Bedford

Mate, she's beautiful. Great details!

Mate, she's beautiful. Great details!

Thank you everyone,
 
I'm now back from a Nordic trip in the northern hemisphere summer, & have now finished & assembled more of the details around the cockpit & face of the raised deck. The horizontal varnished trimming pieces both sides of the companionway, which insect with a vertical varnished piece each side; & the weathered teak cockpit seat backrests.
 
Overall view:

 
Detail, & I can see the pencil alignment mark needs to be removed:

 
The junction of the strips was difficult to get, but happy with this:

 
Detail, showing the drain openings & another pencil mark to be removed...

 

 
Trimming piece, against the deck.

thanks for looking in,
 

I probably wouldn't buy-in someone elses parts, I was thinking of kitting myself out to do 3D-printing - or at least do the designs myself. On the other hand, as for my laser-cutting, parts usually do not turn out right at first shot. As @dafi knows well, there are usually several runs necessary to get the dimensions right for printing - unlike for substractive machining, where one in most cases ends up with the correct part.
 
However, I love this late 19th to mid-20th century manual technology of substractive machining and those old machines. In addition, I am already spending a good deal of my wake hours in front of a computer, so manual workshop work is a pleasant diversion.
 

Sure but... I've got nothing against 3D printing. I buy 3D parts but I wish I didn't have to, I wish I could make those parts myself. I think there's something to said for building a model totally by hand. I can't do it but for those that can, I admire them and their skills greatly.  

Thanks again for your interest !
 
********************************
 

Anchor-winch 3
 
The winch drums were fashioned from 3 mm Ø round acrylic rod. Each side was built up from two pieces. The problem here were the square holes for the handle-bars. In principle, one could cross-drill two holes and file the square, but at 0.5 mm x 0.5 mm this would have been quite a challenge. There would be other options, such as broaching, but this requires specialised tools.
The simplest thing is to divide the drum into two parts, to slot the end of one part, cement the two parts together and one ends up with perfect square holes.

Set up for slotting the ends of the winch drums

Slotting the winch drums
 
To this end, a piece of rod was faced on both ends, and drilled 0.5 mm for the axle. It was then transferred to the dividing head on the micro-milling machine and the ends were slotted 0.5 mm deep with a 0.5 mm circular saw. Finally, a round disc of the same diameter was cemented to the end, leaving two perfectly square cross-holes.

Milling the eight sides of the winch drums
 
In the next step, the axle of the dividing head was tilted by 1.5° for milling the eight sides of the drum that is slightly conical. The drum is bound by iron hoops at both ends. These were generated by milling the drum to 0.2 mm diameter above the target dimensions. Then, the diameter was reduced by these 0.2 mm, leaving two ‘bands’ of 0.3 mm width and 0.1 mm thickness at both ends.

Close-up view of milling the eight sides of the winch drums
 
The thinner ends of the drum were faced off on the lathe to the correct length and then the drum halves parted off to the correct length.
 
The spill-heads were done in the same way, but are cylindrical (or eight-sided prisms), rather than conical (or eight-sided truncated pyramids). A smaller burr had to be used, as the distance between the reinforcement bands is only 1 mm. Before parting-off, the outside ends were slightly dished with a round-burr in the lathe tailstock.

Milling the spill heads
 
For the ratchet wheel a short length of 3 mm acrylic rod was turned down to 0.1 mm above the target diameter of 2.0 mm. The geometry for milling the ratchets was worked out on the computer. I arrived at ten ratchets 0.2 mm deep (= 32 mm on the prototype, which appears reasonable). In watchmaking there are special ratchet-wheel milling cutters that can also cut curved teeth, but I don’t have any, so I had to make do with a dovetail burr, which is good enough, as the ratchet wheel does not need to be functional. Also, two 0,2 mm thick discs as flanges were parted off.

Milling the ratchet wheel
 
Unfortunately, these transparent parts are difficult to photograph and, indeed difficult to see during machining. A first coat of paint will eventually show any errors …

The parts of the anchor winch made so far assembled

The anchor winch at its future location
 
To be continued …

Absolutely beautiful workmanship

Absolutely beautiful workmanship

Jan, thank you for your feedback!  
 
