catopower

Hi John, On my last couple coppered models, after completing the copper sheathing, I sprayed the hull with flat lacquer. It takes away that overly shiny look to the new model and it keeps off dirt and grime and makes it possible to handle the model without leaving permanent fingerprints as oils in the skin can't reach and react with the copper surface. In my experience, no matter what you do, the copper will not stay new looking no matter what you do. It will always slowly dull and tarnish, but I think the "aged" copper looks much better after 2 or 3 years – much more natural. Clare

Hi Bob, Glad to see you started your MSW build log. That boxwood piece looks great. Did you use the opposite piece as a pattern? I agree that the Hinoki (Japanese cypress) smells wonderful. I always thought of my Woody Joe kit build as a form of aroma therapy. A Japanese friend of mine carved a piece of the wood and saved the shavings because they smelled so nice. I'm going to have to build more of their kits, just for the therapeutic effect. Looking forward to your posts! Clare

Hello Jiljilia, sorry I missed following your build log. It was so quick! I've always like the look of Amati's Arrow gunboat and I even purchased a set of plans for it. I like your photo of the boat next to the Interceptor. I built one of those and flew it a LONG time ago. Was a lot of fun, though it lost a wing pod on the first flight. On it's last flight, I guess there was a lot of wind up off the ground. It went straight up then made a sudden 90-degree course change and I had to go hunt it down. Was a neat flight though – I remember it well, though it was...35 years ago... Wow! That painting of the gunboats, being Swedish, is more likely of the F.H. Chapman designed Swedish gunboats rather than the American gunboat Arrow. Anyway, nice job on the Arrow! Clare

Hi Tom, I just recently lucked out and bought the monograph and plans through MSW/Chuck Passaro. It looks like a very nice ship and I'm hoping to tackle it someday, so I'll be eagerly following your build. I have been using pear wood myself on a current build, not swiss pear. I've really like the way it looks and I think you've made a great choice. Clare

Hi Dave, Drake, I don't know about the stated width of the deck of the Mayflower, but I can tell you that 5/32"=1' scale is the same as the ratio of 1:76.8. So Yves is pretty close in calling the Model Shipways' kit 1:76. Don't know if that helps you any... Yves, One question, and I'm sorry if I missed this in the posts. You stated more than once that the blocks are plastic. Are you sure about that? They certainly don't look plastic in the photos you posted. Also, Billing Boats and Woody Joe of Japan are the only current manufacturers of wooden ship kits that I'm aware of that use plastic blocks. Thanks, Clare

Hi Floyd, that's a very impressive model. Nice job on the hull! I've seen the kit and been interested in it, but I never pictured how big the model is. The hull is really long, but I believe the mast is going to be even longer! Very intriguing kit. The J-Boats were really beautiful sailers. The modern catamarans were fun to watch last year, but they lack the beauty and elegance of the old yachts. Clare

Hi Ulises, Nice job so far on your build – Looks like you're making great progress! On the pattern issue you mentioned. Check to make sure your planks are parallel. At one end of the opening, how many planks wide is the opening? And how many planks wide at the other end? Looks to me that it's 8 planks wide at the fore end and 7 planks wide at the after end? Clare

Hi Keith, Minimum charge I got was $350. I guess if you really, really want the parts badly enough, maybe it's affordable. Or if you make enough parts from a sheet, you can of course sell the unused, but I think it would take an awful lot of people to make it worthwhile. But, now that I'm looking at it again, maybe it's not exactly cost prohibitive. More that it's a pretty big investment. On the other hand, I found at one point a place that will laser cut just about anything and the price was pretty low, with a $6 minimum order. I don't recall what the cost basis was, if it was area of cuts, total cutting time or what. I just know that they could cut wood, but the only metal they could cut was stainless steel, I believe it was. Anyway, now that you brought up the topic, I'm going to have to revisit these things and see what it would really cost to sending some work out to be done. Of course, I think it's nicer not to say "I did my own photo etching" than saying that "I paid a service to do it". But, it just all comes down to the value of your time I suppose. Clare

