BLACK VIKING

The cannons are all rigged and fixed in place.





 

Happy Christmas to you all 

Happy Christmas to you all 

Happy Christmas to you all 

Some updates: 
Making a stand for the ship out of walnut wood.




I'm also re-making the stand for my Winchelsea nef - I've never been happy with the old one. The supports are made but need smoothing off. The joining beam is re-used from the old stand. Once finished I'll post it on the nef build log.
And here are the yards for the three masts.

Steven
 
 

I'm getting a good head start on the fore course. 

The Aztec color combination is interesting to me.

 
This two-tone green combination looks like the actual factory paint on a '54 Pontiac Chieftan I once owned. I guess nostalgia makes this combination interesting to me.
 

I made and attached the catheads... 

...and i made my executive decision. 

The rigging of the spritsail will be done tomorrow. 

Well I finished up all the stairs, now just have to tie a safety rope around them to complete them.  Tomorrow.  
Also tomorrow I will finish up the tiller. Yes I re did It again. Added two more blocks, now she looks just like the instructions.  Lol. I switched the rope again and went with a .75 natural  rope. Don't matter  I won't be doing it again even  if it is wrong lol.
 

 So now it's time to black-in all the chain plates.  And the mast look really  fun to do . I can't wait lol.
 I ordered  a new Pegasus  figure head, it took 9 days to get here from Italy  , not bad this time. I open the bag and dumped it all out, and would  you know it. I broke a wing right off the bat.
I was so carful about the rest of it. I fitted it and painted it, Marvin told  her back in the box till we are done for you lol.


 

Merry Christmas my friends,  thanks for looking.   
 

That's it for the standing rigging!! 

I am very proud of myself for doing something i have never even attempted before, and i hope you guys are too. 

Got a little more work done on the longboat since my last post.  Finished up the seats in the cockpit along with the locker.  Also got all of the knees installed along with the windlass and handles.  I also installed the oar holder pins and eye let rings for lifting the boat in and out of the water.
 
After a little break, I began work on the rudder.  I still have to get the top gudgeon installed and painted on the rudder, then I can install the pintles on the transom and stern post and hang the rudder.  
 
I also made the display base for the longboat.  The boat is not yet permanently attached to the base, I will do that just before I install the masts and rig the boat.

pretty much done with the deck ,some small things to do and they get glued in place then it gets interesting😎
Im really happy with the foc'sle  partition,looks pretty good in my humble opinion 🤣! ,and I've started the guns ,still not sure if im going to do all the tackle yet or just the breeching rope, (issue is I had a bad knife accident a few years back that took out the radial artery and nerve at the base of my left index finger ,even with microsurgery and time for the nerve to regrow i dont have feeling at the top and inside of the finger nearest to the thumb..Right where you need to hold things for fine work ,made it interesting trimming and cutting small pieces when i got back to modelling).
It's going to be interesting when it's time to start the rigging😒
Richard
 

Started on the stern windows ,the window frames and pillars really change the look of the piece! ,unfortunately the camera doesn't catch the 3D effect of the pillars very well.
 
 Richard
 

Thank you, James,
I’m aware of ‘Klear’, or ‘Future’ as it was called last time I used it, beloved of model aircraft builders for canopy fixing and finishing.
 
I’ll certainly give it a go with odourless ca as a back-up.
 
Regards,
 
B.E.

I 'glue' the frames over the acrylic windows with Klear floor polish. It's acrylic itself, dries rock hard and is commonly used in plastic modelling for fitting some PE parts. I've been using it for years with no issue. If it gets on the clear pane, then it's no problem.

Thank you Nils.👍
 
Post One Hundred and Nineteen.
 
 Back to the blunt end
Time to attend to the unfinished stern.
 I had figured out on the bow area how to finish the Pearwood mouldings and pilasters to be used on the stern.

3088
Vallejo Ochre Brown over the Pear followed by a coating of the water-based wood stain I used on the Boxwood hull timbers. This gives a fair match to the varnish hull finish.