And I will allow myself to comment on it a little.
What you called "gifted" I still put in third place in importance. Experience and skills definitely claim second place. But in first place should be the necessary high-quality machines and tools, because without them the necessary experience cannot appear and no gifted can help with this.  

Absolutely beautiful workmanship

Absolutely beautiful workmanship

The contours of the model gradually take shape.

Absolutely beautiful workmanship

Absolutely beautiful workmanship

Anchor-winch 2
 
As planned, the drawings for the cheeks were printed to the correct size and stuck to a piece of 1 mm acrylic glass. A straight edge of the piece was used as reference surface.
 
The first step was to drill the 0.5 mm hole for the axle of the winch-drum. This hole serves, together with the straight edge as reference for aligning the two cheeks so that they can be made identical. The drilling gives me the opportunity to show the watchmaker’s pillar drill (https://www.maritima-et-mechanika.org/tools/drills/drills.html) in action.
 
Using the micro-mill as a router, the parts were roughened out with the aid of a fine cylindrical burr. Then a process of hand-filing began, using a variety of small and fine watchmaker’s files.

 
The edges were slightly rounded using a three-sides scraper and a fine abrasive stick in the handheld electrical drill. Finally the parts were polished with a rotary bristle-brush.

 The lower edge of the cheeks is 9 mm long. Unfortunately, the transparent parts are difficult to photograph.
 
To be continued …

Thank you Pat ...  Back from another travel, I turned my attention to the
 
Anchor-winch 1
 
I spent quite a bit of time perusing contemporary drawings and near-contemporary models of small mid-19th century Baltic vessels in order to get a good idea of what, at that time, the anchor-winch of a modest small vessel might have looked like. While the archives of the Danish Royal Shipyard in Copenhagen indicate, that winches with mechanical advantage, such as those driven via gears and an idler-shaft or patent-winches seem to have been known by the mid-1830s, they don’t seem to have been common on more modest vessels. Vessels, such as this Rahschlup, were built in small shipyards with limited forging and other iron-working capabilities, let alone gear-cutting facilities. Gears could have been bought in, but this would have been too expensive probably for this kind of ‘subsistence’ shipping.

Profile of the winch – Detail from the Original drawing by Möller.
 
This research was needed, because the original drawings show the profile of the cheeks, but there is no plan view, that indicates the length and shape of the barrel. In the Danish archive I found the drawing of a single-masted jagt of comparable size with relatively detailed rendering of the winch. It may be a bit older than the Rahschlup, but the original drawings indicate an eight-sided barrel, which at that time was already a bit old-fashioned. Other drawings from the Danish archive of the mid-1840s showed already more modern looking round barrels.

Jacht THETIS (1842) – Late 19th model from original drawings in the Altonaer Museum, Hamburg.
 
The Danish drawings and various photographs from similar vessels under restauration confirmed that the cheeks were surprisingly thin, only about half a foot in thickness. Similarly, the post against which the bowsprit will rest was only ¾ of a foot in cross-section.

Detail from a drawing F150-119 for a Jagt, Rigsarkivet Copenhague.
 
Based on this information, I drew the barrel and the cheeks as working drawings. The drawings for the cheeks will be printed and stuck onto 1 mm acrylic glass as a guidance for sawing them out.

Working drawing for the anchor-winch of the Rahschlup
 
Workshop results coming hopefully soon …

Thank you for your comments and concern, gentlemen. I must say I'm looking forward to a bit of a break - this has been a much bigger project than I had first imagined, and I've been putting a lot of time in.
 
As for the upcoming treatment, it's akin to pulling up a single weed roots and all before it can grow into a whole garden of weeds. Side effects should be minimal and each days treatment is short, but having to be at the hospital during the day means (obviously) that I can't be at the museum.
 
The 'Duchess' will wait patiently in her temporary case.
 
John.
 
 

You've brought her such a long way John, she'll wait, enjoy the break and I'm hoping all goes well with the treatment.

You've brought her such a long way John, she'll wait, enjoy the break and I'm hoping all goes well with the treatment.

Again, I managed to eek out a bit of time for the workshop between travels and addressed myself to the 
 
Parcel Hatch
 
The ’parcel hatch’ is a common feature of such trading-smack type vessels and proved access to the cargo hold before the mast. As the name indicates, this space was typically used to store general cargo, while the main hold was used for bulk loads, such as bricks or coal, or grain in sacks.