Hi Keith, I've done photoetching for a couple of my models using the Micromark kit. It does work. However, I will say that doing your own photoetching will probably not result in parts that look like the commercial set that Brian showed. The commercial processes are different than the DIY kit, and from what I've been able to find, they are cost prohibitive. But DIY PE is pretty finicky, involves several steps, and if you screw up one thing you practically have to start all over. You also need a drawing program, but the Micromark kit requires an inkjet printer, not a laser printer. I even gave up at one point as nothing was turnout out well. Then, I tried it again with a fresh outlook months later and had some pretty good success on small items. And...well... I was going to direct you to my photoetch results on my Saginaw project, but I just went there and 2/3 of the photos are now missing, so that won't help. Clare

Jay, I too am really glad to see you back at your Constitution model. I was really bummed when you had email me that you were giving up (or at least taking a break from) ship modeling back in November or so. So, I'm glad to see the progress you have been making on the redo of all that work. Having more than a couple big redo's myself, I know that's a hard thing to look at. But, you've got so much invested already, so it's good to see you moving forward again. Beautiful work! Clare

I couldn't come up with a good enough excuse to not work on the Saginaw, so I went ahead and made a little bit of progress... I finished up one of the round (octagonal) skylights and added the paneled doors to the deck house structure. I still need to do a little more cleanup and detailing, but this is what I have now. I haven't glued this into place yet, but will do that shortly. I had the darnedest time getting the windows into place. I tried cutting little pie sections, but they were small and impossible for me to control. So, I ended making a circular piece with a section cut out. This is the only way I could get the windows into the skylight. It doesn't lay flush with the frames, but at this scale, you really can't tell. I did have a little problem with a tiny amount of overlap at the ends, but it's pretty well hidden after I added the bars over the windows. Oh, yes, and those bars were so small and required so much care to affix that it was a very painful process. Give me ratlines instead any day! Next, I dealt with the paneled doors. I needed to add knobs to the doors and just chucked brass nails into a dremel and filed the heads down to a more reasonable size. Interesting to note that the ground away areas are steel colored since these are apparently not brass nails, but brass plated nails. Not so noticeable at this scale. I attached the doors, leaving a couple of the doors ajar. Obviously someone aboard was careless and didn't close them properly, and either the seas are very calm or the roll of the ship will slam them shut. These still need a little clean up and they aren't perfect. But, these will be mostly hidden by the wheel houses and the hurricane deck. The deck house is just temporarily put in place. I will need to get the wheel houses built before I can put this in place permanently. Clare

Excuses? Hang on... I'm thinkin', I'm thinkin'...

Happy Holidays and thank you Grant, Bob, John, Elia, and Popeye for kind words of support. Now that I've gotten past that little brass etching snag, I have no excuses for lack of progress anymore. So, I guess I'd better get a move on! Clare

I've cast many parts over the past few years including cannons, anchors and windlass parts. I've always used pewter alloys. With a melting point below 600˚F, you don't need access to a special furnace. Pewter alloys are easy to work with using just an iron ladle, a MAPP gas torch and RTV silicone molds (and safety equipment!). Not sure why you would want to use lost wax castings. I used to hang out with my father, who had a small lapidary and jewelry business. He used to use lost wax castings for gold rings. You have to make a wax pattern for each item your going to cast and then you destroy the patterns in the process – it's a one-shot deal. Great for sculpting unique works in wax and casting them in metal. But, it seems like there are easier ways to accomplish what you need. Of course, depending on what cannons you need, you might simply consider buying them in pewter from The Lumberyard or buy turned brass barrels from Chuck Passaro if the available sizes will work for you. If you really want to do you own castings (it is pretty fun to learn), you can get everything you need from Micromark except the torch and safety gear. Clare

