Bob Cleek

What Jaager said. If you are going to put your glass of scotch on the rocks on your model, use a coaster!

The amber colored shellac is called "orange" shellac. It's the same thing, just unbleached. (You can get orange dewaxed shellac, also. For ship modeling purposes, in fact, for most purposes, it doesn't matter if shellac is "waxed" or "dewaxed." Clear shellac has much less wax in it than darker colored shellac. The only issue with the natural wax in shellac is that it can sometimes cause problems with oil-based over-coatings such as gloss varathanes.) The "orange" shellac builds up to a very deep dark brown and is useful for classic furniture finishing. The "white" (clear) shellac is colorless. I buy Zinsser pre-mixed in the can. You can buy dry shellac flakes and mix them in your own denatured alcohol, but that's an extra step. If you want thicker shellac, just pour a little into an open container and let the alcohol evaporate until it's the consistency you want. Thick ("gooey") shellac is a good adhesive for some purposes. Shellac replaces a lot of adhesives in ship modeling. It's particularly useful in "gluing" rigging knots. (Nothing's more frustrating that tying off a line and cutting the tail, only to have the line come loose from a belaying pin, or whatever.) A drop of shellac on the knot will set it forever, but if you need to untie it sometime later, just a drop of alcohol will melt the shellac and easy untying or repositioning. Let the shellac dry before cutting off the end. It's similarly useful for preventing thread ends from fraying and, by applying shellac to a length of line, it can be formed to a catenary while drying and will stay that way when fully dried. Shellac is perfect for fixing hanks of line and gun tackle coils so they appear to hang naturally and don't move. It's also good for "hardening" soft woods like basswood. Lay on a generous coat of thinned shellac and let it soak into the wood. When dry, you can sand the surface easily without raising "fuzz." I'd put shellac right up there with sliced bread as one of the world's great inventions.

Happy news!

Dewaxed shellac is indeed a universal undercoating for any overcoating I've ever encountered. It's one of the least permeable moisture barrier coatings around and non-toxic. (Shellac is what they coat jelly beans with to make them shiny.) It's easily sanded, rubbed, and polished, as well. "White" (clear) shellac is invisible. One of the biggest advantages of shellac for those using water-based coatings is that it does not raise the wood grain like anything containing water is prone to doing. There's nothing not to like about the stuff... and it's relatively cheap. $20 a quart, $13 a half pint.

Allow me to further malign the rattle can! Shellac can be purchased in quart and, I believe, pint cans. It's thinned with denatured alcohol. It can be stored for a long time, stirred up and used easily. Apply it with a brush. Brushes clean easily when swirled in a small container of alcohol. When the "rinse" alcohol gets too dirty for further brush cleaning, I use it for thinning shellac or, with some shellac added, as my "thinned shellac" stock. Far less expensive than rattle cans and it can be surgically applied to rigging, etc. with a brush without the overspray problem.

Finally making the leap to a JimSaw, Roger? You'll love it.

An alternative to joggle sticks ("pick up sticks") which is often helpful in tight spaces is to bend a strip of lead or annealed copper or brass against the shape to be picked up. The "dead soft" metal strip will hold the shape when bent and, when turned on its side, will serve a template against which the shape can be drawn with a pencil.

Back in the days, there was a separate trade called a "fettler," who hand-fitted machine parts by scraping the surfaces with scrapers. The faying surfaces of the huge stationary and marine steam engines of the age of steam had to be "fetttled" by hand. the merest adjustment between their base and standards at the base could move the position of the head thirty feet above it by inches!

One of my favorite websites to peruse when I want to productively kill some time! Highly recommended. One note, however... their page on "internal combustion engines," includes "external combustion engines," too! You'd be surprised how few people these days know what an "external combustion engine" is, or so it seems.

For a first model, you'd be well-advised to take a pass on any model with square yards and "lots of string." For a second model, assuming you continue on from your first, do not attempt any model which has square yards on more than one mast. After that, you should have a good feel for your abilities and you're on your own. The kit manufacturers sell lots of big, expensive, highly detailed models to beginners who never finish them. Lots and lots of them. Don't bite off more than you can chew.

Certainly, that could work easily. No need for epoxy, however. Thin shellac should do the trick easily. It will saturate the paper easily. There should be no need to glue the disks together. Just push a pin into the center of the stack of disks and soak them in shellac. This is how they used to make insulated electronic components in the days before plastics.

I have long had an interest in live steam power as well. I had friends in the boating community who had steam boats. I had the pleasure of restoring a 5" long working live steam yacht model to working order years ago and that really got me thinking seriously about building a full size steam launch for myself but, alas, "life intervened." I did add a fair number of books on live steam to my library over the years in the course of studying the subject. There's a surprising amount of model steam equipment on the market. It's more like buying jewelry than model parts, though! An engine will run around $600 to $1,100. The steam plant will run around $900. Then you have to make all the additional plumbing and tankage and the stuff for the RC control system. Saito of Japan is one of the main manufacturers of scale model steam gear. They sell model kits, as well. https://www.saito-mfg.com/en/top_en/steamengine-boiler-boat_en/

That engine is just the ticket for an RC open steam launch hull.

So it has. From the Latin root verb, specere, "to look" and the suffix, -ulum, "a tool for..." Speculum is the Latin word for "mirror." Supposedly, in the late 1500's and early 1600's they called a similarly functioning instrument of torture a "choke pear."

