augie

Hi Joe, Good to hear from you!
 
Sjors, Look as close as you would like. Just watch out for splinters.
 
Some planks had been placed, trashed and broken but progress has been made. At the bow I have fit and glued
the first 7 rows which is the first belt. I am working my way to the stern and will finish up the entire belt before
I move onward.
 

 
Here is a demonstration picture of marking off the plank to be cut. The tape is placed on the hull and then using a
pencil you mark the edge of the plank where it meets the existing plank. Then I marked the bulkheads. At each
bulkhead I then mark the height that was already placed on the bulkhead. The tape is taken off and placed on the
wood to be cut out and using a French curve the top marks are connected giving you the shape of the plank. Because
the pencil lines are hard to see on the camera I traced over them with a sharpie so you can see them better.
 

 
I won't use this piece as my tracing was a little to inaccurate.
 
For a much better description follow check's link above!

I got a strip ripped and milled from the pear blank i bought to see how it looks, very nice stuff.  I'm pleased.  Now on to milling many strips...




 
 

A few pics of the frame half.  



 
I wet the frame to show the joints.



 
Also, the grain in the pear I used is not very good, it's from another piece of pear I had, not the blank I bought.  I expect that pear to look much better.
 
And sitting in the bulkhead.  Now time to do this for real...

Tim, as far as board ft, I made some guess calculations but it actually came down to what size boards I could find.  The pear blank I bought was 12" wide 2 feet wide by 6 feet long.  If my guesses are right that's enough to frame my essex twice, but that's figuring no waste, so I do think I have enough.  The boxwwod blank I bought should be more than plenty for planking, etc.
 
Oops, I got my width wrong - the board was 24" wide before they ripped it to 12" for shipping.
 
I got my test frame made.  I was going to cut both sides but just decided I didn't need to for this test.  Also I printed my pattern undersize by accident, so I had to shift it making the other side off anyway.  Yes I could've printed another one, but it just wasn't necessary at point I discovered this.
 
First the pattern was glued to the frame.  I used elmers glue sticks which I saw in Ed T's log thinking that glue wasn't strong enough, but if Ed used it, it must work.  Confirmed!  The glue stick works great.

 
The pattern was cut out with a scroll saw.  Then I sanded the convex convex curve with a belt sander.

 
Then I sanded the concave areas with a spindle sander.


 
Done.


 
You can see an area at the top of the bulkhead flat area that isn't sanded smooth, but that doesn't matter since that will be under the gundeck and won't show.

As I had very limited time for ship model building during the last few weeks I turned to the gratings as an easy target for fast visible results . Image 1 shows the openings which will receive the anchor cables,  images 2 and 3 depict the building of one of the gratings, image 4 shows the shot racks, and in images 5 through 7 the gratings and shot racks mounted on the Syren can be seen.
 

 
 

 
 

 
 

 
 

 
 

 
 

Frank,
 
Let's be glad these are scale planks and that a bit of alcohol (on the planks and sometimes in the builder) help immensely.  Nicely done on removing the offending planks. 
 
As for the "last repair"... hmmm... I always thought that's we did.. non-stop repair? 

A small update..... My first ( and I hope my last)  Alert repair!!...... I was just starting to set the last 2 strakes
and when I started the star-bord side I ran into a little problem.  while trying to fair the bottom plank I took off to much on the top of the plank, so when trying to fit the one on top of it it just wouldn't sit right, so I decide to yank that plank out and start from scratch, because I know that would have really bugged me, but as  things go, while removing that one I screwed up the one beneath it ( and I thought I was so careful) well what
was supposed to be a band aid treatment became  minor surgery. For fear of screwing up any more planks I soaked that one real good with alcohol . As you can see in the last picture the procedure was  a success !!
 Now all I have to do is get it back together again. I'm so glad this is scale planking!! :P
Frank
 
 
 
This is the first plank removed, as you can see the next plank had a piece chipped right near the stem, Thats what prompted me to remove that one also
 

 
 
This is where I carefully soaked and started to remove the second plank
 

 
 
Operation finished!!! Like I said before , I'm glad these are scale planks!!! 
 

 
Frank
 

Thanks Frank and Alistair,i know what you mean now,i'll just put a photo on.Rope on the tiller step re-done.Channel caps to go on later.

Copperplates are done !!!!!
Not at the bottom of the keel because they don't do that at that time.
And when she is standing on the cradle, you don't see it.
For a while she goes on the shelf and I go back to the Fonz.
I hope to see you there also when there is an update to report....
 
Sjors
 
 

So - not quite ready for pictures yet, but have gotten quite a bit done on the old girl this month.  About 2/3 of the way through installing the ceiling, have started framing the wet well, and have the cabing bunks and sole all installed. 
 