Thanks Grant. I'll be tallying up the votes for a while yet. But, things are feeling better on the brass etching at this point... Consistency of work! The big question of doing this photoetching work is whether or not my success with the skylight parts is repeatable. So, today, I went back and updated the artwork for the paneled doors and also modified the skylight artwork to scale it up for a taller and larger (3/16" scale instead of 1/8" scale) Yacht America skylight. The Saginaw will require 10 paneled doors, so I made artwork with 12 of them, giving me a couple spares. To cut to the chase, I managed to go through the whole process twice today: Once for the paneled doors and once for the America's skylight frame. All seemed to work well, so that's 3 times in a row(!). Looking back, it almost makes me wonder how I could have been having so much trouble. But, I'm just really happy that things are finally going well. We'll see how long it lasts! Above are the results of the etchings I did today. The outer edges of the panel doors have been filed smooth. I still have to file inside the openings. After these are cleaned up, I'll glue them to thin wood sheet to complete the doors. The skylight frame on the right is for the Yacht America in 3/16" scale, so I made this 33% larger than the Saginaw's. It will also be taller, so the legs of the frame will be bent to a sharper angle. I'll probably then glue thin wood pieces over it, with this providing the basic structure. You'll have to look at my Yacht America log to see how well that works out. Above are the Saginaw's skylights test fit into place. I still have to decide how I want to handle the windows and the protective bars. I painted the insides of these white, but they look awfully bright with the black exterior. Though I've painted all the coamings on the model black, I suppose I could re-paint the skylight frames white instead. Either that or "fancy them up" with a simulated wood color. Of course, with windows in place, the inside color probably won't be so prominent. Here's a closeup of one of the painted skylights. In any case, it sure feels good to have the skylight structures behind me now. This takes a load off. The only other difficult structure is probably the paddle wheels. More on that next time. Clare

Thanks John, Bob, Michael. So far, so good. I'll consider writing up a tutorial in the future, but I have to find a bit of consistency in the task first. Let's see how other things turn out. Now that I've made the skylight parts, I'd like to get back to making the paneled doors I tried to make long ago as well as the rings for the paddle wheels. I really am not satisfied with how the flattened wire paddle wheels turned out. They are okay, but not as round as I'd like them. Of course, I may find it difficult to get the width consistent on all four sets of rims, but maybe that won't bother me as much as wheels that a little out of round. We'll see. I'm going to try working on those doors and the wheel rims this week. I also got some large diameter round brass in very short lengths so that I could potentially turn the rims on the lathe. Unfortunately, the chuck I have isn't big enough and I'm not ready to spend $130+ for the larger chuck. Eventually, I'll get one, but let's see how the etched brass turns out first. Forward! Clare