I just love how I learn something new from nearly every one of your posts, Kurt! (And, reading back issues of Ships in Scale, the same goes for your fine articles in that publication.) In this instance, I must confess that despite my life-long wide-ranging pursuit of nautical trivia, I've never until now encountered a seaman's speculum which, of course, sent me scurrying to Google. While never having had any first-hand encounters with a speculum, seaman's or otherwise, I'd previously understood it to be a medical instrument commonly employed by gynecologists and proctologists. It's not unusual that we find medical and dental instruments useful in ship modeling, but I'm at a loss to see what use a modeler might find for a speculum in the model shipyard, except, perhaps, to gently spread rigging in order to access inaccessible inboard areas. My "Googling" reveals that disposable speculums are now made in plastic. Might these be particularly useful to plastic model builders? "Enquiring minds want to know" what use modelers, or seamen, for that matter, might have for a speculum?

That must be the one I have on my bench right now. A nice sailing model of a three masted coasting schooner? It was consigned to FedEx. They put it in a big box and filled the box with "packing peanuts." Apparently, when the box was turned upside down and dropped in transit, all three mast tops and the bowsprit "went bye-bye." The sails and rigging looked like a bored alley cat had at it. LIke the bumpersticker says, "Do it right. Do it once. Hire a licensed contractor!" Fine art and antique specialist shippers are the only way to go. Pay the premium and save the grief.

With the way real oil-based enamels are going the way of the dodo birds, mixing our own paint and colors from tubed artists' oils is going to become a valuable skill for those looking for a really fine finish.

In at least one contemporary Navy Board model without sails, I've seen the sheets run from the belaying pin to their blocks aloft with a figure eight stopper knot in the bitter end. I believe this is how the running rigging would have been left aloft when the sails were sent down. In such fashion, the sheets, etc. would be left aloft and ready to bend to the sail when the sail was again sent aloft.

Absolutely. I've also considered dental wax sprue wire, an easily sourced product. I know it is available down to #20 gauge and if not finer, I expect it could be reduced using a draw plate. It's a hard wax sold on spools like wire that's used in dental labs and by jewelers for lost wax casting purposes. It would have the advantage of melting away when the oven-hardened FIMO was baked. The concept of stamp-molding oven-hardening FIMO isn't limited to blocks, either. There's really no limit so long as the object is shaped in such a way that it can be removed from a split mold. Cannon, cleats, belaying pins, etc. could easily be done. Mold halves could be made of hard injection-molded plastic like LEGO bricks are made of. Stock mold halves that mounted on a plier-like hand tool could be manufactured and sold for all sorts of parts in various scales. The real question is whether the tooling costs and production costs to produce a range of molds would "pencil out." There would probably be a considerable investment to manufacture them and I'm not sure there would be a sufficient market for such a product to turn a profit. But wait! There's more! I did a bit of research on line. It's even easier than what I had originally envisioned. It seems now that FIMO and Sculpey clays are made in a liquid form for poured castings that cure to hard FIMO or Sculpey shapes. (Sculpey is another polymer clay product sold in the US.) So, all we have to do is make a master pattern and then make a silicone mold for what we are wanting to reproduce in quantity. The silicone mold can be used over and over again. We're so busy building ship models that we aren't keeping up with the modeling technology in other fields, I suppose.

Absolutely! I have a kit for attaching brass eyelets for canvas work. It has a pair of vise-grip pliers which accept a variety of different shaped "heads" that will set brass eyelets or "cringles" and snaps and such for canvas and sailmaking. I'm thinking I could fashion a "head" for it that would stamp out molded FIMO blocks. A groove between the two head faces would permit running a wire through to make the necessary holes for the line to run through. "(c) 2021 Robert J. Cleek" just in case you see it for sale in the MicroMark catalog someday!

Probably a buyer's premium at auction or some sort of taxes in the mix. Judging from the picture that brought in the highest price so far, I'd say yours ought to bring a higher price. It's much more interesting and complex a work. (IMHO... )

Ah, the voice of experience is always the most valuable. Scale is always the problem. I have a couple of models awaiting restoration and, for the life of me, I can't imagine how they made the blocks they did, smaller than a grain of rice and quite accurately convincing.

True. Silver solder won't fill gaps. If one wanted an externally metal-stropped modern block, they might have an easier go of it by rolling suitably-sized annealed copper wire into a flat ribbon section.

I'm going out on a limb here because I haven't actually tried this. It's purely theory at this point, but it's something I anticipate attempting when I'm next faced with having to make a bunch of really small blocks. I think it may be possible to make quite small blocks out of oven-hardening plasticine modeling clay, such as FIMO. A mold could be made to form the blocks to any shape desired. When the oven-hardening FIMO is "baked" at 230 degrees Fahrenheit it hardens. (There's also an "air hardening" FIMO, but I believe the oven-hardening stuff is stronger. Through holes in the blocks could be formed using a suitable diameter needle or awl. Metal wire eyes and bails could be permanently inserted in the soft FIMO before hardening, if desired. Basically, we're talking about FIMO beads that are shaped like blocks. It's a slow Saturday morning, so my creative juices are overflowing, but this is one approach I've been playing around with for some time. Imagine a pliers with block shapes in its faces, sort of like an old-fashioned round ball bullet mold. Quite a few blocks could be molded in short order. I don't have any idea of the archival qualities of oven-hardened FIMO, but we have a few pieces around the house that were done with it by friends and they seem to have held up very well over the years. If anybody's tried this, I'd welcome hearing of their experiences.

Tinning and fluxing the untinned part may work with conventional heat alone. However, it sounds like you were using regular "soft solder" and too much of it. It's my guess you'd avoid the problem described by silver soldering the parts using flux, a speck of silver solder, (or silver solder paste) and a torch. The solder joint should be practically invisible if you're careful applying the flux (or silver solder paste.) This will also provide a much stronger joint. A resistance soldering unit can replace the torch if one prefers. They have their advantages. at a price. The "blob" was a "materials and technique" issue, I'd expect.