Once I get the mid-ship sole installed and finish installing the ceiling I will post some photo's.  Right now, I am struggling with how to clamp the ceiling planks at the curve of the bilge.  No room from below, clamps are too short to come from above. 
 
The area that is giving me fits is right along the sole shown in this picture.
 

 
Given my mechanical skills are minimal (I can change a light bulb, but no metal working talent or experience) and my tools are limited to simple hand tools, any ideas on a good clamping technique that I can devise without having to hire a machinist?
 
Will post a full update with pictures later this week.  Thanks, all!

I've been working on two areas --one successfully and one not so much. The bowsprit is done, but not yet permanently installed. The work included tapering and shaping the piece, making and adding the bees and bee blocks, making and adding the cap, making and adding the dolphin striker, making and adding the gammoning cleats, jib boom saddle and spritsail sling saddle and adding the single woolding. The bowsprit itself is a dowel, stained with golden oak stain, and the other wooden parts are boxwood. The bowsprit will not be mounted until the various hearts and deadeyes have been attached.
 
 I have made the hearts from boxwood strip and the deadeyes I'm using are from Model Expo. I am now in the process of making their collars.
 
The less productive work that I've been doing is on the figurehead. I can only describe my efforts to date, both with clay and wood, to be embarrassingly pathetic. So bad in fact that I took no pictures and won't even describe the results. I need to do some rethinking. 
 
Bob

Hi Bob,
 
I just had a wonderful time reading the 8 pages of posts I'd missed and truely enjoyed every minute of it!
As many have said your workmanship is outstanding and an inspiration to us all. Thanks for taking the
time and sharing it with us.

Well, for better or worse, I installed the cathead supports and eking. I still wasn't entirely happy, but I had had enough of it.  After finishing that, I had a burst of activity and did the seats of ease, the anchor billboards and the waist gang board rails.
 
The supports and eking are boxwood, as are the seats and billboards. The waist railing uses the same brass stanchions that I used for the quarterdeck ladderway, with a rope railing. 
 
The remaining work on the head is the figurehead, the iron railings and supports and the boomkins. The railings and boomkins won't be done until I've made and installed the bowsprit and done the gammoning. My Sculpey and a set of clay modeling tools just arrived from Amazon, so I'll start experimenting with the figurehead. I'll probably also start working on the bowsprit at the same time.
 
Remaining work on the hull consists of the deadeyes, the hammock stanchions and netting, the anchors, the lantern and the boat(s). It is my current intention not to do any of this until I have at least made and installed the lower masts.
 
Bob

This will be the last update for a while as we're off on holiday next week.
 
I'm continuing to fit deck beams in the Pritt.  I had hoped to get more done yesterday, but as it's school holidays here the museum was pretty crowded with lots of people stopping to see what I was doing and to ask questions.
 
It's a little hard to see what's been happening in the photos as all the wood is the same colour, but I think these two show best what the current state of play is.
 
John
 

Thank you for all the "likes" and comments. 
 
Hawse timbers... version 4.5 (1 side was replaced once, the other twice).   The hard part (to me) is that lines drawing give no shape to the bow forward of the first cant fram so I'm fumbling with templates and photos.  I think I'm close.  I've filled in most of the low spots and sanded down the highs.  Cherry has this nice feature  that if it ages a bit and darkens, when you sand it the sanded parts become light. This, coupled with a batten and templates gives you a pretty good idea of where one stands in the fairing.
 
They still need more fairing but I need to hold off a bit.  Frankly, I'm getting tired of the sawdust in the air at the moment.     The reality is, I need to put in the gunport sills and fair those in.  And then the interior.  The deck clamp "knees" (actualy just nubs of wood) need to be worked such to give a smooth sheer to the clamps.  I'll have to hold on the clamps though, until the stern is finished.
 
Yes, I'm avoiding the stern like the plague.  Hahn doesn't give you a template on the plans for the transoms so I'm sorting this out.  I have the stern framing showing height and width of the timbers, the side showing the location and depth but no top view showing the shape.  Again, much staring at the prints and Hahn's limited build photos.  This seems to be one of those areas that are "up to the builder" to sort out like the quarter galleries.   Speaking of which I'm also sorting out that area as it's not really defined on the prints as to timbers.  However, I'm putting together a plan, which if it works I'll happy dancing for weeks.
 
So... to the pictures.  The first three show the hawse timbers and cant frames.  None of this will be visible when planked.  The last is kinda' artsy-craftsy looking at the interior so I can get an idea of amount of fairing in there to be done.
 




