Mike Y

This is part of the blueprint for the stern frame.
 

 
 
 
The original piece was an aluminum bronze casting. I would have liked to make it of brass, but I don't have the tools to do a good job. I have the tools and a fair amount of experience carving wood so I decided to give that a try.
 
The nice thing about this drawing is it shows a lot of the cross sections, and that tells how to remove material from the piece.
 
The casting had  a "foot" projecting forward of the base that fit into a cutout in the keel. I have omitted this foot and cut the piece straight on the forward edge.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
I have never worked with Castello boxwood before so this was a learning experience. It is a relatively hard wood with fine grain. Growth rings are evident, but there was no noticeable difference in carving the darker and lighter parts. It carved easily with no chipping or splinters, and holds a fine edge.
 

The first thing to do was clean up the rough cut piece and trim to near the lines. I also glued paper outlines of the top, bottom and ends to show where wood needed to be removed. Then I used rasps and files to cut away the unwanted wood until I had  a piece of the approximate shape.
 
I completed most of the work in an afternoon. The part shown here is still a bit oversized on all surfaces. I will wait until it is installed on the hull to file and sand the part down to be flush with surfaces on the keel/deadwood.
 
The rudder pivots on the cylindrical part at the end of the long arm. The wide upper part will be shaped to fit flush with the hull planking.
 
 
 
I took the advice of bdgiantman2 and got the five blade propeller from Bluejacket Shipcrafters.  It is slightly oversized but fits easily in the opening formed by the stern frame. That was a LOT easier than designing a propeller in CAD and then 3D printing it!
 
I plan to use a 1/8 inch (3.175 mm) wooden dowel as the propeller shaft. Epoxy will glue the prop to the shaft.
 
I will use the hole in the stern frame as a template to drill a hole into the keel/deadwood of the hull. The wooden prop shaft will also serve as a pin to help hold the stern frame in place.
 
Now I need to fit the piece to he hull.

Thanks guys.
Greg the pins are easy to make, I think they rank amongst the top 10 most used tools in my build.
Ben, with my scroll saw they were relative easy to make and there were no remakes :-) 
 
I couldn't find an appropriated sized piece of brass for the iron knee so I made it from boxwood and tinted it black with Fiebing's leather paint
I'm also doing lot's of mortice cutting for the remaining carlings and ledges.
 


 
A little off topic, but it was time to make a better storage for my chisels. They used to wander over my bench  with the tip protected by a little piece of isolation foam. This was a nice little project, keeps them safe and organized  
 

 
 
 
Remco
 

So, fighting my deamons, both real and imaginary, takes time.
 
But a quick update on the joinery I can give you (hopefully it still qualifies as "delightful", I guess John will be the judge of that).
Note though, that the aft three pieces are not glued in at this photo.

Then I got me a puzzle.
However there are some drawbacks in comparison to a regular "off the shelf" puzzle.
1. It doesn't state on the box how many pieces it is. In fact, I didn't even get a box for it.
2. The instructions are "sparse", and that is stretching it a bit. It only says, "Start outwards and work you way towards the middle". Not very meny clues in that statement.
3. There is not even a clear picture of what the end result should look like! No box art or anything. As Whitney sang "how should I know???"
Whish me luck guys!

On a slightly more serious note, the deck is not laid workboat style, i.e. straight laid. Instead it is laid yacht style, meaning a slight curve for a more gracious appearance.
 

Working on filling pieces.... first made a 15cm long stripe of wood and on its edge cut a groove 1x1mm, taking into account that filling pieces are not equal in hight, based on plan from plate #6. For example, this one has a groove on the bottom so I cut extra length..

.. put it in place..

.. mark its hight...


.. and cut ..


... then with a small amount of glue, put in place between frames..


.. end results... not perfect...


Keep into account the groove (or water channel) direction changes at frame #22..

Happy modelling..

