wefalck

Mortar with measles ... 🤪

Mortar with measles ... 🤪

One can buy ground glass, but I do not know in what sort of grain-sizes. The diorama-guys also have various products to simulate snow that may represent crushed ice. Was the ice taken in as crushed ice or as blocks? Crushed ice would melt much faster than ice in blocks.

Washes and a bit of rust and pigment 

Oyster smack from which country and period? Oyster dredges do vary considerably ...

Thanks, Paul!
 
As it turns out, it actually wasn't very difficult to thatch the peak of the rancho. I was able to knock it out in a few sessions in a single day while recovering from a bout of pneumonia.
 
After considering my options, I decided to use the cloth strip as a base layer to provide a better gluing surface. I had noticed that my first attempt at a rancho has been shedding bits of thatching because the thatching was mostly just glued to itself, so hopefully gluing to a cloth backing will help. I began cutting lengths of straw and snapping them in half--not enough to separate them, but enough so they would easily take the peaked shape. I then began gluing them to the strip of cloth on top of the rancho.

 

 
I glued a bit at a time, occasionally pausing to hold down portions that had wanted to come up off the cloth. I tried clamping with coffee stir sticks but found in cumbersome and not very helpful, especially as the rancho isn't a smooth surface.
 

 
Finally I had the peak fully covered, and added some other pieces at the front and aft ends to cover the gap.

 

 
I was pleased with how it turned out, so I put the mast in place for some photos, then added a layer of matte varnish over the top to help keep the new thatching layer in place.

 
As mentioned in previous posts, it was common to use thin poles or rope to help hold down thatching layers, so I decided to add that. Unfortunately I forgot to take photos of my process. Given how thin these needed to be, I used a bamboo coffee stir stick. I then cut it to size, rounded the edges, and tied and glued some string around each end. I considered using some of my nice new scale rope, but this use would be pretty wasteful as I would need a decent length for tying purposes but only a tiny length would end up on the model, so I just went with some tan thread. The poles couldn't really be glued in place because of the uneven surface of the thatching, so I tied them in place, dabbed the knots with glue, and then added a matte varnish to the poles which "glues" it at its irregular points of contact with the thatching.

 

 
With that, I think the Rancho is finally complete! At the end of the day, I'm happy with how it turned out. That said, it took long enough that I'm in no hurry to make another thatchef roof anytime soon.
 

 

I think I would view these canopies like roofs on dwellings in shanty-towns: the people put over them what they had to hand and what did the job. I don't think that a strip of cloth would be terribly wrong. It's the sort of thing ethnographers worry about, when they want to find out, what was 'authentic', while the objects of their research in most cases are much more pragmatic.

Black boot-toppings came into fashion, when warships became grey, because harbour waters were full of oil and grime and that would leave nasty traces on the grey.
 
In many navies it was common to have have a white boot-topping above the coppering and this practice continued, when iron ships' bottoms were painted red.

To my knowledge, there was no paint-scheme for the German Merchant Marine in the early years of the 20th century. This was just the fashion of the day. One can see this is on many old photographs on both, sail- and steam-ships. Sometimes grey was substituted for black.

Oyster smack from which country and period? Oyster dredges do vary considerably ...

One can buy ground glass, but I do not know in what sort of grain-sizes. The diorama-guys also have various products to simulate snow that may represent crushed ice. Was the ice taken in as crushed ice or as blocks? Crushed ice would melt much faster than ice in blocks.

If you start a thread, there is an "add tag" button just under the thread title.  People use that to add things like the kit manufacturer or the particular ship being built.  Then it is possible to search for all threads with that particular tag if, for example, you are interested in build logs for kits by model shipways.  The tags show up in the list of threads, e.g. the yellowish/pinkish/orangeish ovals in the screen capture below (what the heck color is that?)
 

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The Burgundian Tower in Zutphen, the final residence for the cannon. It was built in 1457 because of the threat of war by the Burgundian Empire. The building has the floor plan of a horseshoe with a maximum wall thickness of four meters. In that wall there are three gun emplacements on the ground floor and five on the first floor. Below were heavier cannons.
This cannon will be placed on the first floor in one of the gun emplacements. Not all gun emplacements had cannons. In the event of a threat, the cannons could easily be moved inside the building.

