Bob Cleek

So what were you drinking before you peed in the cup? The resident chemists can probably give a better suggestion, but I'd be interested to see if a similar result might not be achieved using a solution of water, amonia, and table salt. If so, that would avoid the chance that your living room or wherever you display the model won't acquire the aroma of a dirty gas station mens' room. You might also consider bringing a urine sample to your urologist. The reddish tinge to that in the cup pictured is concerning! Thanks for having the courage to share a very interesting technique. Great photos, too.

I'll mention further that if you have a small clothes iron or electric plank bender, or even a hair drier, you can apply heat to the outside of the plank (taking care not to scorch it) while holding it in place. The heat will substantially accelerate the drying time of the PVA.

This new product may have come on the market since the inception of this post. It's really the best all-purpose holding system I've ever seen. Very strong and rigid holding ability. Heavy steel base. Arms attach with rare-earth magnets. Flexible arms stay put. Not like those "third hand" holding gizmos that have been around forever and never stay where you want them. High quality alligator clips, too. Reasonably priced. QuadHands® - Helping Hands Tool

Slower glue or faster fingers? Seriously, thouigh, a bit of either or both would probably lessen the problem. The only other thing to do is work one bulkhead at a time, rather than trying to put glue on them all at once.

Acetone will sure do that to styrene and many other plastics. No bout a doubt it. Lacquer thinners, tolulene, xylene, and similar solvents will melt many plastics also. Most all "hot" solvent-based modeling paints are designed for use on wood and metal surfaces. Applications on many plastics will require a suitable primer. Thanks on the review of Tru-Color paints, too!

No. What I'm talking about is exactly the opposite: layers cut to the shape of each waterline shape, stacked on top of one another. i.e. each one a cross section through the horizontal plane. Conseqently, there's a whole lot fewer layers to loft and cut. (In your case, one "lift" for each deck. Not as many as indicated in the video below which is provided for illustrative purposes.) The deck shapes are all you need, together with the distance between each deck. The "bread and butter" lift method is described in detail in this article: Building a Bread-and-Butter Solid Hull Ship Model – The Model Shipwright This method is favored for larger models for a variety of reasons and the interiors of hulls constructed in this fashion are easily hollowed out for R/C purposes by cutting away waste wood before assembly of the lifts. A picture is worth a thousand words department:

I hear you on that score, but I think that's just because we're used to dancing with the girl we brought. I was just thinking that this guy is planning to build an R/C model and an old school "bread and butter" lifts hull would probably be a lot easier and stronger than anything else. If the waterlines are cut carefully, it's quite easy to fair up the hull by simply "knocking off the corners" using a chisel, plane, spokeshave, and/or a disk sander and sanding board.

In which case, it would be much easier to slice "lifts" the shape of the waterlines horizontally from the "loaf" instead of vertically. A lot less cutting to do and probably a stronger hull structure than planks on frames. Much faster because much less work. No?

Excellent! Stories like yours serve to encourage others to keep an eye out for bargains on the used tool market. It's often quite amazing what can be found.

Foredom models have changed over the years. They once had a model 320, I believe, but their current model line uses another system of identifying models. The operation and maintenance of the motors and handpieces haven't changed much at all though. Their present owner's manual should be helpful to you. If you haven't got it already, it's available online at TX_Manual.pdf (foredom.net)

While I'm sure there are sail drawings online, the odds of finding ones that match the sails you need for a particular model aren't good. Add to size and shape the the vagaries of period sailmaking and my guess is you'll spend more time looking than you would drawing the sails you need yourself and then copying your drawings onto your Silkspan as you contemplate. Of course, in that case, it would be easier still to draw the details you require directly onto the sails themselves. Tom Lauria has a fairly good Silkspan sailmaking tutorial on YouTube. Check it out if you haven't already.

Yes on both counts. Shellac is dissolved in alcohol. When the alcohol dissolves, the hardened shellac is left behind. Two-pound cut is perfect for our uses. It soaks into fabric with the viscosity of water. It's invisible when it dries. However, remember also that repeated coats of shellac will build upon one another and create a glossy finish which isn't desirable for modeling.

