Bob Cleek

That's true. The books cited are for earlier rope-stropped blocks. The ship-smithing is obvious. a rod of suitable length would be formed with a pointed end and then bent to the shape of the hook desired. (The tip of the hook is bent outward from the shaft of the hook to hold the mousing as might be required to keep the hook from coming loose in use.) If used, thimbles would be attached to the hooks when the eye was formed. Thimbles are simply a section of metal tubing flared at either end. Thimbles were frequently made of soft metal such as copper or even lead, as their purpose was to prevent the chafing of the rope eye worked around the thimble. A block would be stropped with a strop large enough that the thimble could be secured to the strop by a throat lashing between the block and the thimble. Later metal stropped blocks would have a metal eye fashioned in the metal strop and a hook attached with a shackle. Blocks with hooks were in the minority, since the only need for a hook on a block would be for a block that needed to be disconnected on a regular basis such as for tackles. As mentioned, there are various options for such construction, but the period will dictate which practices were most common at that time. Here's the "how to" from Ashley's Book of Knots which should answer some of your questions: And this from Hervey Garret Smith's The Arts of the Sailor: Everything you need to know about rigging of any period is in a book somewhere. Each period has its "go-to" reference volumes. You will find it very helpful to acquire whichever reference works are relevant to the period of the model you are building. (Most are available new or used in reprints and occasionally online PDF's.) Asking questions on internet forums may get you pointed in the right direction, but, if you think about it, if you don't know the answer, it's pretty hard to know whether the answer you get from an online "expert" is the correct one, isn't it?

It really depends upon the historical period you're talking about. That will determine the construction details of the block which will determine the options for attaching a hook to it. Modernly, not infrequently, a shackle is used to connect an eye hook to the frame of an iron-stropped block. For earlier technology, you may find these contemporary treatises helpful. TheArtOfRigging-Steel.pdf (thenrg.org) The art of rigging (thenrg.org) The Rigging of Ships: in the Days of the Spritsail Topmast, 1600-1720 (Dover Maritime): Anderson, R. C.: 0800759279609: Amazon.com: Books

Your taste in books looks as good as your taste in tools. That's an excellent set.

Kits? Who needs kits with that set-up? You have everything you need for scratch-building! Wonderfully equipped shop. I wish you'd given us some warning, though. If I knew you were going to buy all that stuff ahead of time, I'd have bought stock in Proxxon and made a few bucks in the stock market!

Yes, the shipping costs for an assembled case of any size will be quite expensive and for that reason, I suppose that's why the store-bought cases for models are with few exceptions sold as knocked-down kits less the glass or acrylic. If the case were built of glass and shipped assembled, not only would the weight occasion higher shipping costs, but a "bullet-proof" packing crate would have to be built, as well. When the cost of the glass or acrylic is considered, the case kits are really overpriced in my opinion if one has a table saw handy. (The average table saw blade easily forms a slot which holds the glazing stock.) Acrylic glazing is lighter and for that reason alone might appear preferable, but I've found, in my area, at least, that the proper acrylic sheet material for the job, which is made for picture framing and so has UV shielding in it, can be more expensive than picture frame grade UV resistant glass. Given the time and effort invested in a model worthy of being cased, as most are, the cost of frame materials becomes a justifiable investment in presenting and preserving the model and the additional cost of UV protection is wise. Finding it the least expensive source, I now source my UV-shielded case glass from the picture-framing department of the my local craft outlet. (Michael's.) I rip my own frame stock on my table saw, milling it when desired on the router table or with a milling head and cutters in the table saw, depending on the shape required and the cutter blades or router bits on hand. Recognizing that others' mileage may vary, it should be noted that acrylic glazing, even of the highest quality, is generally not used by most museums. First is the concern about the material's acidic outgassing which can destroy the exhibited artifact. It also scratches easily unless sheathed an an expensive scratch-resisting sheathing. It lacks the strength of glass and large pieces tend to "sag." Significantly, from a cost-benefit analysis, aside from very expensive rare variants, the life-span of acrylic glazing is rated at no more than two years! (I've seen it last a lot longer, but this is the manufacturers' and curators' agreed lifespan.) Anybody who is contemplating building a case for a model they hope will survive them for a generation or maybe three may find this article on "museum quality" archival cases helpful. It's focus is general display case archival "best practices" for all types of museum exhibits and the hobbyist modeler will certainly find compromises from the "ultimate" standards appropriate, but if you consider your model "museum quality," it defines what a "museum quality" case for it should be. https://museumdisplaycase.com/