Hallelujah! I think I finally broke the etched brass spell that's been standing in the way of progress on the Saginaw! I've been kind of down and out of doing a lot of shipmodeling the past couple weeks due to a pinched nerve or something in my neck and shoulder. For a while, I wasn't getting much sleep due to pain and that's left me tired all day – too much so to feel like sitting down and getting any work done with neck and shoulder pain. It's gotten much better since then, and while it's not totally gone, I've been able to get some things done. Being a bit short of project motivation for a while, I decided to do a little technique research and worked a bit on just one aspect of photoetching brass, and just practiced prepping the metal and getting the artwork onto it. I did a bit of experimentation on exposure times under a lamp and took observations. Eventually, I worked my way back up to actually etching the brass and today I made the pieces that would form the basis for the circular skylights on the Saginaw. Here's the exposed photoresist, all nice and cleanly adhered to the metal. This was the first major victory. I'd had problems with bubbled in the photoresist, what I thought was dirt and such. I found that keeping the metal and the photoresist very wet while sliding it into position made a big difference. Also, in the exposure process, the metal was getting hot and that was affecting the photoresist's adhesion and all. I found that getting the right sized lamp, getting the right distance and exposure time helped. Also, I found it best to let the project cool off after exposing one side, but before exposing the other side. To improve evenness in the exposure, I also found a solar powered display turntable. I set the project on that under the lamp to expose the photoresist and the light powered turntable kept the whole thing slowly rotating and evening out the exposure across the work piece. I made sure to warm up the etchant by placing the bottle in a bath of hot water. Even with the very chilly garage, this improves the efficiency of the etchant. I also made sure to start with a fresh bottle of etchant, and I'm very carefully making sure to mark the usage and track it very carefully. The resulting etch took less than 10 minutes. I made sure to remove the work piece at one point and rinse it, removing spent etchant with a brush, before returning it to the etchant bath to resume the process. The pieces for the skylight were cut from the sheet and cleaned up. At this point, all the etching work has been done and now it's just a matter of using the parts to assemble them into something useful, and hoping I designed the part correctly. In this case, the pieces are bent to shape and I cut off some thin rings from a 15/32" brass tube on my Sherline lathe. I glued these into place using a little thick CA in a couple spots to hold the pieces in alignment. I then glued each spoke to the ring using thin CA. Finally, I trimmed off the excess lengths of spokes and filed them neatly. These will fit on top of the circular coamings I turned for them long ago. Next step is to paint them and add the clear acetate windows. That will be a bit of a task, but after all the pain I've gone through relearning and redeveloping good technique for the brass etching, this should be a breeze! I'm not sure if I'm going to try to put protective bars over the skylight windows or not. At this scale, they'd probably be around .005" and nearly invisible. If I put them on, I would mount them vertically and there would be maybe 3 per wedge-shaped window. I'm not sure what material I'd have that would be thin enough to work other than nylon fly tying thread. Anyway, it's good to make progress on the Saginaw again. It's been neglected for far too long! Clare

My understanding is that Midwest acquired some of the Laughing Whale line, but I'm not quite sure which kits. I have a couple Midwest kits in the closet and the instructions are far better than Laughing Whales instructions ever were and the parts are pretty clean. Overall, I'd say they are an improvement over the old LW line. In the past, the LW kits were a little crude, pre-cut parts were a bit rough, the kits had very limited, photocopied instructions, but the plans were very good and they had an interesting selection of subjects. I built a couple of the old kits and still have the ginormous Muscongous Bay Lobster Smack kit in the closet. I've never looked at one after the line was picked up by BlueJacket, but I would expect they've been improved a lot. Still, I wouldn't sell Midwest kits short. They have a high production value and they're designed to be sold on the store shelf, so they're pretty complete and reasonably priced. Clare

Hi Mort, I think you've gotten some good info. I'd also like to point out that if you take your time and hunt on Ebay, you can occasionally find BlueJacket's old Flying Cloud kit. It's an 1/8" scale solid hull kit, like Red Jacket. In smaller scales (mostly 3/32" = 1'), you can find the old Marine Models Sword Fish or Sea Witch kits. They'll be a bit lighter on the detail, but with a little extra work, they should turn out quite nicely. Clare

Hi Dan, I've done this a few times myself. As Sam mentioned, sometimes plates come out a little odd and I too have had plates flake a bit. I'm not sure what that is either. It's been years since I've done it and usually ended up heating small batches of plates in a pie tin. This way, you get a large variety of colored plates. You should experiment with it a bit to get a feel for how to heat the plates evenly. That's one issue that I had was that some plates laying on top of other plates lead to uneven heating. The patchwork coloring is nice, but it was only like that initially in the dockyard. Once the ship was in operation, the coloring evened out. Good luck with the technique! Clare

