wefalck

The problem is, that it only works for the set of diameters provide in the tool ...

In spite of a week's travel for business, I managed to get done a part:
 
*********************

The Main Hatch
 
The main hatch will be shown closed, so I could revert to my usual technique of milling it from a solid piece of acrylic glass. In fact, the piece forms a core and as sharp corners for the recess into which the hatch covers fit is needed, around it strips of 1 mm acrylic glass were cemented. This arrangement was milled to size and shape as shown previously. To make it visually more interesting a quarter-round cove was milled into the outer edge with a 0.5 mm ball-burr. In real life, this would also prevent the wood from splintering, when hit by something during loading.

Milling a quarter-round cove into the coaming of the main-hatch
 
The cover was assumed to be in three parts, each planked with short lengths of plank. The cover is made from a tight-fitting piece of bakelite paper into which the planks were engraved, as was done for the deck-planks. Making hatch and cover in separate pieces allows to paint it with sharp edges. The cover will be simulated to be natural wood.

The main-hatch with the cover inserted
 
Eventually, the hatch will be fitted with clamps for the battens to tie-down the canvas cover. That will be done at a later stage to avoid damage during fitting the part into the deck.
 
To be continued …

In spite of a week's travel for business, I managed to get done a part:
 
*********************

The Main Hatch
 
The main hatch will be shown closed, so I could revert to my usual technique of milling it from a solid piece of acrylic glass. In fact, the piece forms a core and as sharp corners for the recess into which the hatch covers fit is needed, around it strips of 1 mm acrylic glass were cemented. This arrangement was milled to size and shape as shown previously. To make it visually more interesting a quarter-round cove was milled into the outer edge with a 0.5 mm ball-burr. In real life, this would also prevent the wood from splintering, when hit by something during loading.

Milling a quarter-round cove into the coaming of the main-hatch
 
The cover was assumed to be in three parts, each planked with short lengths of plank. The cover is made from a tight-fitting piece of bakelite paper into which the planks were engraved, as was done for the deck-planks. Making hatch and cover in separate pieces allows to paint it with sharp edges. The cover will be simulated to be natural wood.

The main-hatch with the cover inserted
 
Eventually, the hatch will be fitted with clamps for the battens to tie-down the canvas cover. That will be done at a later stage to avoid damage during fitting the part into the deck.
 
To be continued …

Look for a building log on the Norwegian GJØA, I seem to remember that she used a chain drive from a petrol engine to the spill/winch.

I think that it would have been a chain-drive. Leather belts would break, if humid and frozen. I have never seen belt-drives on ships, but chain-drives seem to have been fairly common at a time before electrical direct drives became the norm.
 

Excellent metal work as usual.
 
What do you use as heat-sink to prevent parts already soldered from falling apart?

I think that it would have been a chain-drive. Leather belts would break, if humid and frozen. I have never seen belt-drives on ships, but chain-drives seem to have been fairly common at a time before electrical direct drives became the norm.
 

Excellent metal work as usual.
 
What do you use as heat-sink to prevent parts already soldered from falling apart?

Excellent metal work as usual.
 
What do you use as heat-sink to prevent parts already soldered from falling apart?

Yes, some of the tugs did have indeed rather sleek hulls.
 
How will you simulate the plating?

I think that it would have been a chain-drive. Leather belts would break, if humid and frozen. I have never seen belt-drives on ships, but chain-drives seem to have been fairly common at a time before electrical direct drives became the norm.
 

Thank you all for your feedback and likes!  
And I have a small continuation of brass soldering.  These are the upper tiers of the bow superstructure.

Dear all
 
Thank you all for your comments and likes!
I ve been working on the boat, walking a thin line between the Admiral's wrath and getting a few things actually done, so time for another update.
 
Rob Ross used to say that there are no mistakes, only happy accidents. There sure have been many happy accidents so far with this boat! Usually my CAD drafts are pretty accurate but as I move on, I am scratching my head as 1+1 does not always make 2, I cannot figure out what I was actually drafting. But so far I managed to more or less fix things.
 
So planking is finished! You will see that the sheer strake, or rather half of it, is missing. The reason is that Hercules has a tall bulwark and it would be difficult to securely fix it in place so I thought it made sense to merge the sheer strake with the bulwark. Now Hercules is 150 feet long and made of steel so the planks are completely unrealistic but they do make a nice hull!



The card templates (there were even more than these) show how much work actually planking involves with spilling and everything - still I had only 2 half planks that I had to re do as they came out very wrong.

