Bob Cleek

5 hours ago, Jack12477 said:

18 hours ago, Bob Cleek said:

A woodworking bench vise of that size is a severely limited tool when it comes to versatility.

That depends on what you are using it for.

I don't wish to be argumentative, but your comment leaves me scratching my head, Jack.  

8 hours ago, Landlubber Mike said:

I don't know if I could plane a small piece of wood held in the jaws, but maybe I could.

Yes, I found that the Panavise was a bit light for a lot of applications, but there really is a need for a range of vises in a well-equipped shop. I've got several from a big heavy six-inch jawed bench vise at one end, through an eight-inch woodworking vise, a couple of portable vises that clamp on the edge of workbenches, three or four machinist's vises of various sizes, an engraver's vise, a couple of jeweler's vises, a Black and Decker "Workmate," which is a sort of portable workbench that doubles as a vise, and a now somewhat-rare original (not the Asian copy) Zyliss "Swiss Army" vise, which is a wonderfully versatile patternmaker's style vise originally designed for field use by the Swiss Army.

4 hours ago, RegAuthority said:

I would love to be able to get out and pick up some “ old” kit from auction etc.  Amazon purchases have shown how dreadful some of the modern builds are.

The core of my shop, which I've built over a period of fifty years and three or four versions is "old 'arn,." Like you, I started with early 1950's "hand me downs" from my Dad. Every one of his old Craftsman stationary power tools is still going strong. One thing I learned is that mass equals stability and stability equals accuracy. That's why cast iron tools are still so desirable. And they are out there if you are willing to spend the time searching for them. Local auction and "for sale" sites are a good place to keep an eye on. Every time a craftsman shuffles off this mortal coil, there's usually a widow who can't wait to get rid of his "junk" for peanuts. I envy the British modelers. England seems to have something of a culture of "model engineers," much more than we do in the U.S., so you have a lot of good used stuff floating around over there, or so it seems. Get yourself a well-tooled Unimat lathe to enjoy while you are waiting to find a nice lightly used, well-tooled Myford 7.   

2 hours ago, Landlubber Mike said:

By the way, how do you like the mini vise?  I have a Panavise that I use but was wondering about the mini vice.  Does it need to be attached to a bench or table?

A woodworking bench vise of that size is a severely limited tool when it comes to versatility. A wood vise should not be used for metal, while a metal vise can be used for wood. It has no swivel capability. If one is into collecting miniature tools, it may be desirable, but not for serious work. At the present time, based on current reviews on a variety of sites, the Stanley 2-7/8" Light Duty Multi-Angle Vise with Swivel Base, at less than $50 is the apparent favorite. I don't have one myself, so this is just hearsay, but I plan to remedy that shortly.

Stanley 83-069M $46.95 2-7/8" Light Duty Multi-Angle Vise with Swivel Base | Zoro.com

2 hours ago, mtaylor said:

 

Well, then the hoodie would be a surefire way to get some assistance.

 

 

You'd think so, but in my case, if they took one look at the white beard on this old phart, that would exclude me from the thug category.  

Metal wire of many kinds can be found in stores that carry beading supplies. I suppose it may be a regional thing, but in my area there are a few "bead stores" that carry nothing but supplies for "hobby beaders." They have lots of types of wire and beads that can be useful for ship modeling.

Also, I've found some electrical parts are wound with salvageable copper wire, often in very fine gauges, which may be useful. You often have to clean off insulating coating, sometimes simply shellac, which is soluble in alcohol. The wire can be stripped by running it through a draw plate. 

16 hours ago, Roger Pellett said:

Our local Ace has a K&S display and  a good wire selection.  My only gripe is that the overdo the “Helpful Hardware” business.  Whenever I go into the store, someone sticks to me like a leech.  If they’d just leave me alone they might be surprised what I might buy.

That's odd.  I'm always looking for a clerk to tell me where what I'm looking for is located. Try dressing like you were going to church and see if that helps. Definitely do not wear a hoodie! You may be the victim of "retail security profiling." Is it possible you're setting off the "shoplifter alarms" every time you walk into the store?     

Lee Valley... The Franklin Mint of tool companies?

I remember the rats going crazy for shaft gland packing made of flax and tallow on a tug. They made a hell of a mess. I think it was the tallow that attracted them, not the flax. I expect they'd also have a taste for old-fashioned tallowed canvas tarps and oilskins.

Do you think the experienced guys turn them out all that much faster?   A half hour to make a deadeye and chainplates isn't all that bad at all.

1980's, 1880's, 1780's, 1680's?

In London, your best bet for any of the above would be the Royal Museums Greenwich - National Maritime Museum. 

1 hour ago, Roger Pellett said:

My reason for posting this was to encourage more modelers to push their limits a little; away from premixed paints.

