druxey

The safe choice would be natural wood. However, light grey or pale gray-green might be other choices to consider. Usually the 'red' was actually red ochre; a brownish red.

Perhaps such discussion - which can be valuable - should be on a separate thread and not a build log?

Well done and a nice presentation, Chris. You can be proud of the result.

So I made a little tub for the trawl line. I thought the bottom at about 3/4" looked good but after building it became a little larger...I did it all by eye and didn't taper the first few enough so I tapered the next couple a lot to get it back on track. I think it turned out pretty good for my first attempt.
Soaked some strips I cut from 1/16" material and wrapped them and allowed to dry. I carved the inside leg of the clothes pin rounded so it didn't put any flattening pressure on the inside of the tub. Pro tip- when gluing the bands on, line the seams up so they can be hidden in the back... ahem...
 

 
 
 
And the star of the show, the Dory. I will call it officially complete, although I will add the tub to the base and make a case for it.
 
I used Minwax Golden Pecan 245 for the oars and the thwarts. This I think gave them just a hint of color. I decorated the oars with a layer of fine Corinthian leather. When installing the leather wraps, my suggestion is to shave the leather thinner than you think it should be. I did the math so you don't have to, about 11 molecules of leather thick is about right. 👍 So get out a sharp blade and your magnifier!
I also installed and glue treated the becket ropes. Gave things a light coat of renaissance wax and that is about all there is!
This was great fun and I'm looking forward to the next build!
 
Chris
 

OK got some more work done. Started shaping the oars. After sanding the first one to shape I decided we could speed things up with carving them first.
Here are some pics of the process. The carving is not for the feint of heart. It's very easy to carve to far into the oar.
 

ld
 
I made up a cradle to hold it. Saw it on another build. Here one of them is shaped.
 

 
Then I made a crude attempt at ageing/weathering. Have to admit I have no idea what I'm doing here. Hahaha. These aren't even the colors they stayed by the time I finished the base.
 

 
 
I made a base and copied a deck planking pattern I found online. No idea if it's period correct etc. but figured it was good practice.
 

 
I'll call it mostly done, but I have some smaller rope coming for the beckets and I am still going to try my hand at building a tub to hold trawl line.
 
So a few questions for you that are following.
 
I can't find a suitable color for the thwarts and oars. They are supposed to be ash. I've tried a natural danish oil, essentially no change. I tried a provincial maple stain, too red. I have renaissance wax but would like a color on them first.
 
What method do you use to recreate the trunnels? I simply drilled a small shallow hole and put a dab of glue in it then sanded the area so the glue would grab the dust. After staining they took the color a little darker. You can see I still had some glue squeeze out that I didn't catch when sanding.
 
I cut the deck planks by hand I made them 10 mm across.
 
Also what's your preferred method of cutting planks to length? I used a straight edge and sharp blade. Still tough to get the cut square and vertical.
 
I've seen the "chopper" style of cutter and I've also seen cheap Chinese electric chop saws. Any thoughts on either of those? I don't know if those questions will get lost in this build log. Where is a more appropriate forum for those questions?
 
Thanks for all the comments, the Norwegiansailing pram arrives tomorrow!
 
 

Perhaps such discussion - which can be valuable - should be on a separate thread and not a build log?

The bulldog clip is a nice hack for taper sanding!

Perhaps such discussion - which can be valuable - should be on a separate thread and not a build log?

The safe choice would be natural wood. However, light grey or pale gray-green might be other choices to consider. Usually the 'red' was actually red ochre; a brownish red.

Quite the collection you have there! Well done.

An excellent primer for learning rigging techniques, Toni! 

Preparation for the production of frames.

Now it was the turn of one of the more complicated parts, which I didn't really want to do - the fashion piece.

The piece shrank???

Yes; Christian is absolutely correct: Whenever possible, run the grain along a piece, not across it. Avoid cross-grain! As you had it is weak and prone to snap.

An excellent primer for learning rigging techniques, Toni! 

Nothing like a wet weekend (& end of the summer racing season) to free up some time. I sanded the keel down to an approximate shape, glued the outer stem on & gave it some initial shaping, & glued the keel on. More pictures later but this shows the way I'm ensuring the keel is plumb. It's a piece of clear acrylic sheet with a line square to the base scribed on to it, then fixed to the building base. Two light strips of timber with masking tape stay the keel, I'll check it in a few hours, & by that time the epoxy will be stiff but not beyond movement, should there be an issue.
 
The following steps will be slowly & carefully fairing these to each other. Then the infill piece for the propeller cutaway. It's possible some filling will be required where the keel meets the hull, but we'll see.
 
thanks for the interest

Quite the collection you have there! Well done.

An excellent primer for learning rigging techniques, Toni! 

