wefalck

From late 1977 on for several years I was on the committee that organised the annual university ball of the ETH Zurich - a 'business' with a turnover of several million Swiss Francs and organised accordingly, but by students only. That first year I joined, the theme was 'Goldrush'. Various halls, gyms etc. were decorated in theatre-like decorations that took a good part of the winter-term to prepare and build. In one hall my colleagues put up some veritable rail-tracks and constructed a working draisine on which visitors could move forwards and backwards a few metres. Unlike the rest of the decoration, the draisine was not scrapped after the ball, but we were able to store it in our workshop for further use ... sometimes we would take it out at night for rides on the local tram network through the city after the end of service. We got stopped by police, but they couldn't say anything, as it was not a motorised vehicle and didn't need a license ... 😇

Time well spent:




There is some sense of foreground and background.  The proportion of the carving, relative to the area of the back board, closely copies the Berain drawing.  I am happy.

It is fascinating to me how different this is from the stock kit.
 
Thanks for looking-in!  More to follow..

From late 1977 on for several years I was on the committee that organised the annual university ball of the ETH Zurich - a 'business' with a turnover of several million Swiss Francs and organised accordingly, but by students only. That first year I joined, the theme was 'Goldrush'. Various halls, gyms etc. were decorated in theatre-like decorations that took a good part of the winter-term to prepare and build. In one hall my colleagues put up some veritable rail-tracks and constructed a working draisine on which visitors could move forwards and backwards a few metres. Unlike the rest of the decoration, the draisine was not scrapped after the ball, but we were able to store it in our workshop for further use ... sometimes we would take it out at night for rides on the local tram network through the city after the end of service. We got stopped by police, but they couldn't say anything, as it was not a motorised vehicle and didn't need a license ... 😇

From late 1977 on for several years I was on the committee that organised the annual university ball of the ETH Zurich - a 'business' with a turnover of several million Swiss Francs and organised accordingly, but by students only. That first year I joined, the theme was 'Goldrush'. Various halls, gyms etc. were decorated in theatre-like decorations that took a good part of the winter-term to prepare and build. In one hall my colleagues put up some veritable rail-tracks and constructed a working draisine on which visitors could move forwards and backwards a few metres. Unlike the rest of the decoration, the draisine was not scrapped after the ball, but we were able to store it in our workshop for further use ... sometimes we would take it out at night for rides on the local tram network through the city after the end of service. We got stopped by police, but they couldn't say anything, as it was not a motorised vehicle and didn't need a license ... 😇

From late 1977 on for several years I was on the committee that organised the annual university ball of the ETH Zurich - a 'business' with a turnover of several million Swiss Francs and organised accordingly, but by students only. That first year I joined, the theme was 'Goldrush'. Various halls, gyms etc. were decorated in theatre-like decorations that took a good part of the winter-term to prepare and build. In one hall my colleagues put up some veritable rail-tracks and constructed a working draisine on which visitors could move forwards and backwards a few metres. Unlike the rest of the decoration, the draisine was not scrapped after the ball, but we were able to store it in our workshop for further use ... sometimes we would take it out at night for rides on the local tram network through the city after the end of service. We got stopped by police, but they couldn't say anything, as it was not a motorised vehicle and didn't need a license ... 😇

Regarding downhill adventures, growing up in the 1950's in San Francisco was an adventure. The wheels were old "ball bearings" we'd get from the local auto repair garage or the wrecking yard, the axle was a whittled end of a two by four with nails driven into the end to spread it to a tight fit on the inside of the bearing. Brakes were the heels of your shoes. The teenagers in the photo had fancier brakes... hinged blocks of wood. 
 

Hi all,
 
Another update from the machine shop 😉
 
Most of this week's work is shown below, circled in red. Also, there is a list of all the Mills' parts to the right.
 
 
My main activity centred around completing the mechanisms of the Saddle and Knee ie attaching the saddle feed nut (Pt 20), making the saddle feed screw and knee feed shaft (Pts 27 and 28), attaching their mitre gears (Pt 40) and making and fitting the knee feed screw (Pt 32). There was also some work done on the Stand (Pt 1) .
 
Below, die cutting the left hand thread of the saddle feed screw. This was done in about 1/4" lengths at a time. The thread should be #5-40 Left Hand, but I couldn't find any in the UK so went with an M3 LH.