3086
The stern is otherwise painted in Vallejo Black/grey.

3085

3084

3091

3093

3094
When it comes to the frames for the lights I have seen examples of white frames which look quite attractive. However, they would be the only white elements on the model so I am sticking with Ochre Brown.

3080
The frames are prepared on the fret, priming with Metal prep 4K, followed by two coats of Ochre brown.
 
The trickiest part of this exercise will be fitting the frames without marring the  ‘glass’ with glue smears.
 
Tomorrow’s interesting little exercise. 🫤
 
 
B.E.
18/12/2023
 
 
 
 
 
 

Here’s how the whole operation transpired:

Step 1 – Insert the hull assembly.  I made some red Sharpie markings on the bottle to help me figure out where to dab the epoxy on the water.  Then I slid the hull assembly inside, straightened it out, and lined it up on top of the epoxy.  The main concern was getting the 2 hulls squarely aligned.  No real difficulty encountered with this step.


 
Step 2 – Add the deck.  After the step 1 epoxy was set and the hull assembly securely in place, I put a touch of epoxy on the hull assembly’s connecting ribs and dropped the deck on top.  Very easy.

 
Step 3 – Insert the 2 mast/sail assemblies and drop them in their respective mast steps.  This is where things got a bit tricky because of a small blunder.  Since my original plan was to insert the deck and masts as 1 piece, I had put a hinge near the bottom of each mast.  And that became problematic.  I got the aft mast/sail inside the bottle ok.  But when I tried to insert the base of the mast into its mast step hole, the hinge kept folding on me.  Once folded, the angle made it dang near impossible to get enough leverage to push it down firmly into the hole.  At one point, I even considered trying to pull the mast/sail back out of the bottle, but fortunately I came to my senses and abandoned that dodo idea.  After maybe 45 minutes of frustration, I finally got that dang thing in place.  

 

Now it was a matter of orienting the mast/sail properly and securing it in place.  I angled the sail forward at maybe 50 degrees (similar to some of the paintings), made sure the mast was vertical, then worked up a brass wire jig to hold the mast/sail in place while the epoxy dried.   

 
 
The last step was tying off the rigging.  My standing rigging consisted of 2 shrouds on each side of each mast.  The running rigging was simply a line on the starboard side attached to a loop of thread tied to the curved spar. All lines were tied off to the small spindles or studs protruding along the gunwale.  This was a tedious process, but not very difficult.  The pic below shows the aft mast/sail with all the rigging tied off and threads cut.  

 
Here’s the completed wa’a kualua fully assembled inside its new home.


 
And with that, the easy part of this project is over.  Now it’s time to figure out how to build a Hawaiian waterfall.  YIKES!!
 

Glen, I just stumbled upon your build, and it is truly amazing.  It also brings back some wonderful memories.
 
My parents spent their last few decades living in Hawaii, and as a young adult I lived there 18 of those years.  At some point, my dad, a life-long sailor and a great admirer of the Polynesian voyagers, bought the completed model pictured below.  I think he found it in Hawaii, but it might have been in French Polynesia.  In any event, I was lucky enough to inherit it, and it now sits right beside my work bench.
 
My years in Hawaii included the initial voyages of Hokulea, the first modern replica of these amazing vessels.  One of the greatest thrills of my many sailing adventures was sailing several miles offshore on my Hobie 16 (along with maybe another hundred other boats) to greet Hokulea on her return to Kaneohe Bay, at the end of her initial voyage to French Polynesia and the island of Tahiti.  That was in the mid-70s, and I still remember it almost like it was yesterday.
 
Again, congratulations on a great build.

Hi all,
 
Another update on the Churchill tank progress.
 
This week I've been concentrating on assembling the figures that come with the kit.

 
The box artwork implies there are four figures plus the Farmer's cart etc, but in fact there are six figures included. Considering the kit only costs somewhere between £20-£30 I think it is a good value purchase.

 
I started by assembling the Cart and it's accessories. There are 6 wine bottles, two small and four larger - more on that later. And there is even an oil-lamp.  Note: there are also 6 sets of Goggles on the clear sprue....I need to find out who is carrying those.