Thanks Greg for this clear explanation - your approach to the chocks makes a lot of sense - I have been using the drawings to make these to this point, so I'll try your technique. I've already got the mechanical 2mm lead holder and hard leads but maybe a new disc sander is in my future....Thanks again - this is very helpful!
hamilton

Well, practice does indeed make perfect. It's super important to make sure the ends of the futtocks are the same width and flat over their mating surface with no gaps between them. If you have a Byrnes disk sander this is easy. If not you'll need to get good with a super sharp chisel. I wouldn't use the printed pattern to make the chock as the joint may vary slightly from the pattern. My process is to glue the two futtocks together on top of the pattern and allow to dry. Then place an index card under the joint and trace out the actual chock shape using a mechanical clutch pencil sharpened to a super fine point. Don't worry about the inboard shape for now. Now transfer the card pattern to the properly oriented wood and cut out. The chock should now fit snugly into the joint. Then you can glue it in place. Finally, after dry, trim the inboard face.
 
If you are planning to build several wooden models in the future I can't stress enough how much the Byrnes disk sander (or Proxxon) will improve your work. It's an investment that pays off in accuracy and time saved over the years.
 
Staetler Mars Technical pencil 2mm (780) and Sharpener (502)

I've now constructed the first two frames - deadflat and deadflat 1. There is still a fair amount of cleaning up and refining to do, but for now I'm pretty happy with the results. The joints on deadflat 1 between the futtocks was pretty weak and I had to redo the chock to try to refine them, which was successful enough for the moment, but I really need to get a decent technique down for these joints so they are more secure....apart from "practice makes perfect" are there other things I should be doing to ensure better joints at the chocks?
 
In any case, there is still work to be done on both frames - I need to refine their profiles along the molded dimension, thin them on the molded dimension towards the toptimbers, file out notches for the sweep port sills and lintels on the aft face of deadflat 1 and add trunnels at the joints. Given the need to align the notches for the sweep ports, I will wait to raise deadflat 1 until frame 1-forward is complete, so I can mark these features out at the same time on both.
 
I also fixed the issue with the keel assembly noted above - I sliced off a short length of 1/16" boxwood from a thicker strip, fixed this to the end of the keel assembly and then shaped it with sanding blocks and files. Unfortunately I only have shots of the un-shaped extension attached to the assembly and not the finished piece - I'll see if I can show it more clearly in a future post.
 
In the meantime, here are some photos. Enjoy and bye for now
hamilton
 

I live in Vancouver, so the humidity would argue for the wood expanding....if I were in Scottsdale, maybe it would get all the moisture sucked out of it....this leaves only one possibility - modeller error!!
 
I think I will take a minute or two and just add a 1/16" piece to the front and shape it to suit - not sure I'll be able to blend it very well but as you say Greg it's in a relatively unobtrusive spot.....framing is far more fun than I thought it would be!! But I've got to get my joinery down......
hamilton

Log #85: The Anchors
Thank you to everyone for you kind comments and encouragement. I have spent the past couple weeks making a brief detour from the rigging, but before getting to that I did clean up a few lines. First up were some blocks with hooks for the topgallant backstay tackle and the topgallant yard halyard tackle.

I am getting much better at these now I have my process down and can produce them pretty quickly at this point. These ones only took about 15 minutes to make all in.
 
I then secured the topgallant yard halyard using one of these hook blocks and another block attached to the halyard itself. I belayed the falls to the bits and then ran the coil over the nearest cleate.

With that out of the way I decided to take a break from rigging and look at the anchors.
 
As I have one of the earlier versions of the alert kit, mine came with the cast metal anchors and I can see why Chris has moved away from these. They are easily one of the weakest parts of the kit. I debated for a while as to whether I should just chuck them and draft and 3d print some new ones, but in the end I decided to try and work with them. As I have previously noted my goal with this build has been to stay pretty close to the kit and I though with a bit of work I could make them look ok.

The main problem as you can see from the right hand anchor in the above picture is that they lack detail and the molding process has resulted in some flash and warping. I decided to try and file them down to remove the excess material and make them look closer to how they appear in the illustrations in Steel.
 
I also decided not to use the PE ring from the kit and instead made one out of paper clips which I wrapped around a drill bit to shape them. I then added the puddening to them with 0.35mm brown rope and seized them with 0.2mm beige rope. The seizing rope was a bit too big, but my only other option is the white fly tying thread I have and I thought the contrast would not look right.

You can see in the above image one of the biggest problems I struggled with, getting the primer to stick to the anchors. Despite washing and filing most of the surface off of them, I could not get the primer to hold well.
 
Then I was on to the anchor stock. The kit version did not look enough like the real thing so I scratch built some new ones out of the offcuts of the 3mm laser cut sheet.

I used the drawing in Goodwin as a template which I photocopied and resized (with some trial and error) and cut them all to the rough shape before carefully planing and sanding them to the correct size. Then I got to test out my recent acquisition of a mini drill press to drill the bolt holes.

With the holes drilled I used black monofilament fishing line to represent the bolts. I put these through before glueing the stock to the anchors to make sure I could get them through properly. Once everything was in place I just used a sharp craft knife to cut off the ends.

I then added iron straps using shrink tube and painted the straps and the anchors. I will not go into detail on the painting as I have previously described all these techniques when I did the straps on the boom jaws and when I painted the cannons.
 
Here is the final results. In the end I am pretty pleased with how they turned out and they look reasonably like the real thing.

 

The piece shrank???