This also must have happened to the cannons on ships. The many gun ports on Willem Barentz's ship will not all have been equipped with cannons. If you have 14 openings and there are 16 people on that ship, it's already clear
 
 
A gun gate of the first floor.

The gun emplacement for the cannon I am building.

The floor plan of the floor, with the five configurations. This cannon will soon be placed in place A. After the renovation, that place will be accessible by stairs, the others will not. The museum is scheduled to be completed by July 13 of this year.
plattegrond.tif
plattegrond.tif

3
 
After all surfaces were treated, the barrel looked like the photo. The length is 120 cm.

The painting was done with two shades of brown and black to get a weathered rusty surface. The inside of the barrel still needs to be made matt black.

The mouth of the barrel is a bit rounder, as the examples often show.

The breech has to be slid into the back.

The breech during the assembly of the parts. Which was entirely according to the method of the barrel.

The breech ready to be painted.
 

In the Dutch language, a breech was called a "snelleke". It resembled a beer mug in appearance and the medieval name of a beer mug was "snelleke". In reality, this barrel would have weighed 95 kg but now only 40 kg.

This is the situation on this day. It will take somewhat longer before I can show you more
 
Constant
 

One can buy ground glass, but I do not know in what sort of grain-sizes. The diorama-guys also have various products to simulate snow that may represent crushed ice. Was the ice taken in as crushed ice or as blocks? Crushed ice would melt much faster than ice in blocks.

Well it’s been a while – I’ve been away on an extended fishing trip to the famous limestone Lough Sheelin in Ireland to fish the mayfly hatch. It was, as usual, wonderful. It’s a spectacle of nature, and the big fish appear each year to gorge themselves. For those of you stateside it was the Ephemera danica hatch, much like your greendrakes.
The boats are 19’ made locally and designed for drifting broadside downwind as you cast your fly in front of the boat. The electric outboard is the ‘Ghillie’ helping to adjust the drift around points on onto rising fish. They can’t see you coming if you wear a camo buff…
 


Here’s one of about 6 lbs and we caught some even bigger. They all went back to grow even larger.
 
So to work and back on topic – I have some catching up to do on Vigilance.
Frames 30-34
These frames rise above the keelson onto the stern deadwood, as shown by the blue dashed bearding line.

 
The deadwood is then graded down onto the rabbet to allow the planking to sit flush with the keel.
Frame 34 is the last double frame. Frames #35 - #39 heel onto the horns which themselves butt to the aft face of frame 34. These photos are from the yard:

 

They started by using ply templates to work out the run of the planking onto the counter before making the frames. Then each massive oak pair was winched into place and secured.
 
My set-up is shown below here, with frames 29 and 30 being dry fitted. The paper template sets the frame heel position, bearding line position and sheer height. The gantry tape aligns the frames athwartships, and the sliding bevel and set square set the beam width and sheer height at the sheer line accordingly. Temporary ribbands hold everything in line, and help to check the frame bevel is faired. If not then adjustments can be made before fixing.
I've found that making frames this way is risky – if they are not right then maybe they can be faired, but more likely a new frame will need to be made. If I was to do this again I'd leave more margin for sanding.


All for now, whilst I slowly work towards the counter timbers.
 

One can buy ground glass, but I do not know in what sort of grain-sizes. The diorama-guys also have various products to simulate snow that may represent crushed ice. Was the ice taken in as crushed ice or as blocks? Crushed ice would melt much faster than ice in blocks.

If the part is really Zinc (and not white metal as usually) than this would have been a bad advice - Zinc is not very stable in acidic environments ...

If the part is really Zinc (and not white metal as usually) than this would have been a bad advice - Zinc is not very stable in acidic environments ...

If the part is really Zinc (and not white metal as usually) than this would have been a bad advice - Zinc is not very stable in acidic environments ...

No further progress at the moment due to work and illness, but I was very happy to find a new source of photos of Canoas. Memórica (https://memoricamexico.gob.mx/ ) is relatively new online digital repository containing digitized documents from a number of Mexican archives. Early on, I didn't find it very useful as its collections were limited, they were very random in terms of what documents had and had not been digitized, and the search function didn't seem to work very well. However, on a whim I recently thought I'd see if they had anything on Lake Chapala, and found that they have a large number of photos of Canoas. Finding all of them took some time as they required a number of search terms (canoa, bote, lancha, embarcación, etc). Some are photos I've seen before, but they've mostly been digitized to a much higher quality than the blurry versions on the INAH Mediateca site. Although they don't answer all of my questions about Canoas--notably, I still don't have any good photos of the floorboards)--they're very useful, and I thought I would share a few of the more interesting one. (These are just screenshots, and higher-quality images are available at the link).
 