 
 
As always, feel free to click on any picture to enlarge it to full size.  Oh.. sorry for the sawdust and debris.  I really need to hit this with the shop vac.

thanks for the kind comments and the likes....and a special thanks to Anja!      sorry for not getting this up earlier { like this morning}.....I got side tracked      before I knew it,  it was time to go to work......all I can say is.........one more day 
 
here is the rest of Friday's update.......I took stock of some of the dowel I have on hand.   this is the bamboo dowel........the real long one is basswood......I think.
 

 
in drawing the windows out on the fascia part.......I wasn't quite sure it would work out.  truth is.......it didn't.
 

 
doing the dry fit to see what I would have to do...........I heard a snap.....and saw that the door opening had broken.   it was easy enough to repair.......to  strengthen it up,  a piece of strip stock was run along the upper edge.
 

 
having the front fascia at a slant is a bit tougher......the curvature changes.   get the measurements for the main curvature........then toss'em,  because they don't apply further up.  once the new marks were made {without breaking anything else}  the new curvatures were traced out with the compass.
 

 
then the windows were marked and cut out
 

 
the curvature at the base could have been used to cut off the extra material.......but I wasn't taking any chances.......I'll make a template and mark it later.
 

 
the jig was made and the extra was marked out.
 

Popeye,
 
When I'm watching your post and I was looking at the pictures, Anja was walking by and she take a look and said.....that must be from Popeye       
Even on the style she recognised your way of building   
But it looks good again !
 
Sjors

Friday got a bit more lively......I need to get the pilot house fleshed out,  so I can better gauge the apparatus for the booms {cranes}....I'll get the terminology down....sooner or later 
 
it starts with the base....
 

 
it has a curved front wall,  but I gave it a bit of a twist,  with the side walls.....it will have an angled face.
 

 
the back wall is going to have a framed in door.......hence the larger opening.   you'll see a lot of pencil marks......after it is assembled,  they can be sanded out or erased.
 

 
when assembled, it looks like this.....
 

 

 
on the back wall,  there is a housing for the stack....it will have a louvered vent in it.  here are the parts and the door insert.
 

 
I put the darn thing together.......but forgot to cut out the vent.
 

 
it's OK....very easy to do it at this time.......it was assembled onto the back wall.
 

 

 

Gun rope coils moving right along

I started a gun rope coil factory. I gave up on the plastic rolling device since it got very gummy fast. I used 50% PVA and 50% water to soak the rope. Then I just carefully rolled the ropes in my fingers to make the coils. I check several models and very strict Flemish coils looked a bit parade like and not the way guns would be ready for battle. So I made them less formal looking. I still have about a dozen to go.

I just found out from my newly found friends at Arizona Shipwrights that the grates on a sailing ship should be no bigger than a man's heel. The grates that I struggled so hard to fabricate that were provided by Constructo are big enough to swallow a man's leg! It's too late for me to rectify this major mistake in scale but at least all of you can now check the scale of future grates.

Welcome!
 
I finished my figures. Let me introduce my crew, plus one.
 

From left: the black man, the red head, the dandy, the scout and the previously completed Captain/helmsman.
The scout will be standing in chest high grass (his legs won't be seen anyway) using his bow to move taller
grass aside so he can see better the passing wonder. The black man and the red head will be hauling on a
rope to adjust sail trim. The dandy is new and at the wrong rope. The Captain will be at the helm, speechless
- he's run out of profanities to hurl at the dandy.
 
The figures average about 5/8 inch/16 mm tall. Don't be deceived by the clothes pins. They're about 1/2 scale clothespins I found and are very useful for handling small parts like these. The four figures together took less time to make than the helmsman alone - a good example of a learning curve. I may add a detail or two like suspenders on black man and red head, and the very fair red head could use a hat - he's getting fried out in the sun all day.
 

 
Dave
 

Keith, it's very gratifying - and humbling - to know that one's work is held in such high regard. Thank you.
 
Yes, I'm going to use the 8 inch diameter glass sphere displayed with the opening down and hidden. This will give the viewer a 360 degree, from ground level up to directly overhead, un-obstructed and minimally distorted view. This presents some new challenges for me but I have seven more of the spheres and I'd better find the solution if I'm going to use them. I think I have but I won't know for sure until I bottle this project.
 
It just isn't in me to sit back on my current skill set and, in a way, build the same thing over and over even if the details are different. That would be boring. I can't help but try for perfection even though I know I can never attain it. At least I know it's the best I can do at that particular moment.
 
I understand about a build that grabs the viewer for any number of reasons. This one grabbed the builder and won't let go. It didn't start out this way, it started as a Fantasy Build to commemorate the First Annual National Ships in Bottles Day with a chance to try a couple techniques that had been bouncing around in my empty head and was intended to be a fairly quick build. It's now a year later and just a few days before the Second Annual National Ships in Bottles Day (October 5) and it isn't finished.
 