 
Below, I've attached the mitre gears to the knee feed shaft and knee feed screw to get a feel for the lie of the land. The knee feed shaft will have a handle fitted on the right hand end - this rotates the 45 deg mitre against the knee feed shaft's mitre gear causing the knee to raise up and down.

 
Below, making the brass retaining plate (Pt 10) that keeps Pt 27 and 28 in position and allows them to rotate freely.

 
Test fit of Pts 27 and 28 in the finished retaining plate.

 
Back to the Saddle....drilling holes to accept the brass retaining plate.

 
Below, the finished parts for the saddle shaft and screw.

 
And now assembled into the saddle.

 
The mitre gears mating perfectly. A combination of luck and treading carefully.

 
The Stand needs to have an M3 LH thread put in the boss to accept Pt 32, the knee feed screw. The only way to get a tap in to that confined space is to drill a hole in the base and then tap from the underside of the base.

 
Below, a part assembly showing where I've got to so far. Some of the shafts and screws are a little on the tight side but will loosen up with a bit of fettling once I get closer to final assembly. Generally, parts are lining up quite well.

 
And talking of lining up, the saddle feed nut still had to be threaded in perfect alignment with Pt 27, the saddle feed screw. Hmm...thankfully this nut alignment had a bit more leeway in it compared to the bed feed nut from last week's post.
 
Below, I used a 1/8" drill in the 1/8" hole to 'centre pop' the nut. This worked well. But...I had somehow had made the nut too short....  the thread would have broken through the nut's top surface...another (taller) nut was quickly made.

 
Below, the blue arrow shows the mitre gears nicely meshing, and the red arrow points towards the (taller) saddle feed nut happily threaded on to the saddle feed screw.

 
Finally below, a quick part-assembly view to show the results of this week's work. I feel I might be close to half-way though this build...famous last words, probably 🙂

 
I haven't included as many pics or drawing snippets this week due to time. But hopefully there is enough to give a flavour of what I was doing.
 
All the best,
 
Richard

Useful for a model reconstruction. Such details are often not otherwise documented.

As was the case with the amortisement, it takes a good deal of fettling to get all of these elements to nestle together nicely, the way they were drawn.
 
I now have the clouds positioned and Apollo’s head centered on the cornice archway:

As you can see, there’s still profiling to do on the port side of the chariot.  I think this last element of the carving should be fun to model.
 
The horses will take some effort to get them to where they need to be:

It’s really such a small area, but I can begin to now see where the fade line should be between the Cerulean sky and the Ultra Marine heavens.  My idea may not work out the way I hope, but I will try to create this soft transition with multiple dilute applications of the Ultra Marine.
 
Little by little..

We used to make multi-stage rockets with ordinary fireworks rockets (before Estes and hobby model rockets were a business). Two stage rockets were easy. The largest we made was a four stage monster.
 
The first stage was four of the largest rockets wee could buy. They were wrapped with masking tape and the fuses twisted together.
 
The second stage was three slightly smaller rockets taped together. Again the fuses were twisted and then inserted into a hole we drilled in the clay plug at the end of one of the first stage rockets.
 
The third stage was one of the smaller rockets with the fuse in a hole in the top of one of the second stage rockets.
 
The fourth stage was a tiny bottle rocket sized thing with a plastic nose cone and metal fins. It whistled loudly when it burned.
 
The whole thing was about 1 1/2 feet (0.5 meter) tall. We used a spark gap in the leads from a neon sign transformer to light the fuses. The transformer was plugged into a long extension cord that was plugged into a switchable wall outlet. Just flip the switch - ZAP - and away they went. We launched a bunch of two stage rockets this way.
 
That is how it was supposed to work. But gak1965 named the problem with the four stage monster. One of the four first stage rockets ignited before the other three. Unlike all the other rockets we fired that left the launch pad in a hurry, the four stage rocket rose slowly - just like the Saturn 5. As it rose it tipped over and was about horizontal when the other three rockets fired. Whoosh! Crash! It hit the side of a neighbor's house and fell into a rose bush where it thrashed around until the motors burned out. The neighbor kid was watching at the fence between the yards and the rocket just missed him. The rose bush was toast!
 
****
 
We did recover the second, third and fourth stages. After some reassembly we launched them successfully as a three stage rocket.