 
Below. An example of two of the figure sprues. I'm no expert but the figures seemed well enough made. They all had mould lines down the middle but that was easily filed/scraped off. Some of the parts (eg body and leg) didn't fit together perfectly without a bit of fettling but all things considered everything was fine.

 
The chap below, leaning on the box is in charge of map reading (navigation) so there is a map layout that can be scanned, cut-out and pasted to his board.

 
This poor fellow must have been testing how much weight a soldier can carry - he only seems to be missing the kitchen sink.

 
As advised in an earlier post, diamond files make a quicker job of removing plastic (compared to engineering needle files, which clog up easily). So some cheap ones (from Amazon) were ordered. They work fine, but don't quite have the accurate geometry of needle files. So I use them for roughing out the excess plastic and finish off with a needle file as necessary.

 
The figures assembled. I will glue on the rifle, spade etc once they have been painted. Also shown is the map copy (coloured in) and pasted to the board. Again I'll wait till painting is complete before fitting the map to the figure.  And there seems to be a couple of spare pistols....someone is sure to want them!

 
Finally, a question. The farmer is actually handing a bottle of wine over, rather than milk. I'm assuming it is a Red wine rather than white. The bottle label seems to have a 1937 date on it. It's in Normandy. Anyone care to make a guess/confirm if it is a Red and from which vineyard?  😉

 
So it's time to get the paintbrushes out and get the figures etc painted. I'm also starting to have some early thoughts on what kind of diorama I could make. There are a few pictures of Churchill tanks in France on the web, but not so many of the MkVII. So I may use a background from one of the other Mk's.
 
Well, that's it for now, back soon.
 
Richard

Metalwork around the rudder has been slowly taking place, and the straps are loosely placed on the rudder.  They will be further shaped to the rudder and blackened before being permanently affixed (no idea how I'm going to permanently affix these. The wire bolts won't really have any strength long-term, so am really pondering this one).  I had quite a learning curve in learning how to uniformly fashion the straps; many, many scrap pieces throughout.   The photo also shows the bits of 30 ga wire that will be made into bolts. I'm just laying them down on the strip in the middle to see how the thickness of the wire will look from a scale perspective.  I'm thinking of having 2 bolts per plank.  The rudder is basically made up of 3 planks.

I've also been experimenting with the finish on the hull.  Goal is to try and make the finish appear to be as "real/aged" as possible, so there are a lot of green/brown washes on there now in addition to other white washes.  The plan is to have shellac on the model, and I'm thinking of extending that down all around the acrylic on the hull as well to give it a bit of a wet/shiny appearance.  Still debating that one, however.  The gouges in the hull are for the brass tubing in which the lighting will run through from the ship down into the stand where the power source will be. When the tubing has been installed, the keel will be replaced and everything tidied up.

 

In case anyone was curious about how this mess will be attached, here's a few pics of the assembled one-piece unit, the glue points will be at the base of the simulated keel/stem, along the leading edge of the deck and the rear bulkhead piece where it mates against the inside of the hull, in theory it should work. Thanks for looking.
 
Michael D.

 

Still in the process of dressing out the bowsprit, starting with the knee and top, as much customizing I've done on ships I've never fabricated a top from scratch, while not totally accurate, I think it looks ok.
 
Michael D.
 

Starting to test fit all the parts and dry assemble.
nothing is glued or forced together so a few little gaps but its fairly good, I am happy

Stern deadwood and sternposts

The Forward Deadwood minus the Stem post and cutwater

Frames 70 to 88 dry fitted and decks fitted for checks



And lastly a straight brass round to check alignment fore and aft of mast holes.

Once I have done this for all the frames its time to cut the rabbet and start gluing
 
 
 
 

Bill, those are the bowlines, used to haul the windward side of the sail hard forward when sailing "close to" (as close as a square rigger can get) the wind. They can prevent the sail being taken aback and perhaps damaged if there's a gust from a little more upwind.

Guys what are these rigging lines called and what is there purpose?  They are on each of the three sails on the fore and main mast. The course and top sail has a crows foot type of rigging where it attaches to the side of the sail. The top gallant is a simple fork. The lines go forward through blocks and eventually belay different places at deck level.