I think the easiest answer is that, for many, making your own ropes and lines is fun! Some who have "gone over to the dark side" of scratch building take pride in "making it all themselves." Others prefer to avoid the expense and sometimes the frustration of sourcing cordage via mail order and appreciate the flexibility of making their own color choices, not to mention that the detail-oriented who want to make right and left handed laid rope, four-strand shroud-laid rope and cable-laid rope in sizes perfectly to scale, have little choice but to make their own. The rest, perhaps more focused on the end product than the process of every detail of a build, opt for sourcing their cordage "off the shelf." "Different ships, different long splices" and all that. The question that's perhaps now more pertinent than it was when Frolich and others published their rope-making machine plans is "Why make your own rope-making machine when there are so many sources out there?" Even cost is hardly a consideration when Syren offers a very effective rope-making set-up for less than a hundred bucks, the cost of which is quickly amortized by the savings realized by "rolling your own." (https://syrenshipmodelcompany.com/ropewalk.php) Of course, here again, some prefer to buy their cordage ready-made and if that works for them, they obviously have their reasons.

The plane's body is claimed to be made of "European ebony." Interesting. I never knew ebony grew commercially anywhere in Europe. Many ebony species are on the "Red List" as threatened or endangered and are subject to import restrictions and even outright bans.

Five stars and two thumbs up! Beautiful work. Thanks for sharing it with us.

As noted above, 220VAC 50hz European mains power is easily "stepped down" to 120VAC 60hz American mains power by the use of a readily available plug-in converter which are sold to the travelers from America. I expect the 50hz would result in a slower motor RPM than 60hz, but the machine's speed control should make that difference irrelevant. I doubt the minimal torque demand on the motor would occasion any overheating issues. I'd suggest you send an email to Jim Byrnes and confirm that with him. https://www.byrnesmodelmachines.com/contact5.html It is certainly a beautiful machine. If you find that the shipping to the UK negates the bargain price, you might consider Domanoff's near-identical machine now made in Poland at a similar price point. It is not machined from aluminum, but rather high quality acrylic, but it comes in either American or European powered versions and additionally has a powered, variable speed, take up spool for the finished line. The Byrnes machine has a manual crank-operated take up spool. https://www.shipworkshop.com/product-page/pl4-series-endless-rope-making-machines-with-traverse