The laser-cutting template for the parcel hatch lid
 
This hatch will be shown closed and therefore a ‘core’ (the actual hatch including the coamings) was milled from a piece of acrylic, while the lid was built up from laser-cut parts. I could have milled the two parts in one piece, but milling the camber of the lid would have required a more complex set-up. On the real thing lid was made to fit over hatch like the lid on a box.


 
These hatch lid was tied down with two iron straps, the ends of which slipped over eye-bolts in the deck, to be secured to them with cotter-pins presumably. As these parts will be painted in a different colour from that of the hatch and have to fit tightly, they will be made and fitted later, once the hatch is installed.

The parcel hatch and crew companionway provisionally deployed
 
To be continued …

A wee more update as I did a bit more work on the boat - I must admit I am having too much fun!
 
I previously admitted that I shamelessly read the building instructions from Occre of their Hercules kit to get some ideas. There are a few things that I felt could be done better, in this post I ll show my solutions to the problems.
 
So I left the hull on the side for now and started work on the superstructure. Again, my CAD drafts were not entirely correct but at least the templates for the superstructure inner bulkheads were spot on. However, the plywood started warping so I screwed the bottom to a very thick piece of plywood and used screws and epoxy to make it rock solid. 

 
Now, Occre uses lots of thin vertical pieces to cover the forward part of the superstructure, blended together afterwards with filler and sanding but I just bend a piece of 1 mm plywood.


Another area were Occre used multiple thin strips is the two aft corners but I just made two pillars with stacked pieces of plywood - the small gap will be very easily filled with filler.



Hercules has a very distinct propeller shaft tube thingy, this is a feature that a model must have.

 
The solution from Occre is not very elegant, just bending a piece of wood over a tube. My solution was different.
 
It was actually easy to draft this in CAD and looking at the drawing, it seemed doable to sand a half dowel to sit on the hull.


Indeed, it worked well and was surprisingly easy and quick. The screws will of course be replaced with wood nails, maybe even use a bot of epoxy, then filler and sanding - I think it will look fine.



Best wishes
Vaddoc

Another update. The 'Duchess' continues to grow sails. First two on the mizzen mast. The cro'jack is rigged, the lower topsail merely crossed at this stage, but at least she looks a little more balanced with sails on all three of the forward masts.
 
John
 

Many thanks to all that hit the like button. 
@Jim Lad  Thanks John, really it is a very elegant hull!
@Bedford I had a bit of a hardware issue so suspense to be prolonged for a few days - I suspect the boat will appeal to you as well!
@wefalck I did think about this and I have half decided to leave this out, for two reasons: One is that I do not like the plating which is random with a large curved belt along the length of the hull, such elegant lines deserve better. Second is that I ve been fighting cracks between the planks, I ve already filled and sanded three times but the planks keep moving. Not sure why as the pear I am using is very old and dry, perhaps I have not used enough frames. In any case, the plank lines will show no matter what I do so maybe best to leave it as a wooden hull instead of simulating a riveted steel hull.
 
Ok, some more photos:
 
The hull is now filled, sanded to 320 grit, sealed and sanded lightly to 400 grit - then sealed again and re-sanded to 400 grit. I actually intended to use a blade to scrape the hull but I forgot to do it, it would have been faster. Still, the hull is now very smooth. I ve left the little feet to the hull as they ll help to mark the water line.

Happily, the stern also came out alright


There are several opening to be cut out to the bulwarks as well as some more  work to be done before painting

This is pretty much as far as I ve gone studying the plans and the boat. I need to figure out the stern layout and tiller mechanism, finish the bulwarks and start work on the superstructure (started already, again some happy accidents in my CAD drawings)
 
In the mean time I cleaned and tidied up the shipyard, thought I d share some photos

Sanding station with the new toy, Proxxon MF 70 - not sure what I can do with it but I had some credit with Axminster so chose this.

Cutting/drilling station

Work bench

Take care all
Vaddoc

Yeah, it's all just opportunities to learn isn't it?
Love the lines of old tugs and I'm interested to see what this new build of which you speak will entail.

Yeah, it's all just opportunities to learn isn't it?
Love the lines of old tugs and I'm interested to see what this new build of which you speak will entail.