I wrote: "I find it hard to believe that shellac's solvent, alcohol, would "melt" oil paint." I was not as clear as I could have been. I'm no chemist by a long shot, but I do know that there's a somewhat significant difference between what is called "grain alcohol," which you can drink, "denatured alcohol," (sometimes called "methylated spirits,") which is used as the solvent in shellac (and which you can't drink,) and isopropyl alcohol, which you can't drink, isn't used for thinning shellac, and will dissolve oil paint. I could be mistaken, but I believe it is the isopropyl which is added to the alcohol to form isopropyl alcohol (sometimes called "isopropanol") that dissolves many oils, alkaloids, and natural resins and not the alcohol itself. My bad for not being more specific. As for oil paint film "aging," or perhaps more accurately put, "polymerizing." tubed artists' oil paint is intentionally compounded so that it will remain "wet" for a protracted period (i.e. polymerize slowly) so that artists using it, particularly to paint pictures on stretched canvas and wooden panels, can easily work with the undried paint over a longer period of time using established techniques for applying and mixing colors directly on the painted surface. To accomplish this, artist's oils are made with raw linseed oil which polymerizes very slowly. When using artists' oil colors to paint models, heavy metal salts like cobalt and manganese which accelerate the polymerization of the linseed or other vegetable oil carrier in the artists' oil colors are added to speed up the "drying time." (Linseed oil with driers added is commonly sold as "boiled linseed oil, although it's not boiled at all.) This accelerator is called "Japan drier." * Adding the proper amount of Japan drier to a raw oil-based paint will speed up the "drying" of the paint to as little as an hour. (There are corresponding "drying" conditioners sold for tubed acrylic artists' colors.) When using tubed artists' colors, be they oil-based or acrylic-based, they have to be thought of as simply pigment mixed with a carrier, oil or acrylic base. While classical oil painting artists use artists' colors straight out of the tube, modelers who use them for brush or airbrush application need to condition the tubed paint, which requires thinning and adding dryers to achieve the desired consistency and drying time. * "Japan drier" is so called from the practice of "Japanning," an enamel paint finishing technique, especially for metal, which was popular in earlier times to mimic the Japanese finishing technique of building up a thick coating of high gloss lacquer coats. "Japanning" required applying multiple coats of oil-based high gloss paint which had to dry thoroughly between coats. That would have required a very long manufacturing process allowing for the drying time without the addition of "Japanning driers" to the enamel paint.

That's a new one on me! I find it hard to believe that shellac's solvent, alcohol, would "melt" oil paint. The highly volatile solvents in lacquer would certainly have that effect, I'd expect, but not shellac. On the other hand, alcohol will thin (i.e. "mellt") most water-based acrylic paints.

The trick with coils, etc. is to make them off the model and then glue them down on the model when they are finished. By running the bitter end of a line beneath the pre-made coil, it can be made to appear to be part of the separately attached coil. In very small scales, for uniform coils, such as on pin rails, some will drive a couple of nails or pins a sufficient distance apart and wrap a suitable length of line around the pins to form the coil. For faking mooring lines, a similar approach is used. What I generally do is to take a piece of scrap styrofoam packing sheet stock (always a good idea to keep a few pieces around) and I wrap it in kitchen plastic wrap. (If I want a number of uniform sized coils or fakes, draw a pattern and place the pattern on the piece of styrofoam beneath the plastic wrap.) The plastic wrap will make it easier to remove the finished shaped line from the block when it's dry. Following the pattern seen through the plastic wrap (or not if you don't use a pattern,) I use sewing pins pushed into the styrofoam block to hold the line in place as I want it to look when attached to the model. You can put pins on either side of the line or through the line, however best suits the occasion. After the line is pinned to the block, take a paintbrush and saturate the line with clear ("white") shellac. ("Orange" or "amber" shellac, which is also available, has an amber color and will work the same as "clear" shellac, but for most modeling applications, you don't want the color.) The shellac, right out of the can, is the consistency of water and will soak right into the fabric of the line. Only one application is required. Just a touch with a loaded small brush and the line will soak up the shellac. Let it soak in well but don't overdo it. Now, let the shellac dry. As the shellac dries, the saturated line will gradually stiffen and you will be able to shape the line further as you may wish, using tweezers or the pins, whatever works for you. (Fingers aren't such a good idea because the shellacked lines will readily stick to your fingers and you may end up with a "tar baby" of string on your fingers.) If, after the shellac hardens, you want to further adjust the coil or fake, you need only apply some alcohol and shellac will soften again until the added alcohol evaporates. When the shellac is completely dry, which will be within a matter of minutes because its alcohol solvent evaporates very quickly, your line will appear as it did before, since the shellac becomes invisible, but it will be stiff and "cemented" into the position you shaped it to. (Blow on to speed up the process, if you want.) You can then remove the pins and carefully peel the line off the plastic wrap, which shouldn't stick too much to the line. and you can then attach the finished coil or fake to the model with glue or a bit more shellac.. This technique can also be used to secure the ends of rigging thread from unraveling and to shape catenaries in things like footropes, or to stiffen rows of reef points so they hang naturally against a sail. Somewhere along the way, many folks have come to use PVA adhesive for similar purposes, but I became familiar with using shellac in the days before PVA became popular and never found watered down PVA to be much use for anything as an alternative to shellac, mainly because I found shellac easier to handle, it has better adhesive properties, and the drying speed of its alcohol solvent is far greater than that of water. Shellac is a perfect sealer for model work. Its archival properties are well-proven, it is readily cleaned up alcohol, and is is completely safe for man or beast in all respects. I buy white ("clear") shellac (de-waxed if I can get it) by the quart and denatured alcohol by the gallon can (from which I decant it into plastic squirt bottles,) at any paint or hardware store. It's relatively inexpensive, has a relatively infinite shelf-life and a myriad of uses in modeling. It is also completely compatible with all other oil or acrylic coatings which might be applied over it.