Although I'd seen this photo, from 1909, before, it was in a really blurry version. With the higher quality image here, it's possible to make out a few things. The Canoa closest to the camera is named "La Fama" (best translated as "The Renown"). You can see how it uses thin poles running lengthwise along the rancho to help hold the thatching in place. Also, it interestingly has a thole pin located forward of the rancho (and a raised bit of wood on the rail that to me looks like a seat for a second thole pin nearby). This is a detail that I'd like to model, as a few of these smaller Canoas de Rancho seem to have had thole pins for rowing.

( https://memoricamexico.gob.mx/swb/memorica/Cedula?oId=0r6c_YsBTon6gu63zcYu  )
 
I'd also seen this 1905 photo before (this is just a detail from the bigger photo). What's most interesting about it to me is that it shows not just the gudgeons for the rudder wrapped around the stern post, but it also shows metal brackets around the edge of the transom. It would not be too difficult to model this detail, so I might add it to my build.

(Source: https://memoricamexico.gob.mx/swb/memorica/Cedula?oId=mPts2osBVs6S4R6nmckF  )
 
This 1905 image was entirely new to me. It shows a small Canoa (without a rancho), named "La Bayena"--"The Whale," a perhaps ironic name for such a small vessel. The anchor at the bow is quite prominent. Notably, this is one of the few images clearly showing how they used the half-ring anchor support, which other photos show to be a common feature on these vessels. While it was clear that it was used to guide the anchor chain, it wasn't clear to me how they used it to hold up the anchor. As this image shows, they could simply place the anchor chain or the ring of the anchor onto the support in order to hold the anchor up when not in use.

( Source: https://memoricamexico.gob.mx/swb/memorica/Cedula?oId=mvts2osBVs6S4R6nmckQ  )
 
This photo from 1908 of vessels docked at Ocotlan is also new to me. What's most interesting is what it shows about rancho construction. The vessel at the far right clearly is missing a substantial portion of the thatching--likely undergoing repairs or renovations--and for this reason part of the peak of the rancho is covered by cloth.

(Source: https://memoricamexico.gob.mx/swb/memorica/Cedula?oId=ir6c_YsBTon6gu638cxb )
This is clearer in the detail below:

This suggests to me that cloth coverings like this were likely only temporary measures. It also suggests that, if I decide to build my model in this way, I'd have to use several wider pieces of cloth overlapping along the top, instead of a single long, thin strip.
 
On the topic of the rancho: earlier, I had noted that I wasn't positive whether the poles running lengthwise along its exterior were structural and used to hold the thatching in place, or if that was just a handy place to hold the poles used for poling the Canoa. This photo, titled "La Colonia" ("The Colony")--which may be the name of the vessel, which is written across the transom but is not totally clear in the photo--definitively shows that the rancho poles were just used to hold the thatching in place. The actual poling pole is, in this photo, balanced across the boat just in front of the helmsman, and others are located forward. The photo also shows that the rancho itself seems to have been used as a tie-down point for the sheets.

(Source: https://memoricamexico.gob.mx/swb/memorica/Cedula?oId=g_ts2osBVs6S4R6nsc0d  )
 
One final photo, from 1905. It's highly unusual in that it shows a rancho that has been propped up on some kind of balustrade. I'd be surprised if this was made specifically for the boat, it looks more like something from a house. The rancho may have been propped up to give more space for the clearly bulky cargo load. Other interesting details include the crew member climbing the mast--the only such photo I've seen--and the anchor resting in the half-ring at the bow. Although I'm not planning on borrowing elements from this photo for my build, it was too interesting not to share.

(Source: https://memoricamexico.gob.mx/swb/memorica/Cedula?oId=mfts2osBVs6S4R6nmckK  )
 

Greetings Fellow Modelers
 
Thanks to all for your fine comments, for the "likes" and to those watching quietly.
 
 
More Fish Hold Stuff
 
Continuing on with the fish hold, the next step was to build the back walls of the bunker partitioning.  In the drawing below, the hold is defined by the yellow cross-hatching and the back wall partitioning by the green lines.  The back walls are individual bunker partitions, but for this model I've simplified it as a single one-piece wall.  The blue dots are the vertical posts used to segment the hold into individual bunkers/pens.
 