One of the many happy accidents is in the following photos. I did not really want to buy new wood so I had just enough pear for the planking. I managed to snap the very last length I had left, with just a half plank left to do! I managed to fix this by making it in two parts, narrow escape!

Then lots of Osmo filler and lots of sanding. Of course I did not read the instructions that state to thin the filler with 15% water and I struggled wasting a lot of the expensive filler. Prior to that, all the hundreds of screws were replaced by tree nails.



Much more filling and sanding will be needed but a big chunk of the hull preparation has been done.
 
Then I made the bulwarks but only after I managed to snap the little stem extension not once but twice. I had a sheet of maple and three sheets of mahogany left so I used maple - what a nice wood it is! It will all be primed and painted black.


 



But something felt wrong. I went back to my CAD drafts and the plans and indeed, the bulwark/planks were a couple of centimeters short. The happy accidents are piling up!
Now, Hercules has this little feature at the stern where there is a small flat vertical segment, this has to be made by laminating thin strips which gives the opportunity to correct the mistake above.
So I used some thin beech strips I had. I dislike beech due to its huge movement in service but it is so nice to bend, just with water it can be tied in a knot.


I just used PVA to laminate the strips, if I had used epoxy it would have been very messy.

Then rough cut to shape and screwed in place.



I know it looks rough, I had trouble with the stern drafting in CAD and did not really spend time on it, I hope I ll fix it with a bit of filler, bit of sanding, paint on top.
 
I am enjoying this boat, it is very different from anything I have built so fat.
 
On another note, the postman dropped a cardboard tube with some plans which are currently being processed. There will be a new log starting, this time for a far more complex boat that will take a long time to build, a boat that from the first time I saw it I new I just have to make! 
 
Take care all
 
Vaddoc

For real clean cuts sandwich the brass or other soft metal between thin sheets of plywood and run them through your Preac, Byrnes or other small saw.  I usually have a sandwich of Ply with a  metal inner sheet glued together so when I need to cut a thin strip I can do so w/o delay.  I used to use Duco Glue and dissolve the glue on the sandwich in Acetone but I now use Weldbond II or III and use Isopropyl Alcohol as the solvent.  No burrs or wavy edges at all.
Kurt
 

Log entry 11 - stern and raised deck
 
I had forgotten that I had to finish the lower stern before I can move on to painting! 
 
So I have been working on that, cutting out paper templates, scanning, drawing in CAD, laser cutting and attaching. This is the result:
 

 

 

 
I had to use a bit of filler, but I think I need to get another kind. This one is a bit grainy and I won't sand as smooth as the surrounding wood. I think it won't be hodden enough under paint. So I will look for something smoother to use on top. 
 
Before painting, I also need the raised deck st the stern installed, as the little vertical piece need to be white like the inner bulwarks. 
 

 
I have drawn and cut the railing as well, as that is nicer to do map out on the unpainted hull. In these images, it is just loosely attached with a few pins, but it gives a good idea of the future appearance of the ship. 
 

 

 

 
As you can see, they double as channels for the shroud rigging - an interesting arrangement and not one I have seen replicated in the few other models I have seen of these small Danish schooners (see examples a few posts back by me and Beckmann). But it is quite clear from the original plans.
 
And I couldn't help myself, but had to try to place the short 12 pounders on the deck. I think it will be a nice looking deck eventually 🙂.
 
Thanks for looking!
 
BR
TJM

In spite of a week's travel for business, I managed to get done a part:
 
*********************

The Main Hatch
 
The main hatch will be shown closed, so I could revert to my usual technique of milling it from a solid piece of acrylic glass. In fact, the piece forms a core and as sharp corners for the recess into which the hatch covers fit is needed, around it strips of 1 mm acrylic glass were cemented. This arrangement was milled to size and shape as shown previously. To make it visually more interesting a quarter-round cove was milled into the outer edge with a 0.5 mm ball-burr. In real life, this would also prevent the wood from splintering, when hit by something during loading.

Milling a quarter-round cove into the coaming of the main-hatch
 
The cover was assumed to be in three parts, each planked with short lengths of plank. The cover is made from a tight-fitting piece of bakelite paper into which the planks were engraved, as was done for the deck-planks. Making hatch and cover in separate pieces allows to paint it with sharp edges. The cover will be simulated to be natural wood.

The main-hatch with the cover inserted
 
Eventually, the hatch will be fitted with clamps for the battens to tie-down the canvas cover. That will be done at a later stage to avoid damage during fitting the part into the deck.
 
To be continued …

Continuing on the sail, I first laced it to the mast hoops, securing all the knots with a dab of superglue. The photo below is from before trimming the loose ends.