Sorry to hear that Mihail is suffering from the sanctions imposed on Russia. At least it sounds like he's not drafted and freezing his butt off in a foxhole in Ukraine. It saddens me to see that sanctions designed to twist the arms of governments too often hurt the little people who have no say in what their governments do. Micro-carving tools are easily made from tool steel or even broken drill bits. You won't need a lot of expensive tools. Just a propane torch, a hacksaw, and some small files and sandpaper. (If you have a woodturning lathe, you can get fancy with handles, but any old piece of dowel will work.) YouTube has many tutorial videos on making micro-chisels and carving tools. Search YouTube for "how to make micro-chisels" and you'll find lots of these. Below is one of the best.

Don't forget the San Francisco Maritime Museum, which has some impressive ship models and the J. Porter Shaw Library nearby at Fort Mason, a valuable resource for ship modelers looking for plans and photographs, all part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area which incorporates all the waterfront from the Hyde Street Pier to the Golden Gate Bridge. There's also a resident ship model club aboard the ferry Eureka that has an interesting website that's worth checking out. See: Hyde Street Pier Model Shipwrights (hspms.org) Additionally, the San Francisco Model Yacht Club, devoted to sailing models has its own clubhouse and pond yacht lake in Golden Gate Park. They were founded in 1898 and are the oldest model yacht club in the country. See:: SFMYC – San Francisco Model Yacht Club Those SFMYC guys are really serious about sailing models! (Photos from SFMYC website.)

Time to come over to the dark side, guys! She wouldn't be a daunting task to scratch-build a model of her. Why wait for a kit? You can do it. The complete plans are available on line for free, even in TIFF format, so they can be enlarged for modeling use. These plans were made as part of the Historic American Engineering Record ("HAER") Available from the Library of Congress on line.: Title Sheet - Schooner C.A. THAYER, Hyde Street Pier, San Francisco, San Francisco County, CA | Library of Congress (loc.gov) T

As you probably know, artists' oil paints are formulated to provide the maximum drying time in order to provide the artist with a paint they can work with, moving it around on the canvas for as long as it might take them to complete a painting. Artists oils generally use raw linseed oil (also called "flax seed oil" under which name it can be found in any health food store.) ("Boiled" linseed oil is raw linseed oil to which driers have already been added to speed up the drying process.) The proprietary driers you are using, such as Liquin, do speed up drying time, but nowhere near as much as would be desired for regular painting rather than artists' oil paints. You want the more powerful stuff, generally sold in hardware and paint stores as "Japan drier." Follow the mixing instructions on the Japan drier container. Think of your artists' oils as "concentrated paint, just pigment and linseed oil, which should be considerably thinned with turpentine, mineral spirits, or acetone, (depending on the user's preference... like a barbecue sauce recipe) and Japan drier to speed the polymerization of the linseed oil base. By adding the correct amount of Japan drier, one can accelerate the drying time of an oil paint as much as is desired. It appears from the manufacturer's literature that Liquin is only intended to modify the artists' oil paints within in the much narrower spectrum of drying times required for classic artists' oil painting techniques, rather than for fast drying times appropriate for modeling.