Absolutely!  A bit of thinner, turpentine or mineral spirits, or a bit of acetone if I'm spraying, which allows building up a coating without waiting so long for it to dry, a tiny dash of flattening paste, if needed, a tiny dash of Japan drier to speed up drying even more if needed, a bit of raw linseed oil to slow down drying if need be. pour it into an empty pill bottle with a half dozen bee-bees and shake her up good. Getting in touch with my inner mad scientist. Life is good!  

Big tubes of some high quality colors can seem a bit pricey, but I sure don't miss paying eight bucks for a third of an ounce of pre-mixed paint anymore, that's for sure. 

Hey, Roger, I can save you ten bucks. Check out this free interactive online color wheel:  https://www.rapidtables.com/web/color/color-wheel.html

You just click on the area of color you want on the color wheel or type in the Hex, RGB, or HSL code and you get a "chip" of the color in the large square to the right of the color wheel. The colors on either side of the color you pick are the colors that yield the color you picked when mixed together. Red and yellow make orange, yellow and blue make green, blue and red make purple, and so on.

30 minutes ago, Jaager said:

Now that I know what they really are I would use artist's oil  (40ml tubes)  and mix my own 

One of the companies may have a ready made that is close or only needs more black or white or ....

A little linseed oil and mineral spirits and you are set.

What Jaager said. However, be sure to buy quality artists' oils, which have finer-ground pigments, not cheaper "student" or "hobbyist" grades. These will have "purer" colors which are more likely to blend as expected. Sometimes, non-primary colors are a combination of colors which don't behave exactly as expected when mixed with other colors. Given the usually limited palette of ship models, It only takes a few tubes of colors to give one the ability to pretty much everything they'll ever need. 

However, if you really want to stick with premixed paints, check out Tru-Color Paint. I've not used it myself.  It's a relatively new company and isn't as widely distributed as some of the other brands, but it is getting really good reviews from the railroad and armor modelers. They will mix custom colors, I believe. That said, their color selection is so broad that I don't think you will find it all that difficult to get a match. Check out their color charts. See: https://trucolorpaint.com/

1 hour ago, kurtvd19 said:

No.  Just took me a bit to find my link to the company.  They are in Poland and ship quick and the shipping costs were very reasonable.  A lot of product can fit in a #10 envelope. 

Steve Wheeler and I purchased a lot of parts from this place.  We would pool our orders together - it gave us an excuse to get together.  Everything we got was of very good quality and they are quick to get the parts in the mail.

https://www.rbmodel.com 

Wow! What a selection of "jewelry!" It looks reasonably priced, too. This one went right into my "Favorites - Modeling" file.

Thanks a million for sharing it, Kurt!

Excellent question! I wondered the same thing the other day. Vossiewulf was a valuable member of the forum community. He's a very accomplished modeler. I've learned much from him over the years. Perhaps the Admin could give him a ping.

"I have scratch built turnbuckles but I found a source for very well made brass turnbuckles at a very reasonable price and will not scratch build another turnbuckle.  These are for more modern boats than steam riverboats where I will still have to scratch build them."

Did you forget to post the link to your source, or are you just trying to play hard to get?  

I've always had problems with turnbuckles. Reasonable facsimiles can be made, but I've never been able to replicate the working turnbuckles on a 4' long  live steam working 1900 steam yacht model I extensively restored years ago. The model was built in the early 1920's. Four inch-long open body turnbuckles with properly opposingly threaded forked arms supported the deck-stepped signals mast. I've looked all over for tiny reverse-thread taps and dies to no avail. Even regular tiny taps and dies are very hard to find and quite expensive. I expect the best that can be done is to have but one end threaded and the other a "dummy." On that model, the ability to loosen the turnbuckles and unhook the shrouds from the chainplates made it possible to remove the mast when transporting the model, a feature that came in very handy. If anybody knows where opposing-threaded micro-taps and dies can be found, I'm all ears.

(I wouldn't be a bit surprised if wefalck doesn't have a complete set of right and left-handed micro-taps and dies in his collection of watchmaking tools!  )

3 hours ago, Roger Pellett said:

Here on the Lakes, the colors of vessels’ hulls reflect the cargos that they are expected to carry; Red oxide, iron ore; Black, coal; and light grey, limestone or cement.  A few fleets sported fancy paint jobs; Shenango Furnace painted their hulls green and ships In the Inland Steel Fleet still have a red oxide hull with a white stripe.  Crews supposedly hate the paint job since they have to maintain it.

