catopower

Thank you Louie, Druxey, One of these days, I will go on a quest to slay the carpet monster. But, I fear the action will only attract another one, or maybe something worse... In the meantime, it's important to stay ahead of the carpet monster, so I continued work on my cog. I've finally gotten to parts that are too big for the carpet monster to swallow. This is the underside of the stern castle deck. most of this structure will be very hard to see on the completed model, but it's nice to know it's there. So far, so good. There are two cabins added to this structure, one on either side. I didn't bother painting the interior sections in advance, as I wasn't sure if these would be visible. I think I'll go ahead and paint the interiors, though I think that only one wall may possibly be partially visible if the cabin door is open. But, the thought of the cabin door being open on a ship, just plants the sound of a swinging and banging door in my head. Hope the noise goes away... Finally, I'm making preparations for the top side of the deck, and assembled the solid rails (fences, walls?) that will surround much of the deck. It's only now that I realize I have a bunch of nail painting to do again. I THINK I'm getting near the end of the nail painting. Anyway, it's nice to be moving forward on this project again. Actually, it's nice to be moving on ANY project again. Been absent from any real ship modeling (okay, some might not consider this to be real ship modeling) for more than a month, so it feels good to be back. I went through some ship modeling withdrawals there for a bit. Now, I may be overdosing a bit, but it's only because I NEED it(!). Plus, I know I'll have to slow the pace shortly, so I want to make as much progress on my projects as I can now. Clare

After having been away from any serious ship modeling for more than a month due to a family illness, I'm back home now and have been missing ship modeling so much, that I'm trying to get back to my many projects to get some things finished up. I'm still having a bit of a difficult time getting my life back to "normal" and I don't know if it's stress about family matters, the time change, the elections, being overly tired, confused about how to reset and regroup after having been away for so long, Covid-19 separation, or what. But, it is affecting me a lot right now, so I'm having to force myself to get restarted on things, and I did make myself sit down and start the next step on the cog model. First thing – I finally worked on finishing and mounting the rudder. First task was to make a couple blocks that will be needed. I went ahead and assembled all the blocks that came with the kit. If you're familiar with Chuck's larger-sized specialty blocks that he sells, these assemble in the same fashion. Sorry for the poor quality photo below. These blocks are very small and I had a hard time getting them into focus. The rudder came out very nicely. The hardest part was gluing in the ultra tiny doughnut-shaped pieces that are used in the rudder hinges. Shipyard gives you only exactly the number of parts you need, so the loss of a single piece will leave you short. And, unfortunately, one of the suckers jumped out of my grip and rolled into the abyss that is my carpeted floor. As you can see, there are three in the bag and I need four... Since I don't plan on swinging the rudder around much, I figured I could fake things a bit and get away with having the one missing piece. You can't see it anyway, as it's hidden by the black rudder irons. The rudder looks pretty good in place, so I think I'm okay with the shortage. Now, I'm just realizing how much more careful I need to be with the model, so as not to accidentally tear off the rudder. The kit comes with a mounting cradle. I don't know if I will want to use that, but I'm just realizing that it might be time to give some thought to how I'm going to mount this model. My normal "go to" for lighter models like this, is to use brass posts that fit up into the keel a little ways. That will be okay for a final display, but I'm going to need a working stand of some kind. The clinker planking will be a bit of an issue here, since I don't want to damage it in the process. But, in any case, here's my final pic, showing the tiller with the blocks mounted. I need to add some cleats next, but I haven't painted them yet, so I'm now prepping the whole laser-cut card sheet for painting, giving it all an initial coat of the light colored paint number 03 in the kit, before painting the wood color. Clare

This was the first ship modeling book I'd ever owned. Though it's not perfect, I learned a lot from it and got tons of inspiration from looking at the photos of shipmodels in the book. I never met Mr. Roth, but his wife Lois had maintained his ship model mail order shop, The Dromedary, for many year and I called them often. I have to admit to having a small crush on Rose, who worked for the shop... 😊 Clare

Actually, you're right in that it doesn't make much of a noticeable difference in that these kits don't actually require you to do any significant cutting. So, one razor blade is probably just as good as another. The only thing that needs to get cut most of the time are the little tabs that hold a part to its sheet. I'll still use the scalpel for that because of the comfy handle! It was only when I needed to cut some excess off of a thick, built-up card stock piece that I noticed that the thinner blades are really nice to use. The slice right through without applying much pressure.

