Altduck

Yes

Yes

Yes

I used Gin with my daughters when they were teething.
 

And you also have to be sure not to "Pass Wind" (Methane), and hold your breath so you don't exhale any CO2 

And you also have to be sure not to "Pass Wind" (Methane), and hold your breath so you don't exhale any CO2 

I used Gin with my daughters when they were teething.
 

And you also have to be sure not to "Pass Wind" (Methane), and hold your breath so you don't exhale any CO2 

And you also have to be sure not to "Pass Wind" (Methane), and hold your breath so you don't exhale any CO2 

I used Gin with my daughters when they were teething.
 

I used Gin with my daughters when they were teething.
 

And you also have to be sure not to "Pass Wind" (Methane), and hold your breath so you don't exhale any CO2 

And you also have to be sure not to "Pass Wind" (Methane), and hold your breath so you don't exhale any CO2 

And you also have to be sure not to "Pass Wind" (Methane), and hold your breath so you don't exhale any CO2 

I used Gin with my daughters when they were teething.
 

My Mother once told me she used to rub whiskey on my gums when I was teething to numb the pain. It's probably why I like a good single malt scotch.

We did that for our boys too.  The older one asked if he had Wicky Gums when he was a baby after seeing us doing this for his younger brother.   
 

If I didn't live so far away from most of you, you'd all be eating me out of house and home claiming you were just here to see my models!
 
Truth.

And the oven structure is done! Here it is with the final coat of stucco:

If you're wondering about the odd pattern on the base (just one base wall with stucco), there's a reason. We eventually intend to cover the base and dome with creek rock held in place by mortar. So there's no need to finish the concrete block base with anything for now. The dome needs its full stucco coats to retain heat and be usable. The reason there's a stucco coat on just that one base wall is that we'll be building a large firebrick grill right up against that wall, so it won't be getting the creek rock treatment, so we decided to seal it in with stucco instead. It'll be all but hidden when the decorative work is done.
 
But now it's time to start building fires. The idea here is that there's still a lot of moisture in the concrete dome and surrounding stucco, and that needs to be carefully driven out to fully cure the oven for high-temperature cooking. So the official process is to start by building small fires in the oven, keeping the initial internal temperature below 300ºF, and then over the course of a week slowly build bigger and bigger fires. If one builds fires too hot, too fast, the danger is that the moisture isn't gently driven out of the dome, but instead steams off, causing cracking or other structural damage. By next weekend, if all goes well, we should be able to cook in it.
 
So we're spending today maintaining a small kindling fire within the dome. Here's the first-ever flicker of flame within, followed by a typical view of the first day's curing fire.


I can absolutely see the value of purchasing a professional dome rather than trying to design one ourselves. Despite the very tall chimney (something like 10'), the oven drafts beautifully, drawing in air low over the firebrick and spiraling the smoke and heat up into the chimney. It would be very easy for a poor design to just spit the smoke back out the front arch, choking the fire and the user, but this works exactly as designed.
 
Since we have to pay close attention to the fire today, to keep it going but not too hot, we doubled down on kitchen duty and fired up the adjacent smoker, where two venison loins (about 5.5 lb total) and a couple long salmon fillets are gently smoking. This is an old-fashioned barrel smoker that I run with hickory, oak, and fruitwood cut and cured on-farm. No charcoal, gas, or other fancy stuff. Just carefully managed wood and smoke.
 


Unfortunately, this coming week is forecast to be our hottest yet for the summer, highs near 100ºF from Tuesday through at least Saturday. Not the ideal conditions to manage careful fires, but that's life. One great value of working from home is that it's so much easier to manage projects like this.
 
Hopefully this all goes well and we have an uncracked and cooking-ready oven by next weekend! Thanks for reading.
 

Amazing!!

Rigging - done. Missing a few ropes on the deck though.
 
Also I have ran out of the rope for placing flags... So will have to wait a few weeks untiI I will get it from Amati shop 😅
 
I am very happy with the overall result so far 🥳

Good evening mates, no progress on the AV today, but I did take a couple of low light shots that better show lighting effect.
 

And…another project I’ve been thinking about and working on, the rain gutters which my wife calls the eyebrows 😊. I have the look I’m striving for, now to make a jig so I can produce exactly the same part, 174 times.
 

College starts this August. 

The wonderful distractions of summer (not the least of which is our daughter’s wedding) have slowed progress in the shipyard considerably.  I’m certainly not complaining, just explaining.  Don’t expect my next post anytime soon.
 
Hull planking is maybe (optimistically?) about 2/3rds finished, and there are only a couple of things worth mentioning.
 
The instructions have you do most of the planking with a single, bow to stern, strip of wood, which I did when doing the lower half dozen planks. But I decided that was a bit unwieldy.  I added wood to the middle two bulkheads, and I am doing the rest of the hull with half length planks, alternating where the two half length planks meet.  Much easier.
 
As I think I mentioned previously, the first layer strips provided by OcCre are 2mm thick.  I have a bunch of 1/16th thick strips lying around, and I experimented bending those, and found the difference (1/16” is thinner), while small, to be noticeable when it comes to bending and twisting.  So while the lower hull half-dozen planks are 2mm, the rest of the hull is 1/16", which means I’ll have a bit of sanding to do where the two sizes meet. But I have a lot of sanding to do all over the hull, so that’s nothing new.
 
I sanded and filled (using spackle) the first couple of inches or so of the bow, and then drilled holes for the hawse pipes.  I had to determine where the hawse pipe holes were to be located, something that would have been easier with kit plans rather than just pictures.  The instructions direct drilling the hawse pipe holes 30mm below the white rub rail that runs the length of the hull just below the top of the bulwarks, which meant determining where that rub rail should be. The ship’s plans I found online show a rub rail quite a bit lower than where OcCre locates it, below the trailboards, and with the hawse pipe just below that. Thinking OcCre got it wrong, I took a look at my Frank Hurley book, and found the color photo shown below.  Clearly something changed by the time Endurance reached the ice, and that’s what OcCre depicts.  With the location of the rub rail determined, I decided 30mm below that was far too low for the holes.  Instead I cut out a paper outline of one of the trailboards, and used that as a reference point to determine (somewhat randomly) where I wanted the holes to be.



I also gave myself a bit of a challenge.  I want the anchor chain to run continuously from the anchor stocks, through the hawse pipes, through the holes I drilled  months ago in the forward bulkhead, around the windless to be installed in the open area below the forecastle deck, then through the holes I drilled in the deck just aft of the windless.  No particular reason to make the chain run continuously in a model (a gap inside the hull would never be seen), but it just seemed kind of fun to try this challenge.
 
Before I had more than a plank or two of the upper hull done, I ran the piece of thread seen in the picture above through the holes in the bulkhead.  Then after the bow was significantly planked, I drilled holes for the hawse pipes, with a bit of difficulty ran the thread through those holes, and dry fit the hawse pipes in place.  I then pulled the chain through and determined that it worked!