At scale model viewing distances, wood grain isn't going to be apparent. I'd suggest you also try putting a coat of shellac over your oil paint wood color, let it dry well, and then hand-rub it for a very smooth surface. The tests will be the best proof, but I think that the alcohol solvent in shellac will have no effect on the oil paint beneath it, while the mineral spirits in even a traditional varnish may soften the oil paint beneath it unless the oil paint if well-cured.

Yes, we do agree that shellac works well as the last layer of the coating system. I mentioned stain because I thought he was working on real wood and not card. My mistake. Stain could go over shellac, but it wouldn't look the same as stain on bare wood. This is because the grain structure of the bare wood absorbs the stain at differing rates and enhances the figuring of the wood. Shellac can do this to a certain extent (especally a darker shellac,) but if the shellac is put down first, it soaks into the wood and any stain will only uniformly darken the workpiece. I agree using shellac before a dye would be a bad thing for the reasons you stated. My use of the work "stain" wasn't careless, it was just wrong, since I thought it was wood to which he was applying the finish instead of cardstock. The ship modeling world would be a better place if we could just convince our colleagues to only use shellac and artists' oils and avoid all the "better living through chemistry" that seems so fashionable these days. Not likely we'll live long enough to see that happen though.

Ah! My bad! I thought that was a wooden hull, not a card model. Take that as evidence of your great skill in creating a faux finish with oil paints! Forget what I said about using stain. You've done a great job once and after you sand off the lacquer, you should be okay if you just reapply the oil paint faux wood finish (with a bit of drier added.) You can then wait for it to dry well (a few weeks should be enough since the coating will be thin) and then apply two or three coats of shellac and, when dry, hand-rub it to a nice perfectly smooth satin finish. At least, that's what I'd do. As before, be sure to do a test run first, but the shellac should be completely compatible with the oil paint and the alcohol shellac solvent shouldn't have any effect on the oil-based paint.

I think he wants to stain the wood and then put a high gloss lacquer over it. Not something I'd advise, but any stain would have to be applied before any shellac. No?

Speed is a poor substitute for torque.

It's difficult to tell from the photo exactly what's happened to the finish, but from what I can see and you've described, it appears that the spray lacquer employed a very "hot" solvent which reacted with the oil paint, "skinning over" (drying quickly on the surface with greatest exposure to the air) and when the lower level of the lacquer dried, it "shrunk" and created the "crackle" finish on the drier top of the lacquer coat. Such problems are almost always the result of incompatible coatings with different drying or adhesion characteristics. It may also be a function of the incompatibility of the acrylic basecoat and the oil paint over it. Some reaction between the "hot" lacquer solvent and the oil paint causing the oil paint to soften may have resulted in the oil paint being pulled away from the acrylic base coat as the oil paint dissolved by the lacquer solvent shrunk when the solvent evaporated. The different result you had when you tested the coatings on the "coating paper" may have been due to the paper's porosity or surface flexibility permitting the lacquer solvent to evaporate without creating tension between the lacquer and the lower coating layers. Another possibility, and this is a wild guess, is that the drier you used on the oil paint reacted with the lacquer solvent, causing the lacquer to dry more quickly than it should have which caused the crackling in the lacquer. This is all speculation, of course. It would take a chemist to evaluate the compatibility of the various coatings used. Generally speaking, "water and oil don't mix," and water-based acrylic paints and oil-based paints and lacquers shouldn't be considered compatible in any event. You may be able to remove a fair amount of the lacquer and oil paint using lacquer thinner to soften it and wipe it off. Similarly, you may be able to remove the acrylic coating with alcohol or some proprietary acrylic stripper. In any event, a gentle scraping and careful sanding down to bare wood is in order. From there, it depends upon the finish you desire. High gloss finishes are usually avoided on models as the high gloss destroys the impression of reality and makes a model "look like a toy," as some have described it. If you wish to darken the wood, as you apparently tried to do, the proper coating schedule would be to apply an oil based wood stain to the bare wood. Thereafter, the wood could be coated with an oil based varnish and after that had dried well, hand rub the varnish with pumice and rottenstone until the desired level of low gloss was achieved. Alternately, a "wipe on" polyurethane finish containing stain might also be used, but only after testing this on the same wood species with which you used to plank the hull. I'm sorry to see the problem you've encountered. Unfortunately, there's a certain degree of alchemy involved when dissimilar coatings are used, particularly when modern synthetic coatings are used. You just never know what you are going to get. Myself, I entirely avoid using "rattle can" spray coatings and water-based coatings on models because I've had similar difficulties to what you've experienced when I've done otherwise. Fortunately, the damage can be undone with a bit of work.