Hi Chuck, I know what you're referring to. But, I think the difference is a more than you realize. Standard single edge razor blades are usually #12 size, which is .012" thick, though you can get #9 blades, which are only .009" thick. I mic'd the razor blades I have, and they come in at .0035" thick, or less than half the thickness of even the thinnest single edge razor blades. By contrast, my scalpel blades measure .015" thick. So, it seems that any razor blade will cut better than a scalpel blade. But, I'm telling you, these paper modelers using the shaving blades know what they're doing.

Fantastic looking model. Well done!

Hi Chuck, the thing is that what is sold in hardware stores is many times thicker than these shaving blades. They are true razor blades, and they slice card stock like butter. I've seen some modelers take the double-edged razor blades and wrap tape around the extra edge, giving them a safe handle. If I keep making card models, I think I'm going to have to give that a try.

Thanks for the nice comments all. Chuck, we have this Hanse Kogge in card, your Wütender Hund in card, Chris's Wütender Hund in wood, that just leaves the wooden Kogge von Kampen kit, and we'd have Shipyard's full collection covered! Any volunteers? Ages of Sail got a whole bunch of the wooden Koggen von Kampen kits... Louie, thanks for the comments. On the coloring, like with most things, over time and repeated applications of protective coatings like pine tar oil, the darker the ship will be. Consider this a newish ship! And, as for not wanting to work with card, I've completed a couple and find it a really fun medium. It's also a much "cleaner" medium than wood, as it makes little mess in comparison. The main feature that I find less forgiving is simply things that are pre-cut. But, they are also amazing time savers. I wasn't really feeling all that great yesterday, though much better today, but I'd just stayed in and did a few more things to the model. There is a ladder at the bow that I completed, as well as that beam the runs underneath those two heavy posts on the bulwarks. As expected, the beam didn't fit correctly. In order to get it to fit, I had to remove one of the posts and also trim down the ends of the beam just a little. But, it worked, and I was able to fit the beam and glue the post back into place. When adding the knees to this assembly, I could see that the hull didn't flare outward at the top quite as much as it was supposed to, as the knees didn't sit right. However, the bulwarks are flexible enough that gluing and clamping the knees into place pushed the bulwarks to the correct shape. So, next, I decided it was time to deal with the timberheads sticking up out of the bulwarks and all. Wondering why card modelers in Eastern Europe are always risking their fingers with razor blades, I thought I'd give it a try. I have plenty of half blades, which gives less "handle" for holding the blade, but maybe less risk of slicing the fingers with only half the sharp edges. This turned out to work really well on the untreated card parts, but I had stiffened each of the timberheads with a shot of thin CA. It didn't work so well on those, and I was forced to lay the hull on it's side to support the bulwarks, while I chopped down on the timberheads with a scalpel. This worked out well. I then applied a little paint over the ends to clean up the cuts. Next step will be to add a couple support knees to the bulwarks around midships and to begin assembling the rudder. Clare