Ahh, a flying boat has been on my list for a long time, but I was rather thinking of one of the earlier Dorniers, but that would be scratchbuilding, as no kits are available.
 
What engine used the Macchi? I took some pictures of Italian aero-engines in the technical museum in Milan a few weeks ago.
 
I am not so familiar with the market, but there seems to be a lot of after-market stuff around for WW1 aircraft. However, I have the feeling that it is mainly for the 1/48 and 1/32 scales. There seem to turnbuckles and lugs in etched brass available.

Ahh, a flying boat has been on my list for a long time, but I was rather thinking of one of the earlier Dorniers, but that would be scratchbuilding, as no kits are available.
 
What engine used the Macchi? I took some pictures of Italian aero-engines in the technical museum in Milan a few weeks ago.
 
I am not so familiar with the market, but there seems to be a lot of after-market stuff around for WW1 aircraft. However, I have the feeling that it is mainly for the 1/48 and 1/32 scales. There seem to turnbuckles and lugs in etched brass available.

Ahh, a flying boat has been on my list for a long time, but I was rather thinking of one of the earlier Dorniers, but that would be scratchbuilding, as no kits are available.
 
What engine used the Macchi? I took some pictures of Italian aero-engines in the technical museum in Milan a few weeks ago.
 
I am not so familiar with the market, but there seems to be a lot of after-market stuff around for WW1 aircraft. However, I have the feeling that it is mainly for the 1/48 and 1/32 scales. There seem to turnbuckles and lugs in etched brass available.

Ahh, a flying boat has been on my list for a long time, but I was rather thinking of one of the earlier Dorniers, but that would be scratchbuilding, as no kits are available.
 
What engine used the Macchi? I took some pictures of Italian aero-engines in the technical museum in Milan a few weeks ago.
 
I am not so familiar with the market, but there seems to be a lot of after-market stuff around for WW1 aircraft. However, I have the feeling that it is mainly for the 1/48 and 1/32 scales. There seem to turnbuckles and lugs in etched brass available.

Ahh, a flying boat has been on my list for a long time, but I was rather thinking of one of the earlier Dorniers, but that would be scratchbuilding, as no kits are available.
 
What engine used the Macchi? I took some pictures of Italian aero-engines in the technical museum in Milan a few weeks ago.
 
I am not so familiar with the market, but there seems to be a lot of after-market stuff around for WW1 aircraft. However, I have the feeling that it is mainly for the 1/48 and 1/32 scales. There seem to turnbuckles and lugs in etched brass available.

Cockpit painted up 

Lots of Sanding required and the rigging looks insanely hard 

As part of a club build, Anything Italian, I chose my first resin kit. Limited run, lovely details. I’ll try not to stuff it. 

"Tow" is "short and coarse fibers of little value separated from the longer and more valuable fibers through hackling in the manufacture of rope. Tow is occasionally used in the manufacture of inferior qualities of rope." (International Maritime Dictionary, rene de Kerchove, 2nd Edition, Van Nostrand and Reinhold Co. 1961, Litton Educational Publishing]
 
"Tow" is also the short bits of fiber that break off of natural fiber rope, particularly hemp and sisal ("Manila") rope. On a large square-rigger, a lot of tow would find its way to the deck and collect in wet piles and muck things up. Hence the bosun's call, "Sweepers, man your brooms. Clean sweep down fore and aft." Another general meaning of "tow" is simply "worn out rope."
 
"Tow" was sometimes collected and saved for use in canvas pockets for padding of various sorts in rigging and so on, and for caulking material when mixed with tar to make oakum. Worn out or rotten line was often recycled into oakum as well. Quality oakum, however, was made not from lengths of worn-out line or "tow," but from new, long hemp strands. The highest quality new hemp line or oakum is made from the strong fibers from center of the stalks of the cannabis plant, which are whitish in color. (Oakum used by plumbers to caulk iron pipe joints is usually made from tarred jute or burlap.)
 
"Fibers and flyings" are what fill the air in a textile mill or rope walk and if you've ever been in a running textile mill, you will know that there is a huge cloud of fibers, little bits and pieces of broken fiber and dust, and "flyings" which are longer thin threads thrown off in the milling or spinning process, which must be continually cleaned up as they pose a large fire hazard. "Flyings" from the mills and ropewalks were used to make high quality oakum. 
 