 
Next, the robands on the gaff. I was initially going to just loop the rope through the eyelet in the sail and then directly around the gaff, as below.

 
But, looking at photos, I decided it would look more accurate to first do a half hitch through the eyelet around the boltrope, and then around the gaff, as below. Subtle, but worth it.

 
As with the mast hoops, I first tied off everything around the sail before attaching the gaff spar.

 
The throat took some thought, as I wasn't sure whether it should be attached to the gaff or the mast, and once I decided the former, it wasn't clear how to tie it off, as it's located at the gaff jaws. After a bit of searching, I noticed in the photo below that there was a thin rope running around the gaff jaws.

Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/luchinmardones/5232587713/in/photostream/lightbox/
 
 
After seeing it in a few other photos, I now think that the throat was simply tied off around the jaws on many lanchas, so I did that, as seen below.

 
To make the robands, I used the same "fake splice" as I've used for stropping blocks: tie a half hitch, secure with a bit of glue, and trim the ends tightly.

 
A quick check, with the gaff temporarily held at the right angle with scrap thread and wire, to make sure none of the angles are wrong.

 
For the boom, I ultimately decided to go with the continuous loop instead of robands. While it at first looks like the continuous loop uses more rope, that doesn't take into account that each roband needs excess rope that gets trimmed after tying the knot. Handling it as a continuous loop was much easier than doing separate robands. That said, while I've seen a number of photos with a continuous loop lacing on the boom, none of them show that on the gaff spar, so this is accurate.

 
Finally, the photo below shows that, unlike the rest of the mast where hoops were used, the tack was held in place with a wrapping of rope.

Source: https://www.carlosvairo.com/galeria-puerto-montt-lanchas-chilotas
 
This was a pretty straightforward matter to represent.

 
With that, the gaff sail itself is finished! Next up, I need to figure out how to properly represent the hanks on the jib, and add the running rigging. At this point, I have about 1.5 feet of the .35mm rigging left, hopefully I won't need much for the jib.

In spite of a week's travel for business, I managed to get done a part:
 
*********************

The Main Hatch
 
The main hatch will be shown closed, so I could revert to my usual technique of milling it from a solid piece of acrylic glass. In fact, the piece forms a core and as sharp corners for the recess into which the hatch covers fit is needed, around it strips of 1 mm acrylic glass were cemented. This arrangement was milled to size and shape as shown previously. To make it visually more interesting a quarter-round cove was milled into the outer edge with a 0.5 mm ball-burr. In real life, this would also prevent the wood from splintering, when hit by something during loading.

Milling a quarter-round cove into the coaming of the main-hatch
 
The cover was assumed to be in three parts, each planked with short lengths of plank. The cover is made from a tight-fitting piece of bakelite paper into which the planks were engraved, as was done for the deck-planks. Making hatch and cover in separate pieces allows to paint it with sharp edges. The cover will be simulated to be natural wood.

The main-hatch with the cover inserted
 
Eventually, the hatch will be fitted with clamps for the battens to tie-down the canvas cover. That will be done at a later stage to avoid damage during fitting the part into the deck.
 
To be continued …

In spite of a week's travel for business, I managed to get done a part:
 
*********************

The Main Hatch
 
The main hatch will be shown closed, so I could revert to my usual technique of milling it from a solid piece of acrylic glass. In fact, the piece forms a core and as sharp corners for the recess into which the hatch covers fit is needed, around it strips of 1 mm acrylic glass were cemented. This arrangement was milled to size and shape as shown previously. To make it visually more interesting a quarter-round cove was milled into the outer edge with a 0.5 mm ball-burr. In real life, this would also prevent the wood from splintering, when hit by something during loading.

Milling a quarter-round cove into the coaming of the main-hatch
 
The cover was assumed to be in three parts, each planked with short lengths of plank. The cover is made from a tight-fitting piece of bakelite paper into which the planks were engraved, as was done for the deck-planks. Making hatch and cover in separate pieces allows to paint it with sharp edges. The cover will be simulated to be natural wood.

The main-hatch with the cover inserted
 
Eventually, the hatch will be fitted with clamps for the battens to tie-down the canvas cover. That will be done at a later stage to avoid damage during fitting the part into the deck.
 
To be continued …

Thanks, @Glen McGuire! I agree, I think the second option looks less bulky. 
 