Vanda-Lay makes quality products for what they are. Their customer service is great because they are a small family-owned company. I have their drill press and it works fine for what it is, a small "micro" drill press. (I also have the same capability with my full-size 1950's Craftsman/King Seeley bench top drill press which has a quill adapter to mount quarter-inch router and milling bits and an X-Y table and vise for drilling and milling, and my Unimat SL which has mico- drilling and milling capability.) The Vanda-Lay drill/mill set up looks quite nice. Their CNC machined tools are well made and I expect you'll find have tight tolerances right out of the box. (Most all Asian-made machine tools will require significant amounts of fettling (tuning) to get working to acceptable tolerances. This is what you are paying for in the price difference between, say, Little Machine Shop or Micro Mark and the lowest prices online for the same unit.) I picked up my Vanda-Lay drill press and a top of the line Dremel slightly used for peanuts from a modeler who became disabled and quit the hobby. For the same money for a new Chinese small drill press, I would look for some "old 'arn" like the 1950's cast iron Craftsman bench top drill presses that are quite inexpensive used and well worth restoring if the price is right on a beat up one. Remember with machine tools that weight equals accuracy. I would not waste money on the cheap small Chinese-made drill presses. Particularly for drilling with very small bits, you want a press without runout in the quill. A wobbly tiny bit will quickly break. Also, it's always better to pay a bit more for a larger machine tool if you have the space for it because you will always have the workpiece capacity limitations of the machine to run up against. Buy a 7x12 Sieg Chinese lathe and it won't be long before you experience the frustration of it's not being able to handle a 14" workpiece! The best maxim is to only buy a tool when you need it and then buy the best quality tool you can possibly afford. Cheap tools are a waste of money. They may be cheap the first time you buy one, but the cost adds up when you have to keep replacing them over and over again. A top of the line tool will last a lifetime and still have some meat on the bone when your widow sells your tools off or gives them to your buddies. Vanda-Lay is good quality stuff in terms of materials, fit and finish. The primary limitation with the Vanda-Lay tools is their Dremel power plant. Dremel mototools are handy gizmos but they were never intended to do hand-held work to fine tolerances or operate at slower speeds. (They rely on speed, not torque, to get the job done.) Dremels are big and clunky if you are trying to do fine work with them and, at high speeds, a slight slip of the hand can ruin a workpiece. I've spoken with Vanda-Lay and they've assured me that they'd be happy to provide a holder for a standard one-inch diameter Foredom Flex-shaft handpiece to replace their stock holder for the Dremel Mototool. While I haven't the need for one, I've not yet ordered one, but I think this would be a great improvement over the Dremel. The Foredom handpieces are much lighter and not so "top heavy," their foot pedal variable speed controls are more sensitive, and their large motors have far greater torque than the Dremels, particularly at low speeds. A decent used Foredom setup will probably run you a couple of hundred bucks, but once you use one, you'll never go back to the Dremel for modeling. You could easily spend five hundred bucks on a Foredom-equipped Vanda-Lay mill/drill set up, so you may be tempted to take the step up to a Sherline lathe and/or mill, or the equivalent, but remember that once you get into dedicated lathes and mills, you will easily have to spend as much again on the essential tooling and accessories for those machines before you can start doing any work with them. As always with modeling tools, one can spend a lot of money on fancy machine tools, but a skilled craftsman can do the same with sharp hand tools with far less of an investment in money. The trade off, of course, is that with hand tools, you're trading your working time for those savings. There are many variables to consider and everybody has their own comfort level. It's easy to invest a lot of money in tools. "Choose wisely, Grasshopper!"

I think one thing to remember is that these days everything mailed seems to go by air. Air mail prices were always expensive. Back in the days of the transatlantic mail ships, the Queen Mary or Queen Elizabeth could carry hundreds of tons of mail across the Pond in four days time and we were used to waiting several weeks to get surface mail from Europe. Now, we expect the same in a few days. They can do it by air, but it comes at a much higher price. Surface shipping has gone way up in price, as well. A good bit of the inflation we're experiencing is the result of price gouging by the shippers. Before the pandemic, the average rate for shipping from Shanghai to Los Angeles was stable at less than $1,800 per container from 2011 to March 2020. Since the pandemic, the rates to ship that same 40 foot container from Shanghai to Long Beach have gone up almost as high as $12,000 per container, although prices are coming down a bit at present. The pandemic gave rise to a big increase in "e-commerce" mail order business (think Amazon) which overwhelmed the shipping infrastructure. There weren't enough containers in existence to carry it all. Add to that the fact that China "locked down" to prevent Covid spread and their import traffic contracted, so, with much less to ship back from the US West Coast to China, a lot of empty containers piled up here, raising the price of empty containers in China.

If you haven't already, you might want to check with Midwest Products. I believe they discontinued their model kit line, but are still very much in business and may have a copy in their files. Email: info@midwestproducts.com Phone: 1-219-942-1134 Toll Free: 1-800-348-3497 Address: 400 S. Indiana St. Hobart, IN 46342 There's a copy of the plans you are looking for listed right now on eBay for $2,95: https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=midwest fantail launch ii&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-34002-13078-0&mkcid=2&keyword=midwest fantail launch ii&crlp=_5057&MT_ID=&geo_id=&rlsatarget=kwd-77447026886641:loc-190&adpos=&device=c&mktype=&loc=43893&poi=&abcId=&cmpgn=395409860&sitelnk=&adgroupid=1239149811198381&network=o&matchtype=p&msclkid=8d8eceba2aa71eea1a68adb8976cb278

If our mother didn't think it could "put your eye out," it just wasn't fun.