Well, it probably doesn't look like much was done, but I made a little more progress on this model. There is a bunch of framing at the bow and stern that I finally managed to add. It was a lot simpler than I expected. However, the compounded errors I've made on the hull planking caused me some minor issues. All should turn out fine in the end. There were a few bulwarks planks to add too, and that was probably a little weirder. There are two heavy posts, near the bow, their placement is based on the hull planking, which a little off on my model, so I wasn't really sure about the alignment. I did the best I could, but when I started to lay down the bulwarks planking, lining up the planks on the proper fram, the planks didn't line up into the posts the way they were designed. It's not really an obvious error, except that I know the ends of these planks are supposed to fit into the slots in the side of the post. Also, note that nail patterns don't quite line up with the frames. This will be less noticeable once I trim off the excess frame that sticks up. At the stern as well, the plank ends are apparently supposed to line up with the edge of the frames. For the most part, these aren't too bad here. But, the nail patterns don't really line up with much. Big problem with these photos is that they show my terrible deck paint job, particularly on the starboard side. Port side looks better. I'll try to fix it up a little, but it looks worse in the photos than when you look at the model directly. My next concern is that there's a beam that runs across the bottom of the two posts. If the positioning is off, then the beam might look a bit off, or I might have some trouble attaching it. I almost feel like the beam should have been attached to the bottom of the post first, the bulwarks planking added second, the the post assembly added last. But, this I've found to be the one issue with any model with a lot of pre-fabricated parts. Not just card models, but wooden ones too. Same thing was true with the Japanese higaki kaisen model I built a few years back and even with the kitamaebune model I've been building this year. Laser-cut parts are design to fit a specific way, and if you don't get the positioning right, it's going to throw something off. It seems that the closer your model comes to being scratch-built, the more likely everything will be aligned properly. But, it's a lot more work. This may have a few alignment issues, but the build is really pretty easy. Clare

Hi Tim, I'm already treating the sails with something other than starch in order to give them the existing shaping, so they already have a lot of body. I actually sprayed them again, lightly, and it started to undo some of the shaping I'd already done. I'm hoping that a little bit of the hot air will allow me to shape the sail just a bit, so that when it cools, the stuff will hold it in shape.

Thanks Tim, Druxey. I'm not there yet and may have to redo the sail build yet again, but it is a small sail I'm doing the testing with, so it's not THAT much work. Druxey, I think you're right in that I'm going to have to rig up the mast and sail to see if that will help things out. The hairdryer is probably a good idea – I'll try that.

Wasn't really happy with the number of strips having to get cut down to 22. The largest Kitamaebune, which this model represents, had 24. In fact, you could generally tell the cargo capacity of a transport by how many of these panels make up the ship's sail. So, I went back and I prepped and cut a new piece of sail material. But, then I thought I might do better if I experiment a bit with the sail on the Tonegawa cargo boat that I posted about a little while back. It's the same scale, and the sails would have been made the same way, but with only 9 shorter sail panels instead of 24 long panels of the Kitamaebune. One thing about these Japanese sails because of the way the individual panels are sheeted, they have a very distinct, ruffled look. So, I decided to focus on that this time. I basically cut the strips to length, bent them around a small dowel, then glued them together at a slight angle, forming a kind of v-shaped valley between adjacent panels. I also cut the top and bottom edges of each panel to impart a slight curve, to give a sense of the panel hanging down of its own weight. It's not bad, but it doesn't billow the way the real sail should. As you can see below, they hang straight down. At the bottom of the sail, the edges tend to curve forward just a little. I'm working on ways to solve this issue now. But, I do like the way each panel billows just slightly. Next step is for the whole thing to look more natural. The sheets will tie off to a heavy rope that runs across the hull. Note the jumble of simulated rice bales. I'm not sure what to do with these, now that I'm working on a sail. These ships would only need to mount the sail if they are heading up river. Upriver basically means away from the big city toward the farm lands. In that direction, they would not be carrying rice bales. If I want the rice bales, the mast would most likely be lowered as the sail wouldn't be necessary. But, realistically, if I have any rice bales at all, it would probably be full, having loaded up at one location and sailing down to unload them at a dock in old Edo. But, for a representative model, some bales would look nice and so would the sail. So, I'm figuring I'll stack some in the hold in a manner than balances out the load a bit. So, the next step is to try to create a sail that billows a little AND has ruffles. My first and simplest attempt doesn't look too good. I tried treating the sail material again with Terial Magic. The stuff that stiffens the sail material nicely. But, I'm not done with this yet. I got a little more billow out of it, but the sail now needs some touch ups to even out the surface. Behind the model here, you can see one of the books I located on these boats. It's called Takasebune Monagatari or the Takasebune Story. On the cover, you can see a photo showing an example of how the sail looked in operation. Of course, after I get this all figured out, I still need to apply what I learned to the Kitamaebune model. Clare