My two cents in the "should I buy the kit" discusion
 
With the knowledge I have now of the 'kit' I would not buy it again. Apart from the hefty price tag it's more of a scratch build starter package than a kit. And although all the parts are precut, Mr Hunt had no good control of his CNC router leaving ugly dents in every part. Cleaning up is tedious and will harm the overall shape of the parts. I stopped using them a long time ago....
Building the kit is just as complex as making it from scratch, so if I could go back in time I would:
 
Get the Swan plans from admiraltymodels.com 
Get the Swan framing package from hobbymillusa.com 
Get TFFM Vol I, II and III from seawatchbooks.com, well I got them as you need the books even if you have the 'kit' as the practicum won't take you all the way.
 
(ps just a happy customer from the above company's nothing more) 
 
Buy yourself a good scroll saw and table saw, you can easily squeeze this into the budget of the kit price you've just saved from spending. And it's a good investment for future projects. 
Take a plunge into the wonderful world of scratch building, it's not as difficult as I had imagined especially with all the help and knowledge here on MSW you can tap in to. And one other thing, if you mess up a kit part like the hawse timbers ( it took me more than one attempt  ) you're in trouble. But if you make your own parts you just cut a new set and try again.....
 
Now lets get back on topic Thank you Martin for your kind words.
 
Current state of the lower deck. Progress is slow bud steady.
 

 

 
Remco
 
 
 
 
 

Just thought i would complete the post by showing the technique of my made up push blocks and sticks. I have removed the fence to take the photographs. The only problem with this surface planer is that the plates are quite short both on the in and out feed. In a perfect world i would make a jig that fits the planer at the same height of both, an extension, which is only needed for very long pieces. The push blocks have sand paper under them to get a good grip on the wood being processed. There are lots of YouTube videos for those of you who have never used a surface planer or jointer. 

OK, here is a little update.... started to work on frames...






No much to report... just cut, sand, fit, glue...

Happy modelling..

Hi photo Anson thanks for yours like.

My first carving attempt.
Mike R

I decided to order another batch which I will process in the next week. This takes me to 29 board feet of finished lumber, much more than I will ever need.  It was cut in April 2024 so it’s nice and dry. 

A bit more work at the bench this weekend - I decided to make the lower deck hatch. Here the practicum is a bit at odds with the model. The practicum speaks of a partial "aft hatch" behind this one, but this can't be, since the mast partners are immediately behind this hatch. There is also a lack of information in the practicum on the exact locations of the sheet and jeer bitts, so I'm a little confused as to where these should be - there is some info on this in the photos provided with the practicum, but it isn't really adequate to locating them....In any event, I did also go so far as to mill 11" and 10" square strips for the pump shafts (6) and the bitts (4) to use as blanks for working out the mast partners - though the upper deck framing will need at least to be partially complete before finalising these.
 
The hatch came together pretty easily. I took a card template of its basic dimensions and laid this out on a sheet of scrap ply. I then arranged some battens around it to lock in the head ledges and coamings in the proper place. The head ledges and coamings fit together with lap joints which are pretty straightforward. 
 
The gratings were made from material scavenged from my never-to-be-finished Syren kit - these gratings are of roughly the correct size and were of sufficient quality (unlike those often supplied by other kit mnanufacturers) for these purposes. Because the gratings when assembled did not fit exactly right, I needed to add a couple of battens along the head ledges (image with clamps below) so that the gratings looked correct.
 
Overall this went very smoothly. And it's nice to start creating more of the superstructural features of the model, which immediate (I think) make it more satisfying to the eye even in its unfinished state.
 
Enjoy the photos and happy modelling
hamilton

Whoa - I see my last actual update here was way back in October!! There has been precious little time for modelling, unfortunately, though I did spend a bit of time over the holidays doing some planning for the MS Flying Fish, which I don't plan on digging into for a while, but which drew my attention while taking a look through my inventory. Figured it never hurts to start planning and it was a nice break from inhaling sawdust and trying to wrap my head around the hanging knees. But I bit to bullet today and managed to complete these nettlesome parts....
 