You sure can't beat the price if you only have very occasional need for it. My major concern, however, would be keeping the nozzle working correctly. It appears to have a rattle can nozzle and we all know how those can go south. (Yes, always turn the can upside down and spray until just gas comes out before putting the can back on the shelf.) The advantage with an airbrush is that you can clean them and always be assured of perfect spray performance and be able to adjust the shape of the spray "line." (Well, almost always. ) Given the price, it's sure a good way for somebody to taking their painting to the next level.

As Jaager said, "It takes a library." The subjects you've listed are extremely broad and vary over the centuries and from geographic area to geographic area. There really isn't any single book, or even several books, that cover it all. Each model you build, if you are serious about it, will require some degree of research. I'd suggest you identify the specific vessel in which you are interested, or the era and type of vessel, and begin your research there. For example, if you are interested in American clipper ships, you'd want to obtain a copy of The American-Built Clipper Ship, 1850-1856: Characteristics, Construction, and Details by William L. Crothers, an excellent volume that covers the subject in great detail. https://www.amazon.com/American-Built-Clipper-Ship-1850-1856-Characteristics/dp/1635617332 It will not, however, be of much help if you are interested in mid- to late-18th Century British warships, you'd want to have a copy of David Anscherl's The Fully Framed Model, HMN Swan Class Sloops 1767-1780. https://www.amazon.com/Fully-Framed-Model-Sloops-1767-1780/dp/0975577212/ref=sr_1_1?qid=1659827783&refinements=p_27%3ADavid+Antscherl&s=books&sr=1-1 If you stay with the hobby any length of time, you can find yourself with a library of hundreds of books, many out of print and hard to come by, and acquiring such a library can become "a hobby within a hobby." (And modelers, or their widows, sometimes offer entire libraries of this type for sale when the modeler no longer has a use for them.) Fortunately, today "there's an app for that." Google is your friend. A tremendous amount of information is available on the internet, some as raw material, and some in forums such as MSW. Also, there are many of the old classic books, now in the public domain, which have been scanned and can be downloaded, such as George Biddlecombe's The Art of Rigging (1848) (https://thenrg.org/resources/Documents/articles/TheArtOfRigging-Biddlecomb.pdf) and David Steele's The Art of Rigging (1896) https://thenrg.org/resources/Documents/articles/TheArtOfRigging-Steel.pdf , both of which are available in the "Articles and How Tos" section (https://thenrg.org/resource/articles) of the NRG's "Resources for Ship Modelers" on the "Resources" section of the MSW forum. (https://thenrg.org/resource) This section of the forum is full of materials that will likely go far in answering many of your present questions.

Knots on model rigging are often approximations of the actual prototype knot because it's nearly impossible to tie a real knot that small. The best information on knot tying for model rigging are the many YouTube instructional videos on surgical knot tying generally posted by medical schools for the use of their students. Search for "instrument knot tying" and "suture knot tying." For general knot information there are two definitive references, both still in print, as far as I know: Ashley's Book of Knots by Clifford Ashley and The Encyclopedia of Knots and Fancy Ropework by John Hensel and Raoul Graumount. These two books have just about every knot devised by man. The Encyclopedia is the more technical of the two, categorizing the knots as to their mechanical design and type. "Ashley's" categorizes the knots by their various uses.

Or it could go like this: "What is in the box, sir?" A miniature table saw I obtained in the US. Here's my customs declaration form. "Did you pack it?" No, but I unpacked it when it was received from the manufacturer and then repacked it myself. "Welcome home. Your import duty is..."