 

Since, draft can vary greatly depending on loaded condition  and since fouling is not a huge problem, the paint job does not mark a load waterline.  Instead the hull color is carried down to the strake of plating just above the bilge strake.  Below that, the hull is painted with whatever primer was used.  In days past this was an orange hued red lead.  Color photos from 50 or so years ago sometimes show this, and often show the red lead primer where lock walls, docks, etc. have rubbed off the paint.

 

When Ships fit out after winter layup, crews standing on the harbor ice with very long handled paint rollers touch up the paint.  These ships are usually drydocked every five years.  At that time the bottoms are sandblasted and repainted.

I did not know that. Very interesting. It makes perfect sense that they'd not be too worried about antifouling paint there. I have not idea what the local regs are, but there are lots of rust-inhibiting coatings available now, so red lead isn't needed. (They can even spray molten zinc, which results in the equivalent of hot dipped galvanizing.) They come at a cost, though. In my neck of the woods, they stopped painting the Golden Gate Bridge with red lead paint years ago. They now use another coating of the same color. 

15 minutes ago, Roger Pellett said:

One color that I have not been able to find anywhere is red lead, not the actual stuff.  This is an old time industrial color widely used as a primer.  It appears to have been used for painting the bottom of Great Lakes Ships.

Maybe I'm missing the color to which you refer. Red lead primer is used to prime iron and steel because the lead oxide bonds well to iron and steel. It's not an antifouling hull coating, however. Traditional antifouling coatings are generally the same a reddish brown color as some red lead paint because they contain a fair amount of cuprous oxide. There's a wide range of colors which one might describe as "red lead." 

Red lead oxide pigment has a color range from bright orange ("International Orange") through scarlet to brick red or brown depending on the composition of the lead oxide. That's the problem when it comes to matching it. Because red lead oxide was the cheapest paint pigment at one time, they painted everything with it where appearances didn't matter, from ship bottoms to boxcars to schoolhouses, to barns, and in every variation of the orange to brown range.  This is probably why none of the paint manufacturers market a specific "red lead" color. Artists call the bright orange colored version of red lead tetroxide "minium," which was what the Romans called it. You can find artists' oil paint called by that name: Minium (Red Lead) Oil Paint Minium 50Ml (artistsupplysource.com) You'll find many premixed shades of what you are looking for in the "railroad colors" section of model paint manufacturers' chip sheets. 

Minium-232908 - Minium (mineral) - Wikipedia

Or, you can buy lead tetroxide powder from Firefoxs' Home page--for fireworks making supplies, pyrotechnic chemicals, color smoke, composite propellant kits, electric igniter kits, Igniter Heads, Paper Caps & Plugs, 37/38mm insert materials, fireworks fuse.... (firefox-fx.com) and mix up a batch of the real stuff in your basement at home:

Makes one gallon:

20 lbs dry red lead tetroxide powder**

5 pts raw linseed oil*

1/2 pt turpentine

1/2 pt Japan drier*

*If using "boiled" linseed oil, the Japan drier should be omitted.

**If cost or weight is a consideration, cabosil or talc may be substituted for up to half the red lead tetroxide powder to maintain paint consistency.

Or for small modelmaking amounts, you could just take any clear matt finish coating and however much red lead tetroxide powder you need to color it to your taste. 

Thanks for posting this conversion chart program. It's one of the most extensive I've ever seen and a welcome addition to my "favorites" collection. I especially like the convenient feature of just clicking on the brand and then the color and getting the whole range of equivalents. It's more than just a "chart," it's a program. While the variation in computer screen color settings render these "online paint chips" less than perfect, they are an excellent start for those of us who mix our own colors, or run out of our "stash" of the old-time premixed "good stuff" in the middle of a build.

For those who may find it useful, here's an additional color conversion chart for the now out of production Floquil colors: Floquil Color Chart.pdf (microscale.com)

Here also is a link to a PDF copy of Floquil's instruction booklet on another website. It contains a lot of good painting tips for miniatures:  Floquil Painting Miniatures (paulbudzik.com)

3 hours ago, Roger Pellett said:

Build from scratch:

While quality model kits, as Roger describes them, serve to inspire and educate beginning builders and those who, for whatever reason, want a model a particular kit yields, "going over to the dark side" of scratch modeling is the inevitable outcome of one's developing modeling confidence, if not skill. 

You don't need to be a Passaro or Tosti to build from scratch. As Roger sagely notes, there is an unlimited supply of plans for just about any type of boat and they can often be had for "beer money," if not for free. Freeing one's self from bondage to the kit manufacturers opens the entire world of nautical subjects to the modeler who is thereby no longer bound to building models of ships that have been built hundreds, if not thousands, of times before. Chapelle famously addressed this over fifty years ago (I think,): Nautical Research Guild - Article - Ship Models that Should Not be Built (thenrg.org)  and Nautical Research Guild - Article - Ship Models that Ought to be Built (thenrg.org).  