I made a card pattern from the plans and tested it against each of the hanging knee positions (there are only 4 in total, so those of you building a full model in this style can please ignore or forgive my whining). It worked reasonable well for all of them so I traced it into some 6" boxwood sheet that I milled for this and other purposes. 
 
I decided it was best to go through the process of fabricating and fitting one of the knees before doing any of the others. I was not aiming for perfection, but for as nice a fit as I could achieve with my limited experience. In trying to fit and adjust the part I realised that it would be much easier to do if I committed to installing the well, pillar and lower deck framing assembly - so I did that first. It was then much easier to lightly clamp the part in place and test its fit and positioning. After applying a couple of coats of poly, I drill out for bolt heads on the inboard edge and aft faces where they bolt onto the deck beams - using brass nails for the bolts. In retrospect it would have been better to use only the shafts of these nails as the heads are pretty large at this scale....
 
In any event, once the first knee was in, the others went quite quickly. For next steps, I'm not entirely sure what I'll do next - I know I need to make blanks for the various pump shafts and bits, so I can mark out their positions on the lower deck framing prior to planking & completing the lower deck mast partners and hatch....but I also don't think it would hurt to do the waterways and in-board hull planking between decks....On the other hand, I feel like I should consider the upper deck framing, even if installing it is a ways off, since positioning of the pump shafts and bitts is necessary there too and it would make sense to mark positions on both decks to ensure decent passage of these parts....Regardless, it's also hard to say how much time I'll have in the near future - work is busy, lots going on with the family, and the Canadian economy is about to get pretty shaky, meaning we're tightening our belts up here.
 
In any case, enjoy the photos and happy modelling!
hamilton
 

I have received the boxwood sheet that I needed for the stern frame. Here are the first steps for creating this piece.
 

 
The piece cut from the 5/16 inch (7.9 mm) boxwood sheet nicely with the scroll saw. Now I will finish the carving with knives and files. This will take a while!

Things are moving along well, and I’m learning some hard lessons along the way! Turns out I can’t build three frames in the same time it took to build one. That said, over two weeks, I only had two full workdays, so my bench time wasn’t bad.
 
I had been tracking about 6–8 hours per frame, but building three took around 12 hours—with errors. I also had to build the frame-squaring jig, which took some extra time.
 
Rushing remains my biggest challenge.
 

 
My biggest issue was not thinking through the grain direction carefully enough, which resulted in at least one inherently weak frame snapping. Unfortunately, it didn’t break until the very end—after I had already mounted it to the keel. I’ll likely need to redo this one.
 
I also need to refine my build sequence. I initially tried fitting the filler pieces and sweep ports before mounting, but that approach didn’t work well. Cleaning them up without the rest of the hull in place made things much more complicated, which contributed to the breakage.
 
For now, I’ll focus on building everything out and hold off on cleanup, even if it means dealing with a messy look for a while—something that’s challenging for me. I have a strong impulse to do as much as possible upfront to minimize work later, but I need to adjust my approach.
 

I decided to set up my Proxxon to mill out all the gun and sweep ports, which has saved a tremendous amount of time. Since there is so little material to remove, I conducted some tests and determined that I can accurately guide the pieces under the bit by hand, rather than spending extra time mounting them. This approach proved to be very successful.
 

These metal squaring blocks have turned out to be a blessing.  I have four, and cant tell you how versatile and useful they are.   I probably use them more than any right-angle.   I bought as a part of larger pack of things, and it turns out I could have thrown the other stuff away!
   
The half frame at the gunport of frame three is the one I snapped.  Its glue at the moment, but not well and its ugly so I may just go ahead a discard it.   We'll see.   

While in Taiwan I went to Wood Craft Fair and purchased some interesting planers.
Facebook links:
lukangtools - Chisels, planers, etc. - Taiwan
https://www.facebook.com/lukangtools
sincerecraft - Taiwan
Check out their facebook page and some of their videos.
https://www.facebook.com/sincerecraft.tw

This is the starboard quarter gallery and stern lights . I have made the quarter gallery lights detachable to show the seat-of-ease.