This thread dates back to 2015, which I believe was before Jim Byrnes began offering the crosscut sled for the Byrnes saw. While the cost of a Jim Saw and sled is far beyond the "Choppers" and the Horror Fright chop saw, Byrnes Model Machines has the bases covered here also, and again by orders of magnitude more accurately and more efficiently. (Albeit that the price of the Byrnes quality is also greater by orders of magnitude, but you get far more than you pay for with Byrnes tools.) I may be stating the obvious here, but I can't resist giving a plug to the best collections of products out there.

It almost looks like the sheets of copper were individually treated with liver of sulphur of various degrees of dilution. Not to dispute Mr. Romberg, if it be he who built it, but to my eye the bottom of that model ship doesn't look anything like a real coppered bottom. Certainly, new plates hung in the drydock would appear as portrayed by the "new" copper plates, although plates wear more at the waterline than anywhere else. This is what a real newly coppered bottom looks like: This is what a coppered bottom looks like when it has been in the water for a while, the upper picture of Constitution is after she'd had some time to dry off and the lower one is as the dock had just been pumped out. Note in the latter picture the dark mottled "weathering:" For a coppered bottom on a model to look like it should, care needs to be given to remain true to scale. At scale viewing distances, the model's bottom would have to be nearly flat with only paper-thin plate of the proper scale size if one were working in a scale where the thickness of the plate edge could be discerned at all. In my opinion, if the scale doesn't allow for "plate" material of the proper scale thickness to be seen on the model, it's better not to try to show individual plates. A "weathering" job would provide the more accurate portrayal.

Perhaps now's the time for somebody to set up some kind of internet platform that connect airline travelers and shippers together. I could easily be wrong, but it seems to me that somebody flying on a commercial flight from the US to Australia to easily add a box with a Byrnes Saw and sliding table to their luggage allowance, paying for overweight, if any, and get it there for a lot less than $616! Then again, on a per mile basis, I'm sure shipping the same package across the US would be every bit of $100, so perhaps not. Not to be a conspiracy theorist or anything, but I can't help but think the corporate capitalists have seen the "recovery" from the pandemic as "open season" on charging as much as the market will bear to make up for lost time. I heard the fuel companies' profits for the first half of the year were the highest in history.

Excellent and essential advice! Additionally, don't airbrush by bending your wrist to cover a distance. Keep the airbrush at the same distance to the surface as you move the airbrush across the surface with your arm, not your wrist. If you spray with a "flick of the wrist," the center of your arc will be closer to the nozzle than the ends of the arc and you'll have an uneven lighter coat at the ends at best and, at worst, a big runny mess in the middle. Similarly, when spraying a curved surface like a boat hull, be sure to keep the distance between the nozzle and the work surface constant to ensure an even coat. It takes a bit of mindfulness at first, but quickly becomes second nature.

Have you tried covering your mold ("plug," actually) with kitchen plastic cling wrap ("Saran Wrap") to prevent sticking to the mold form. You should be able to lay up multiple layers of toilet paper or even paper towel material, wetted down with shellac, over the plastic wrapped mold. It will dry quickly as the alcohol evaporates fast. What results in a hard paper and shellac matrix which can be sanded and will take paint well. Epoxy resin will work as well, but it's nasty and messy, as you've probably discovered!

These two shots are from my research collection. They may be of help to you if you don't have anything better. It appears to simply be a flat trim piece that doesn't bend at the bottom.

I'm sure they got into the game long before the prices started increasing geometrically. This is great news, actually. It's about time that quality ship models began to adequately reflect their status as fine art. While this is a much later model (1803,) it is still apparently an "Admiralty Board Model," of sorts and it appears its provenance is impeccable. A price point just a tad over $600,000 USD seems about right, all things considered. Such models don't hit the market all that often. Seven years ago, the 12 foot long builder's model of RMS Mauretania sold for $195,922 USD (162,000 GBP.) This is definitely a sale to watch. I'm not so sure about the catalog estimate of 20,000 to 30,000 GBP for a lantern from Victory, though. Bid Now: A painted tin and horn lantern from the Gun Decks of HMS Victory, English, circa 1800 - July 2, 0122 2:30 PM BST (invaluable.com)

No kidding! I turn 73 this week and it's still tempting. Of course, I'm sure there will be a price involved. I doubt they're just giving it away!