouble and the branded products seem to keep for decades. I also use these diluted paints for washings. I only use acrylics in the airbrush to facilitate cleaning and not to have to mess around with solvents. Long-established artist's paint suppliers have a reputation to loose, so their products are likely to be of good and reliable quality. The brands I am typically using are Schmincke (German), Vallejo (in France they are labelled Prince August), and Winsor & Newton. If at all possible, I apply the acrylics without primer. Brass and copper can be difficult due to the slightly hydrophobic oxides that form on them. If possible, polish the surface or apply e.g. zapon varnish as primer if needed. Of course, in the past I extensively used Humbrol paints, but as noted above, I do not like to airbrush solvent-based paints. For figure-painting I sometimes used artist's oils in the past, but find that I can get similar results with washes of acrylics for airbrushing that have been further diluted.

'Red ochre' is iron-oxyhydroxide (FeOOH), depending on the amount of crystal water and the purity of the material, it can be actually anything from a pretty bright red to a dark brown. Dark brown would be ok (in some navies the cast-iron guns were made to corrode with vinegar and the resulting mixture of iron-acetate and iron-oxyhydroxide solidified in situ by rubbing the gun with line-seed oil), but a red gun would show stains from powder-smoke and the powder-slime from washing out the guns all over. There is a good reason, why guns were painted dark.

The armies all over Europe used gangs of 'recruiters', who worked like press gangs. So one should assume that the respective navies did so as well in times of need.

Challenge well mastered !

The shackle looks nice as well ! I meant this kind of saw blade: https://www.ebay.de/itm/201975383662?hash=item2f06abc66e:g:GC4AAOSw-29ZWxFd It is sold by the metre in various diameters from 0.26 mm upward for fretsaw work on semi-precious stones. They are not cheap though, 8€ to 10€ the metre, but you can hold it in an (older, as diamond may mar the jaws) pin-vise.

Mostly overlooked by modellers, but the shipwrights and boatbuilders of old took great care and pride in finishing their work, running down a moulding-plane here and there. It also had the practical purpose of rounding off edges to prevent splintering. Not easy to reproduce below certain scale, which is probably the reason, why it is rarely reproduced by us modellers.

As I said above, solved mystery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones

With e.g. Photoshop you can get rid of the background: ... o.k. it bit more fine-tuning would be needed for the shadows underneath the stand.

I know these rabbit holes all too well ... Looking good the blocks, so the tumbler works. If you have a file fine enough, or some diamond-coated round fret-saw blade or a very sharp chisel, I would round off the edges of the holes to simulate the sheaves. It looks better, when the ropes don't come out of the holes with a sharp bend.

I gather you scrape off any glue squirting out while it is still wet - hence also the wetting brush ? What kind of chisels do you use ?

Re. sliding stones: I vaguely remember that there was a paper in Nature on it in the early 1990s and in the meantime they have hit Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones Agree, there are striking images on that photographer's Web-site. I gather, if you live by it, it needs a fair bit of self-promotion ... lots of competitors.

Yes, one can 'point' the focal point on my iPhone SE too, but that is not enough, one needs to put a particular element on the object into focus and then you are dependent on how the autofocus reacts to the object's area. For image-stacking one would need to move the focal plane step by step through the object and this you can really only do with a manual focus ring. In the house, including my workshop, we have gone virtually completely LED now, mainly filament bulbs. In the workshop I installed an indoor LED floodlight over the workbench and have a moveable architect's lamp with a strong LED bulb in it. The colour temperature of illumination in a workshop can be quite an ideological matter among modellers. Some people go to great lengths to install 'day-light' (5500 K) illumination in their workshop, paint walls bright white etc. Personally, I wouldn't like the hospital feeling. My models typically would be seen with artificial light, rather than in bright day-light, so I rather would go for something that looks good under 3600 K. With the possibility to set the way how the camera interprets the light or to adjust the light temperature in Photoshop et al., the colour temperature of the illuminating light is also not so critical anymore, compared to the days of film. 'Warm' LEDs, however, are about 10% less efficient than 'cold' LEDs, because the yellow filter that is painted on them absorbs some of the light. One thing to avoid, if possible, is to mix sources of light of different colour temperature, because the resulting (local) colour tinting is difficult to correct.