I will be very happy to move on to something a lot less fiddly.
Cheers
Dick

The last batch of ropes is finally finished. In total, I wound about 260 ropes of various thicknesses, the length of the rope is about 180 cm. And now I can start working with wood again.

Thanks for all the likes, and kind words guys.  I appreciate it!  Al, yeah, as I said in one of my above posts, I like putting the effort into the photography aspect.  I usually build smaller models, so it's been a challenge photographing something this size at times.  And to answer your question, yes, I do all the dusty work there.  Since it's in my home office, I am constantly using a small shop-vac to clean up sawdust while I'm working, and I wipe the work surface down with a damp sponge after each time I've worked on the build.  One of the reasons I'm making all the spars before I start rigging is so I can get past the sawdust producing stage and finally not have to be constantly cleaning up sawdust.  While it looks clean, that room needs a deep cleaning soon.  Here is a closeup of how my work area looks after I put my tools away (it helps I don't have many), and do a quick cleanup after every build session.
 
Erik

I finished the woodwork on the mast.  Everything is square and lines up as it should.  The further I get into this project the more I am compulsively measuring, test fitting, etc.  It really does prevent any nasty surprises down the road.  I made the mast tree so that all the parts would fit with light press fitting, so the tolerances are tight enough to assemble it without the need for glue.  This made it easier to test fit on the mast.  I did use glue for the final assembly.  The cheeks were a bit tricky.  Being new to this ship building gig, I wasn't quite sure how all the shapes are accomplished.  I have David Antscherl's book The Fully Framed Model - Rigging a Sixth Rate Sloop of 1767-1780 - Volume IV which has some clear photos of what material to take off the mast.  Though I see a couple of areas in my photos below that need some touch up, overall I'm happy withe the way the mast turned out.
 
Erik

Continuing to slog along on this model. Next up we have the lower wing. The construction method is dodgy IMO. The two spars must be passed through the fuselage before the wing can be completely assembled, i.e., one can't assemble the entire wing off the model and then mate it to the fuselage. At best you can assemble half the wing, run the spars through the fuselage, and then finish the other half.
 
But there are other problems as well. As mentioned before, the laser cut frames are too thick, which means the slots where they interlock are too narrow, so they must be widened. Then, once I got the spars inserted through the fuselage, I discovered that the fuselage sides covered about half of the slots for the inboard ribs (of which there are only two per side). That meant I had to carefully reduce the thickness of each rib at its two slots down to about one-quarter of its original thickness, which makes each rib very weak, even when soaked in CA. It's no surprise, then, that one of them broke during assembly.
 
And the icing on the cake: After I got everything assembled, I discovered that the wings are not perpendicular to the fuselage center line. 😑
 

 
I am edging dangerously close to the point where I start thinking about other, better-designed kits that I could be working on. 😒

The outstanding paper modeler who built this beautiful Fokker E.V, included that "structure" between the guns: 
 

 
  
 
Gene K
 

Very neat! Thanks for showing your milling setups, that is extremely useful and I am curiously examining every photo 😊

Time for some side projects  
 
Fist I was concerned about the side-to-side alignment inside the hull.
The height measurement gauge is asymmetrical, and flipping it around may introduce some measurement errors. So I wanted to make a pointy thing that can be moved side-by-side on the top gantry. 
There was a question in another log - "what is the mill for" - here is a classic example of a simple part that should be square with a precise and square-profiled recess. Mill is much more consistent and requires less skill than a "well tuned table saw", for example.

For the "pointy bit" I needed something very soft to avoid scratching the part. Basswood from the Model Shipways kit was ideal - I use it a lot as a soft lining for clamps and jigs. 
I wanted to practice milling it in a rotary table instead of using lathe or a rotary tool. Not the best idea, the finish was not smooth at all (though such a soft wood is not making the task easier)

The resulting gadget. When in action - only one clamp is holding the arm in the correct position, while the assembly slides side to side. Should work even with curved beams, by probing the ends of the beam.