 
 
To begin, I created a paper template of the area to be walled.
 

 
 
Planking was glued directly to the paper template.
 

 

 
 
Styrene channel was glued on at each post base location. The proper depth channel needed for this is not manufactured, but I found an “H” column that was close enough once modified.
 

 

 
 
The back wall pieces were then glued on.  A corner torn from a Post-it note makes a hands-free right-angle square.
 

 
 
At this point, I became aware of two errors that needed to be addressed.  First, the height of the perimeter partition walls, and the bulkhead end walls were too short.  This would allow a view through an open hatch to see above the walls.  It would be an extreme angle view to be certain, but a deck mock-up proved to me it was possible.  The second error is that the forward bulkhead end wall was placed 12 scale inches forward of where it should be. That's a problem because it interferes with the proper placement of the mast, which is unacceptable.  So, a second end wall was installed 12” aft of the first one.
 
In the image below the new (taller) end wall is on the right.  One would now expect that the two forward bunkers are 12” narrower than the other bunkers, but they are not.  The post spacing is correct from the aft bulkhead forward and only the forward wall was misplaced.  Indeed, I caught this error because the forward bunkers appeared to me a tad wider than the others.
 
Extra work caused by working carelessly.
 

 
 
Next, the four-sided posts for the bunker partitioning were made.  They are a five-piece styrene construction.
 

 
 
 
A construction jig is assembled. The styrene is modified “H” columns and strips from Evergreen.  Solvent cement keeps the posts from being inadvertently glued to the jig.
 

 
 
A channel is placed into the jig.
 

 
 
A flat strip is cemented on top of that. Two of these channel/flat piece assemblies are made for each post.
 

 
 
The center rectangular strip is added to one of the above assemblies.
 

 
 
Then both assemblies are cemented together.
 

 

 
 
The posts are glued onto the post bases.
 

 
 
One of the back walls is heightened, a channel extension is glued on, and a partition is installed.
 

 
 
The partitions are cut from blanks of edge-glued wood strips. A paper template of the partition is placed on the blank and the shape is cut free. They are stained with chalk and alcohol. I use alcohol to liquefy and apply the chalk because it penetrates the wood and evaporates off quickly leaving no time for the thin wood strips to warp.
 

 
 
I used “super thin” CA to glue these partitions in.  With the partition already in place, a drop of the CA at the top of the post races down the channel and glues most of the plank ends.  I have an extension tip on my bottle to help control the flow and I use the watery glue infrequently and cautiously.  I feel there should be a “skull and crossbones” on the bottle.  If you must use it, keep a can of fresh acetone at the ready.  A mishap will glue your fingers together instantly with the possibility of a trip to urgent care.  Am I exaggerating?  Not really.
 

 
 
The partitions are all in.  I'm considering partially filling a few of the bunkers with ice.  What do you folks think and what would make a convincing 1:48 ice?  It would have to be a non-soluble material.
 

 

 
 
I've installed 8 surface mount LEDs (one over each bunker) to light up the hold.  That seems like a lot, but they are small and their output will be adjustable.  Two wood strips holding four diodes each are assembled.  These LEDs are SMD 805 warm white and are attached to the strips with a clear (when dry) version of Gallery Glass.  For scale, the grid on the mat 1/2” (12.7mm)
 

 
 
Both strips attached over the bunkers.
 

 
 
Thanks for stopping by.
 
Be safe and stay well,
 
Gary
 
 

If the part is really Zinc (and not white metal as usually) than this would have been a bad advice - Zinc is not very stable in acidic environments ...

Hi all, work continues. Now prototyping the davits. Most parts davit head, cleat,…not glued yet. Experimenting with best way to make them. Davits themselves still need cleaning and a bit more tapering towards the head.
cheers sascha
 

A little bit of progress made over the past few weeks on the gears and tracks and in putting together the diorama base that comes with this kit. I’m wondering if they included a base because the tank itself is so small that it needs elevation.  A minor annoyance with this kit is that the numbering on the spruces is printed in the same tan colour as the parts and so one must check and recheck part numbers often because of the glare of the working light makes it difficult to see the numbers.   My son has finished his lego x wing, leaving me behind in the galactic dust 😆
 
Scott