Thanks everyone for the nice comments. Robbyn, to answer your question, as Elia points out I have a couple build logs here that have been on hold for a bit or moving very slowly. Mostly, I've got a couple projects that I'm doing for other people that I've had to bump to the front of my project queue. I just got tired of not finishing anything, so I pushed the longboat to the front since it was so far along, but it's been in the works since the kits were initially released. Elia, as I just mentioned, I've got a couple other projects that I'm actually working on for other people. Also, I'm doing a couple out-of-the-box kit reviews for Ships in Scale magazine, and that's actually been a nice distraction. I just finished one that should show up shortly, and then I've got another one or two others I'd like to do in the coming months. It's all a good thing, but it is slowing down these other projects, particularly the Saginaw, on which I'd hit some snags. The Yacht America is actually pretty far along and I was thinking about making some progress on it. If I get it far enough along it'll naturally call on me to finish it. So, stay tuned. Clare

Done! In a marathon late night session last night, I finished my longboat. I tied the last of the rope coils into place, glued the handles on and officially declared victory. I just couldn't go one more day saying that it should be finished by tomorrow. I'll post a full set of pics in the gallery shortly. I ended up not including the grappling anchor as the casting seemed too big for the model, especially after looking at Chuck's prototype which has an anchor I really like. Perhaps in the future I'll fashion one that's smaller, but it seemed unnecessary, so I left it out. Also, I did flub the location of the flag halliards and put them on the port side instead of the starboard side as given in the instructions. That didn't seem like it was critical, so I left that as well. Here's a final pic with more to be posted in the gallery shortly. This started out as a kit that I thought was "nice" and ended up being a really fun and challenging build that tested my skills, taught me a few things, and turned out to be a pretty sweet looking model. Chuck did a wonderful job on this kit design I have to say. I'll be building a case for it in the near future, but at least it's under a dust cover now. Clare

So near, yet, so far... Every time I think "Okay, I should have this project done tonight or maybe tomorrow", tonight comes and goes, tomorrow hits and ends and, and again it's "okay, I'll defnitely have this project done tonight, or maybe tomorrow..." But, seriously, I think I can say that I will have this project done by tonight! Or maybe tomorrow. No. Tonight, I think. I have an event to go to this afternoon, but I have lots of time before I have to leave. And, I'll be back shortly after dark and have time to work on it tonight. All that's left now is to rig four blocks with hooks and rig the jib and staysail halliards and rig the backstays, for which the pendants are already complete. The anchor is rigged and ready to seat with its coil of rope. Oh, and then I just have to tie off the flag halliard. As long as I don't break anything (crossing my fingers here), all should be okay and I can permanently fix the tiller and the handle for the windlass into place. Here's what it looks like now... Almost there! Clare

Congratulations on completing your longboat build Robbyn. You've done a terrific job. Your completion is inspiring me to get in gear to finish up my own longboat project. So, now I'm busily trying to get caught up. It should be very soon and I'm only hoping it will turn out as nice as yours. Well done! Clare

Hello Shlhawk, That's a very good question and the funny thing is that I have been actually faced with exactly the same issue regarding HMS Victory and paint. I am building a model for someone and I'm trying to figure out a way to build it without paint. But, I don't like the way the ship looks without paint. Or at least the way the completed kit might look if I build it without paint. Personally, I think the bias for no paint on a model is just a bias. It's all personal opinion and my own is that paint can frame a model quite nicely and create a contrast that can make the wood on a model stand out. Most ships never looked the way an all wood finish model looks, but that's fine if that's what you like. I'm thinking I'd like to build the Victory with natural wood tone for the yellow bands and for the area that would normally be coppered and then where it's black, I'd like to paint it. Then, that makes it easier to paint the stern galleries which might look a bit odd unpainted while using the kit supplied parts, at least to me. In my experience, when someone asks what people think about a topic, they usually have something in mind and are looking for some encouragement to follow their own ideas. If you feel your model should be all natural, then that's the way you should build it, and if you think it needs some paint, then don't worry about it and go ahead and paint. There should be plenty of examples of both on MSW. As for my case, I need to figure out a way to convince the owner that we'll have a great looking model with my limited paint scheme plan. So, unfortunately, I can't follow my own advice and just do it the way I want. But, good luck and regardless of what you decide, I'll be looking forward to seeing your build here on MWS, Clare