Sail panels are now glued up. I checked the width of the full sail and it looks a little wide, which I figured might happen. Just compound errors in the measure of things added up. But, I preferred to err on the large side rather than small. I'll compensate by cheating slightly, and I'll remove one of the of strips from each of the outer panels. This will put the sale a little on the narrow side. But, when I lace the sails together, I'm going to try to work in a slight gap at the top and bottom, as appears in a number of drawings and on the replica ships. This effectively widens the sail so it should hang nicely from the hogeta, or yardarm. Next step, I'll need to trip the strips so that they line up nicely at the bottom. I managed to glue them up so they line up nicely at the top. But, some strips stretched more than others and the bottoms are a little uneven, as you can see in the first photo. I'll have to be a bit careful, as the strips are glued up with the ropes in between the, but they shouldn't present any real problems. I'm actually considering leaving that short mast at the bow bare-poled. The sail will be really short in order for the bottom end to stay clear of the main stay tackle. I've seen a number of drawings and painting that show the sail, but in a configuration that's physically impossible, showing the sail occupying the same space as the stay tackle... Unless we're talking about shifting into 4th or 5th dimensional space... Anway, it's a little more to think on. In the meantime, I have this sail to complete. Clare

Doh! Thanks for the correction Carl. I'm sure the Austrians love that. 🙄

Minor update. I'm moving forward on the sail construction, gluing up the individual strips into four separate panels. Before gluing any of these together, I painted a section of a couple of the strips. These are markings used on the sails of these northern port transports to identify who they belong to. I'm not sure how my sails will look with the markings and may change my mind as to where the markings appear on the sail. But, so far, I'm expecting them to appear as two short rectangles centered high on the sail, separated by two blank strips. I still have time to change the plan as I can rearrange the existing glued up sections a little. I'm going to see if I can take another look at some examples of these markings and make the final call today. In the meantime, you can see how this is progressing... Again, each panel will be made up of six strips, so I'm basically half-way done making the panels. I will also have to decide soon if I will add fake ties of some kind. If I do, it will be a very slow going process. So far, Aleene's Tacky Glue has proven to create a very strong bond. Clare

Oh, ran across this thread only today. I'm positive this picture has to date from no earlier than the early 90's. There appears to be a Knox-class frigate in the reserve fleet in the background, judging from the shape of the superstructures. The first decommissioning of one of those was in 1991, I believe. It was a bit confusing because, apparently, Pampanito became a museum ship in the 70's. I'm pretty sure a museum ship wouldn't look that bad. But, further Facebook comments said that she was actually in the movie "Down Periscope" in 1990-something. This must have been a real weathering job then! Unfortunately, being a star in a Hollywood comedy seems a little undignified. But, hey, it probably helped her survive as a museum ship.

While researching sails, I ran across a great website by a ship modeler in Germany. He scratch built a model of the replica ship Naniwa maru, which is a higakikaisen replica. The website entry is from back in 2012. It looks to me like his model was built at a scale of about 1/50, so it's a nice size. Aw with other builders taking on a scratch build of one of these ships with only limited information, I found his model pretty amazing. http://www.googlehupf.at/shipwright/?page_id=276

Just a heads up on some thoughts about the faux stitching... As interesting as this looks on that museum model and in the last photo I posted, it doesn't actually look quite correct, so I'm not quite sure what I'll end up doing. I thought this was a good solution. But, I have a feeling that this is kind of the old model makers solution to a complicated issue. Most models seem to show some kind of horizontal ties like this, but if you look at the replica ships, what's mostly noticeable is lacing. Here's a model by Toshitaka Nakazono of The Rope... And this one by Taketoshi Tanaka, former president of The Rope, and the model used by Woody Joe to develop their Higaki Kaisen kit... Both images are from the english language site of The Rope, in their Photo Gallery of Japanese Sailing Ships and Boats. So, if I do go with the little ties, at least my model will be in good company. And, I guess I can start by making the ties a little shorter, if possible.