Oakum is made by taking long fibers soaked in thick pine tar and simply twisting and rolling them into "ropes." The caulker has to prepare the oakum by unraveling lengths of the loosely twisted fiber from the loose ball (or "bale") of oakum and rolling the pine tar-soaked strands back and forth between the palm of his hand and the top of his thigh. (If you see a guy in the boatyard with his pants covered with tar on the front of his upper leg, he's a caulker! )
 
So, "The white ocham to be from flying & not from ground toes or decaid White ropes." means, "The white oakum specified here is to be made from mill flyings of the top-quality virgin white fiber of the plant and not from ground up tow or recycled rotten white hemp rope."
 
Quality oakum will result in a longer-lasting caulking job. Using old, weak fiber from worn out, rotten, or "decaid" rope will rot and decay in short order. The Admiralty wanted to use "the good stuff" because they didn't want to have to recaulk in short order because the stuff used was rotten to begin with.
 
Caulking mallet, caulking irons, and untarred "bale" of white hemp for making up oakum. See: Oakum - Wikipedia
 

The problem is that, if kids don't learn risk awareness at an early age, it will hit the adult even harder and potentially fatally ... you should learn respect of moving things at an early age.

Well, I'll put in my 2 cents.   
 
As kid we didn't have any hills in the subdivision which basically was filled with housing bought by folks on the GI Bill of WWII.   However, there was a large hill probably 1/4 mile away or so that was undeveloped and had tall grass.  Our summer time had many trips down that hill on either a big sheet of cardboard or an old car hood (several were stashed there by us kids).   Great memories of fun times. BTW, the hill was known in the neighborhood as "Cardboard Hill".   
 
Back then, we'd leave home in the morning and not come home till dark and no one worried about us. We'd wander (usually on bikes) to the hill in on direction, the grade school in another, and then there was creek on a large state owned farm that was a great place on hot day to sit in the water and talk.  

Living in constant fear is corrosive.
 
Since we're all telling dodgy hill stories, here's my variant. I grew up in one of the Great Lakes snow belt zones, where 2-3 feet of snow was a pretty normal ground cover. We lived in a farmhouse atop a large hill, with a steep wooded dropoff behind the house. So one winter some friends and I built an Olympic-inspired luge run down that hill by packing down the snow into a tight, smooth chute that wound its way in sharp curves between the trees all the way to the bottom. Then we hooked up a hose and iced down that sucker. We must have engineered it well because it's a wonder no one flew out of the chute and cracked themselves open on a tree; that thing was fast!

The problem is that, if kids don't learn risk awareness at an early age, it will hit the adult even harder and potentially fatally ... you should learn respect of moving things at an early age.

Thank you very much, gentlemen, for your kind comments.
 
@amateur Well, when you look really close, it is not always as perfect as you may think. However, I try to use the airbrush, whenever possible, because this gives an even coating. Spraying white is difficult due to relative coarse pigment particles, black on the other hand is easy, because these particles are probably the smallest. Everything else is somewhere in between.
I am mainly using Vallejo model air and Schmincke acrylics. I also tend to use less glue, but rather varnish to cement parts in place. Most parts have some sort of mechanical lock as well, so that the glue just provides added strength. The varnish can also cleaned up with solvent - when the cementing takes place before painting.
 
Forgot to mention: some time ago @Toolmaker sent me a PM about braiding wires to imitate chain, a method that looked quite convincing. I tried it with the 0.06 mm Konstantan-wire I need to use and this is just to flimsy. It breaks very easily, when handled and I was not successful at that size. I gather with wire of 0.1 mm diametre or above it should work. In order to get the 'links' even one needs to pull quite a bit.

I gather the design of the model followed the full-scale industrial design practice - there, all parts would have been machined in special jigs and the tolerances would be a factor 10 less stringent probably.
 
The design is a bit overconstrained for individual machining, because you have to hit the feed-nut at the right place and the right angle.
 
On my watchmakers lathes, which would be of similar size, but with very close tolerances, the round feed-nuts are floating in a close-tolerance bore. This gives you two degrees of freedom: for vertical float and angular misalignment. They are also slit, allowing them to be tightened for compensating wear. Most of this is, of course, not relevant on a model.