In action:

Next up was the problem of wood stock preparation.
Majority of the interior construction is made out of relatively small lumber, 2-4mm in 1:48 scale.  I could never cut those perfectly on a table saw, they always need a lot of finessing later on, resulting in an uneven strip. The wood sheets I have are 1 or 2 or 3mm thick, so more sanding is needed if you need something in between. The strip preparation was taking too much efforts.
A thickness sander would be ideal, but the only one in a small scale is Byrnes, which is rather a collector item nowadays.
DYI options are not appealing either, and they are still noisy and dusty.
Another alternative is a thickness planing jig. Most of them are too complicated for my task - with knobs and adjustments leading to inaccuracies, so I decided to use spacers. The range of required thicknesses is rather narrow - on of the largest parts (gun deck beam) is just around 4mm thick. 
 
Decided to build the jig out of scrap piece of walnut. Did not want to risk using plywood, the grooves might end up on a wrong layer, resulting in an uneven surface. They are tiny, but need to be smooth. 
 
Cutting precise grooves on a table saw is not so easy, but slow and steady does the job

Router plane helps to clean up the bottom of the groove:

Resulting jig, custom made for the miniature Veritas bench plane:

Spacers are made out of styrene, very good material for that. Easy to get in a variety of thicknesses, affordable, does not warp with moisture, fairly hard (to avoid compressing too much when planing). I have cut a bunch of spacers with a smallest increment of 0.25mm, should be enough for the range of thicknesses I need.

Jig in action:

Quite happy with it! Simple jig, but very effective. And perfectly quiet  
The finish is incredibly smooth out of the box, so I can use the part right away with no further surface cleanup or sanding. If necessary - should not be hard to add a sanding block for the same jig. 
I could easily get down to 1mm thickness, anything lower - and it is better to hold the "tail" of the strip rather than push it into the stop, otherwise it might get wavy.
 

Next up was the problem of wood stock preparation.
Majority of the interior construction is made out of relatively small lumber, 2-4mm in 1:48 scale.  I could never cut those perfectly on a table saw, they always need a lot of finessing later on, resulting in an uneven strip. The wood sheets I have are 1 or 2 or 3mm thick, so more sanding is needed if you need something in between. The strip preparation was taking too much efforts.
A thickness sander would be ideal, but the only one in a small scale is Byrnes, which is rather a collector item nowadays.
DYI options are not appealing either, and they are still noisy and dusty.
Another alternative is a thickness planing jig. Most of them are too complicated for my task - with knobs and adjustments leading to inaccuracies, so I decided to use spacers. The range of required thicknesses is rather narrow - on of the largest parts (gun deck beam) is just around 4mm thick. 
 
Decided to build the jig out of scrap piece of walnut. Did not want to risk using plywood, the grooves might end up on a wrong layer, resulting in an uneven surface. They are tiny, but need to be smooth. 
 
Cutting precise grooves on a table saw is not so easy, but slow and steady does the job

Router plane helps to clean up the bottom of the groove:

Resulting jig, custom made for the miniature Veritas bench plane:

Spacers are made out of styrene, very good material for that. Easy to get in a variety of thicknesses, affordable, does not warp with moisture, fairly hard (to avoid compressing too much when planing). I have cut a bunch of spacers with a smallest increment of 0.25mm, should be enough for the range of thicknesses I need.

Jig in action:

Quite happy with it! Simple jig, but very effective. And perfectly quiet  
The finish is incredibly smooth out of the box, so I can use the part right away with no further surface cleanup or sanding. If necessary - should not be hard to add a sanding block for the same jig. 
I could easily get down to 1mm thickness, anything lower - and it is better to hold the "tail" of the strip rather than push it into the stop, otherwise it might get wavy.