Well, I started experimenting with faux stitching tonight. I began with a length of thread that I'd pre-treated with Aleene's Tacky Glue to stiffen it. When dried, I cut some very tiny 2mm length of it. I'm hoping there's an easier way cut lots of 2mm lengths, possibly by lining up several threads on a piece of double-stick tape or something, so I can cut several pieces in a single pass instead of one at a time. In any case, I then used a pair of fine tweezers and dipped one 2mm piece in some Aleene's, then placed it across the seam between strips of cloth. The result looks like this: I originally started placing them about half that distance apart, but it looked way too busy. These are about 1cm apart. Still probably out of scale for the 1/72 scale model. But, as we all know, it's difficult to make sails correct in scale. I might place them a bit closer together on the actual model. We'll see. Aleenes turns out to be pretty tough. It's hard to remove these things after a very short drying time. You might note the slight gap between the cloth strips near the bottom. That's because I'd taken a scalpel blade and separated the cloth slightly. I think this shows me that it's possible for me to fasten the sails together only with these ties glued on. Of course, the back side needs them also, and they need to be lined up with those on the front side. But, I had little trouble doing this since you can easily see through the cloth when backlit. So, I think I have a plan to move forward now. This strips will be fastened together in groups of 6, and there will be four of these large panels. The next issue will be how to lace the 4 panels together. However, in that case, I'm pretty sure I'm going to go with hand sewing the lacing. You can see in the printed cloth provided by Woody Joe, how the lacing between panels goes. I will probaly also try to show a bit of gap between the panels, particularly the gap that lines up with the mast. Wish me luck!

Hi Druxey, we'll see how the sail turns out. I made a sample section of three strips glued up with two threads between each strip. I realize today that it looks VERY flat. The gluing up is strong and convinced me that this should work okay, which is why I'm proceeding with this method. But, I am considering that instead of glueing the strips to each other, perhaps I can tie them together. You can see the horizontal ties in the sail in the last photo of my previous post. The Woody Joe printed sail also shows them, but on their sail, they are more numerous and very small. I'm sure I would use fewer ties, as doing this will end up being really time consuming and tricky at this scale. I'll experiment a little to see if it's even worth doing. If it doesn't add to the appearance, then I might as well just glue up the panes and also glue on lots of tiny thread pieces on both sides of the sail or something.

I bet you thought I wasn't going to ever make any more progress on my Kitamaebune project, didn't you? Well, I had decided to move ahead with a sail construction plan I came up with in order to try to mimic the different nature of Japanese sails. Well, I spent a lot of time experimenting and just staring at sail material and at the kit provided sails. Then, I decided to go ahead with what should end up being a pretty labor intensive sail construction. I decided I'm going to assemble the sail from separate panels. I MAY stitch the panels together in some fashion, but at the earliest stage, I'm going to be gluing up the panels. I glue most of my ship model sails now, as it avoids creating out of scale machine stitching. Cutting the sails was simplified greatly by using my Silhouette Cameo 3 machine. I drew up a series of long rectangular panels using the Silhouette Studio software and used it to cut a 12" x 12" piece of cloth. To make sure the cuts were clean, I pre-treated the cloth with Terial Magic, which I believe I talked about in a previous post. This stuff, when dry, makes the cloth somewhat paper-like. The cloth cutting session itself didn't take all that long to draw up and run the cutter. Of course, a lot of cut strips, when peeled off the adhesive faced cutting mat, makes kind of a messy bunch with lots of strands stuck together. I cut the loose threads and then cleaned up each strip, trimming away loose threads. I then applied a thin bead of Aleen's Tacky Glue to one edge and attached a piece of thick, beige thread to one edge. I did this with each strip one at a time. It really didn't take me as long as I thought it would, but I still had to spread the work over a couple nights. The main sail on the Kitamaebune is made up of 24 strips in panels of 6 strips each. I haven't quite decided if I am going to juse use the one piece of thread separate each neighboring strip, or if, like on the real sails, I should use two threads, basically lining each panel with its own piece of thread on each edge. Actually, I lied. I created the strips narrow enough to require me to use two threads between each neighboring panel. So, if I don't use two threads, the completed sails should end up a little too narrow. So, two threads it is. Now, I didn't really think about it before I glued the threads to the sail strips, but the identification markings on the sails should really only appear in the cloth, I think. I don't want the threads painted, so I will have to be careful with the painting. I should also do the painting before I add thread to the second edge of each strip, just to be safe. Now, I haven't decided what identifying pattern I'll use on the sail. I could try to do a little research and see if I can identify one that's specific to a certain ship or trader. Few people would ever "get it", but I guess I'll see if I can look something up this weekend. If nothing else, I'll probably just paint a short segment of a couple sail panels. Below is a photo of a model in a museum in Japan, though I don't recall which one. This is actually one of the old Woody Joe kits before they went with the laser-cut parts. It's a bit more of a "shipmodeler's model" requiring more woodworking and it's also a noticeably larger kit. Not as detailed or as accurate, but it sure looks like a Japanese ship model. There were actually two different kits available of similar large side. Sadly, these kits aren't available anymore, but I did manage to squirrel away one of each when you could still get them. I'm afraid to start one, because then the kit will be gone for good. I've thought about just scratch building a model based on one of the kits, so I can keep the original kit intact. Does that sound silly? Anyway, I still have 5 sail strips left over, so I think I'll prep those too, as I'll need them to make the bow sail.