As soon as I saw what was happening with this attempt to model a tallgrass prairie (when I stepped back from the work to photograph it) I knew it wasn't just an incremental improvement over the "fairway", it was an order of magnitude improvement if I continued the way I started. Although a very focused 4 1/2 inch disc diorama places different demands on the builder than a 4 foot by 8 foot, or larger, model train lay-out, I owe a lot of my success to the products from Woodland Scenics and their series of excellent instructional videos.
 
Dave

Yes, Piet, there are several prairie preserves scattered among the plains states including those that serve as bison preserves as well. Those are short grass prairies in the western plains states where the scant rainfall limits the grass growth to 3 feet / 1 meter or less in parts of Montana, Wyoming and Colorado and a little of Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico where those three states meet.
 
I chose the tallgrass prairie that extended through much of Illinois, Missouri, Iowa (my home state), Minnesota, the Dakotas and the eastern parts of Nebraska and Kansas where annual rainfall exceeds 20 inches per year, the prime farm land states. The prairie in the area between is called mixed grass. There are three National Tallgrass Prairie Preserves, all on land that has proven marginal for farming for one reason or another. The best they've been able to do so far is give a faint impression of the tallgrass prairies - they more closely resemble farms than a completely wild tallgrass prairie.
 
The tallgrass prairies were comprised of about 50 species of grasses and 200 to 300 species of wildflowers. Their were numerous insects that evolved an almost symbiotic relationship with the plants they exploited for food and pollinated in the process and the plants evolved to exploit those insects - now both the insects and the plants are extinct. There were species of grass that sprouted within days of a prairie fire, grew very quickly and provided cover and erosion control while the other species recovered from the fire. They went to seed very quickly before being overwhelmed by the re-growth. The seeds would remain dormant in the soil until the heat from another prairie fire triggered them to sprout and repeat the cycle.
 
The most amazing part of the tallgrass prairie ecosystem is that it evolved in only 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age.
 
I enjoy doing research and learning from it - and I'm pretty good at it.   I did a lot of research while re-thinking my approach and waiting for my raw materials to arrive. I also found the subject very fascinating which surprised me.

Carl,
Yes but I have the last laugh, them Dodgers just took their division!
 
Back to building. 
My Arch Enemy Mr Sciatica has paid me a visit and is interfering with my build time again. Not to mention work, I just spent the last two nights "wading with pirates" in a theme park attraction whose name I am not allowed to mention. 
Since Ole Mr Sciatica wont let me sit for long periods I have put my windows on hold. Instead I have been doing things that can be accomplished while standing.
 
On a positive note I am making progress on my carriages and cannons. I think I am finally getting the hang of this blackening process!
 
I started out soldering the trunnions in and filing them to a constant length. I just used soft solder - they were a press fit and wont be under any stress.
 
After a good going over with a purple scrubby pad and brass brush I cleaned everything up in soap and distilled water with a distilled rinse. Then into the ultra sonic cleaner. My little Harbor Freight cleaner works pretty well but I wish there was a way to run for more than a 3 minute cycle. I ran it for 10 cycles then rinsed in distilled water.
 
After that it was into a 50/50 solution of distilled water and muratic acid. I intended to leave them in for 30 minutes but the Better Half came home and we went to lunch. They ended up being in the acid till the next morning when I woke up and went "Oh NO!!" I ran outside and pulled them out afraid of what I would find. Other than being discolored they were fine.
 

 
A quick dip in a baking soda solution and a final rinse on distilled water, into the blackening solution they went for ten minutes. They looked good while wet but when they dried not so good. The top set are after cleaning but before the second soak.
 

 
I recalled Russ saying he blackens his parts several times so I took 1/2 of them and rubbed them down with a scrubby pad and back in they went for a bout 15 minutes. This second soak was much better so I did the other half.They look pretty good to me, a nice black with a satin sheen.
 

 
 
While all this has been going on I have finished staining the carriages and applied a coat of linseed oil with beeswax. Once that dried for a couple of days I buffed them up and finished drilling for my hardware. I felt they needed some more oil and wax but wasnt sure how to go about that with the hardware glued in. I noodeled on it for a bit and hit on my dremmel with a buffing wheel. I rubbed a bit of oiled with a q-tip and then buffed them on a low speed. It worked so well I am going to go back and re-do my other small parts, I was never really happy with the sheen, they just do not match the hull.
I still have to make cap squares as well as finish cleaning up the trucks and get some stain on them.  then I can start rigging these things. 
I think next build I will opt for lighter colored wood, all my hard work kind of disappears into the darker mahogany.
 

 
I am getting there, slowly!