I think the question that should be asked by serious modelers more often than it seems to be is, "If, by some strange twist of fate, my model were to come to light two or three hundred years from now, would studying it tell people in that far distant future anything they didn't already know?" We don't have to build to the amazing levels of technical quality to which only a few are able to achieve, either. Some of the most academically valuable models we have today were actually quite crude, but they are all we have to see what ships of their times looked like. We are all capable of building "museum quality" models, if we just give them enough time!

Mataró – the oldest Museum Ship Model | Professional Model Making (wordpress.com)

5 minutes ago, mtaylor said:

It's tools???   I was told when young that it was "beer".    

When we were young, it was beer! But, alas, we are no longer young.  

On 10/15/2021 at 6:29 AM, stuglo said:

(I'd love a shireline but I still love my wife- difficult choice, but the shireline, while versatile, can't cook and kiss me goodnight)

Tools get you through times of no love better than love gets you through times of no tools!  

2 hours ago, kurtvd19 said:

I will not get rid of the print copies I have because taking the laptop to the john just isn't for me!

I always knew there was a reason that I always kept my printed copies of magazines I valued, but, until now, I never realized why.   I have a complete cased set of WoodenBoat magazine, having acquired every issue since they provided us with samples to review at the classic yacht brokerage where I was working when their first issue came out. I also have a digital set and, just as Kurt does, I use the digital version for the index and to skim for what I'm seeking, but when I narrow my research, I always pick up the hard copy. 

There's no explaining publisher's attitudes. I suppose some have good reason. The motives of others remain suspect. a few decades ago, I contacted the Hearst Publishing offices to inquire whether they would allow me to edit and prepare for publication a "best of" anthology of MoTorBoaTing magazines "Ideal Series," itself a collection of "how to build it" and similar articles from the magazine, which had been very popular between 1920 and 1960 before going out of business and, at some point, selling its rights to the Hearst Publishing Company. There were many "public domain" plans for some of the nicest small boats ever designed by some of the top naval architects in the first half of the 20th Century. I couldn't even get them to send me a rejection letter after three attempts to engage in discussions with them! It would have been some of the easiest money they ever made and there was no doubt the anthology would have been very popular. Hearst didn't even have the courtesy of explaining why they weren't interested.

On 10/12/2021 at 1:42 PM, Peanut6 said:

Basically I'm looking for a "well if you use this you can't go wrong" type of thing, something inexpensive and easy to use.  Any suggestions would greatly be appreciated as I'm figuring something would be better than just letting it go as bare wood.     

It would seem that the Peanut6's question, which he titled an "education request," invited a comparison of pros and cons of the various options. As something of a "professional" yacht finisher myself once upon a time, I'm glad to hear that glbarlow's cabinet refinishers used something other than shellac or "satin" varnish, neither of which were the best option for the hard use kitchen cabinets endure. "Satin" varnish is best avoided altogether. It lacks UV filters and will degrade quickly in direct sunlight. It's often also difficult to keep the flattening agent evenly in suspension while applying it, resulting in an uneven flat/gloss level on the surface and the flattening paste (dust, essentially) obscures the wood below it. Clear "satin" finishes are made to mimic a real hand-rubbed finish and they do that poorly, at best. Shellac as a final finish on just about anything that will be handled is just wrong, other than on heirloom quality fine furniture, and then only when applied as "French polish," in which each shellac coat is hand-rubbed with oil, resulting in a finish that is a combination of oil and shellac.

A "satin" or "hand-rubbed" look finish is accomplished using a hard top quality clear gloss finish which is hand rubbed with pumice and rottenstone until the desired level of gloss or "satin" is attained. No coatings chemist has yet to produce a brushed or sprayed finish "out of the can" that equals a real hand-rubbed finish. The real hand-rubbed finish is like no other in both appearance and feel. It's clarity and smoothness is unlike anything else. When the nature of a hull lends itself to hand-rubbing, either to depict either a painted or bright (clear) finished surface at "scale viewing distance," a real hand-rubbed finish is unequaled for that application. 

If it makes the polyurethane fans feel any better, Hamburg-made Steinway pianos have been finished with a sprayed polyester finish for the last 30 years or so and have a deep high-gloss finish. New York Steinway pianos, an entirely different model with different tonal qualities, are finished with hand-rubbed lacquer and have a deep satin finish. Nobody knows fine finishes better than the Steinway company and even they find it useful to use two different coatings for different reasons to finish their pianos. You can be sure, though, that Steinway isn't using shellac or "wipe on poly" on any of its pianos!

For those wood finishing wonks, here's an interesting article on how Steinways are refinished: The Art of Refinishing a Piano | Steinway and Sons Piano Refinishing (chuppspianos.com)