Thanks, @wefalck, it's good to know that robands and continuous lacing can be mixed. While it would make a lot of sense to leave the foot of the gaff sail loose, photos show it was attached. Below, the looped continuous lacing is very clearly shown:

Source: https://www.carlosvairo.com/galeria-puerto-montt-lanchas-chilotas
 
Of course, that photo's from the early 1980s, so I wanted to check earlier photos as well. The photo below is from 1940 and shows what look to me like robands:

Source: https://www.bibliotecanacionaldigital.gob.cl/bnd/629/w3-article-613541.html
 
At this point, I'm leaning toward robands on both gaff and boom, as I think it might use less of my dwindling supply of .35mm rope.

Glad to have been of service ...
 
As to the robands vs. continous lacing, I have seen both used on the same sail. I didn't check on the photographs, but was the foot of the sail actually tied to the boom? On vernacular craft sails were often loose-footed, as this allowed tricing them up quickly and thus take the pressure out of a sail e.g. in an emergency.
 
Whether and how a sail was tied to the boom may also be depending on whether the boom was used as a cargo derrick. Robands may be easier to untie than to unravel a continuous lacing.
 

Glad to have been of service ...
 
As to the robands vs. continous lacing, I have seen both used on the same sail. I didn't check on the photographs, but was the foot of the sail actually tied to the boom? On vernacular craft sails were often loose-footed, as this allowed tricing them up quickly and thus take the pressure out of a sail e.g. in an emergency.
 
Whether and how a sail was tied to the boom may also be depending on whether the boom was used as a cargo derrick. Robands may be easier to untie than to unravel a continuous lacing.
 

Glad to have been of service ...
 
As to the robands vs. continous lacing, I have seen both used on the same sail. I didn't check on the photographs, but was the foot of the sail actually tied to the boom? On vernacular craft sails were often loose-footed, as this allowed tricing them up quickly and thus take the pressure out of a sail e.g. in an emergency.
 
Whether and how a sail was tied to the boom may also be depending on whether the boom was used as a cargo derrick. Robands may be easier to untie than to unravel a continuous lacing.
 

Glad to have been of service ...
 
As to the robands vs. continous lacing, I have seen both used on the same sail. I didn't check on the photographs, but was the foot of the sail actually tied to the boom? On vernacular craft sails were often loose-footed, as this allowed tricing them up quickly and thus take the pressure out of a sail e.g. in an emergency.
 
Whether and how a sail was tied to the boom may also be depending on whether the boom was used as a cargo derrick. Robands may be easier to untie than to unravel a continuous lacing.
 

Thanks, all! Yes, Wefalck's bark technique is really excellent. If anyone gives it a try, my main advice is to not judge it until it's dry, as it looks odd and fuzzy when the paint is still wet but really sharpens up once it dries.
 
I've continued to advance on the sails. I added the bolt rope to the gaff sail and, taking advantage of a brief break in the clouds, applied the transparent spray. I then measured and drilled holes where needed to attach the various bits of rigging.

 
I also added a loop of rope to the clew of the jib, as photos showed that the jib sheet ran through a loop here.

 
Next, it was time to start actually attaching the sails. After looking at several photos, I decided that thin wire mast hoops would be the most realistic-looking option. I made them out of 28-gauge wire, wrapped around a length of dowel. The dowel was a little oversized, so I trimmed a bit off the ends before gluing them shut with superglue.

 
Next, lacing the mast hoops to the sail. A lot of other build logs show people adding the mast hoops directly to the sail and then sliding the whole thing onto the mast, which which would definitely be easier, but with everything already on my mast, this option wouldn't work for me. I drew inspiration from diagrams in John Leather’s The Gaff Rig Handbook and examples in a lot of build logs to figure out how best to loop it. I experimented with using fly tying thread, but found it a bit too thin and tricky to work with as strands kept coming off it when threading it. Instead, I went with. 35mm rope. Initially, after looping it through itself around the hoop and running it through the eyelet twice (once from each side), I tied a simple knot on each side with the remaining thread, as shown below:

 
I had a hard time getting it tight on each side, though, and was worried that it was a bit bulky. So I retried by just tying the loose ends off to each other.

 
I'm still deciding whether the first or second option looks best--feel free to weigh in! Both are simplifications from actual practice, but completely following how it was actually done would result in a very bulky knot here. While I decide, I've been attaching the lacing to the mast hoops.

 
Finally, I'm trying to figure out how to attach the sail to the gaff spar and boom. It's a bit tricky. I've seen some photos where the boom very clearly has a continuous rope lacing, and others where the gaff spar very clearly uses robands. So both options seem to have been used. But would a single boat combine both methods--e.g., continuous on the boom and robands on the gaff--or would it make more sense to be consistent?