Hi Peter, LOL, the Kitamaebune is acutally a smaller model than the either the Hacchoro or the Yakatabune! 😉 At least, it's smaller in length by about 3" and even an inch or two shorter in height than the Hacchoro. But, the Hacchoro and Yakatabune are both much simpler to build, and better introductions to Woody Joe kit building. The nice thing about the Yakatabune kit is that you have an opportunity to add some details if you want, since it has a little tatami room interior. The Hacchoro looks pretty nice with it's sails set and all the sculling oars. There are things that could be done to detail it too. I've considered building another one that's modified slightly to include details that would show up on a real Hacchoro, or at least on the two remaining replicas. The mini-kits are kind of neat too and they're small enough to base a diorama on one. I've considered having the mini-yakatabune in a diorama of a river or canal lined with cherry blossom trees. Still might do it, as I have one spare kit AND the cherry blossom trees that Woody Joe makes. Water dioramas always look cool to me.

Hi Peter, I went through the small selection of Woody Joe kits of traditional Japanese boats. The Kitamaebune is really the last one, though I do have another Hacchoro and another Higakikaisen kit. For the most part, everything I'm doing is scratch now, including this Takasebune. It was hard to find a drawing with sufficient information that I didn't have to guess on a whole lot. Here's the whole boat, only about 9" long. I was going to make it 1/20 scale so it could be compared with other 1/20 models – a good scale for the medium-sized Japanese boats. But, it was still 36" long, and I'm running out of room here. So, I went with 1/72 scale so it could be compared to the Kitamaebune and later the Higakikaisen model. The model represents a 60-foot (60-shaku, really) boat. These riverboats ranged from around 30 feet to close to 90 feet long. If I recall correctly, a boat this size would typically carry 500 bales of rice.

Hi Carl, you know, I considered making them more detailed, but they are already so small and require me to double-wrap 6 pieces of thread around each one of them that I just don't think I care about adding any more detail to them. At any larger scale, I would have to do more, but these are 10mm lengths and each and every one are done individually. I originally planned on making them from polymer clay, but the softening, rolling to get just the right size, cutting, shaping, baking of each one just added a lot more time than cutting off and shaping the wood. If they were clay, I was going to flatten them a bit. Regarding the color, I've seen bales from newely green rice straw, and I've seen bales from older yellow rice straw. They're definitely a gray green here, but it's also a hand tinted photo, popular in Japan in the late 1800s, and the paint itself seems a bit colorful and unnatural to me, so I mostly ignored the colors. Still, you may be right and a more greenish tint could be called for. I'm not so worried about these in 1/72 scale. Actually, I made these after I started trying to make one in 1/20 scale. I shaped it with polymer clay, and I made it a bit of a flattened cylinder, but making it actually look like straw mat has me a bit perplexed. I have some ideas to try. But, to be honest, I'm not very hopeful that it's going to look right. Which is why I suddenly took to making some 1/72 scale cargo!

Yes Mark. Yes, it is a consolation... 🙂