Bob Cleek

I'm not sure where you are going with this, Michael, whether you have construction plans for a specific vessel or you are presently building conjecturally, designing as you go along. I've had a fair amount of hands-on experience with this type of layout, owing a small British cutter for many years and having sailed on several larger British pilot cutter types, including one very similar to what you are building. While I have no idea of your present intentions, I'll pass along the observation that the type of saloon door you are building here, in my experience, invariably is hung to swing forward, rather than aft into the saloon. This maximizes the sole space in the saloon, particularly if a table is set on the centerline. Frequently, there will be a second bulkhead with identical doors forward of the saloon bulkhead. The distance between the two bulkheads is the distance of width of the forward and aft bulkhead doors. The doors in the forward bulkhead swing aft, such that the edges of the forward and aft bulkhead doors meet when when opened all the way to right angles with the bulkheads, edge to edge, and form a short paneled companionway between the saloon and the forepeak. (There are hooks or barrel bolts that hold them open in this position.) With the doors of both bulkheads closed, the space between the bulkheads will become the head compartment, with the commode to one side and a hanging locker or even a shower on the other, each being concealed when the doors are fastened in their open positions. I don't know if this comment is helpful or not. It's not intended as a criticism, to be sure. The work you're doing is really beautiful and inspiring! Thanks for sharing it with us. I realize the time commitment involved in providing a build log of this magnitude and it's most appreciated.

I did once explain that leaving it up was proof that I'd lifted it before use. She couldn't grasp the logic of it.

I have a model in a similar situation. It's about twelve years old now in front of a the north-facing window. It's positioned so no direct sunlight ever hits it. It's in a case with UV filtering picture-framing glass. The UV issue concerns me, too, but in all that time, I've never seen the slightest evidence of UV deterioration. I do rotate it every so often so the exposure is even, just to be on the safe side.

Note that the US Navy Naval Sea Systems Command which includes the Navy's Curator for Ship Models division specifies in their requirements for model contracts that all "masts, antenna masts, yardarms (sic!), boom, etc. less than 3/16" diameter shall be metal." See: Specifications for Building Model Ships at https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Home/Warfare-Centers/NSWC-Carderock/Resources/Curator-of-Navy-Ship-Models/Specifications-for-Building-Exhibition-Ship-Models/ I believe that in large measure the same specifications have been adopted by the Smithsonian Institution and Mystic Seaport and that they are generally recognized by professional museum curators as defining "museum quality" in so far as that term can be defined. I follow these specifications to the extent possible. Obviously, some requirements are difficult to meet these days, e.g. linen rigging line. They recognize that new materials come along all the time, but caution that they are often of unproven archival quality. I take that caution seriously. What's the point of spending the time it takes to build a good model, only to have it fall apart in a few decades. See also Mystic's Ship Model Classification Guidelines developed by Howard I. Chapelle: http://www.shipmodel.com/pdfs/ship-model-classification-guidelines-1980.pdf

I've never been able to successfully educate my wife about the proper care of my cast iron cookware or my high-carbon steel chef's knives. She throws everything in the dishwasher. God knows I've tried, but to no avail. I've given up and just stored them separately and care for them myself before anybody else in the house can get their hands on them. I quietly retaliate by leaving the toilet seat up.

Moffett Field, formerly a Navy airbase in Mountain View, CA, near San Jose at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, is now called "Moffett Federal Airfield, and is used by a variety of agencies. It has two blimp hangars, on the right in the photo below, and on the left is the huge dirigible hangar, one of the largest free-standing structures in the world. There is at least one blimp hangar at Tillamook, OR, on the coast, as well. There are also a couple of large blimp hangars in Tustin, CA, down south.

After watching your construction of the door hinges, Michael, I was holding my breath waiting to see whether you'd be able to fabricate operating latches to scale or have to "fake" them. Your Sherman tank answered that question! All from the Toplicht catalog: https://www.toplicht.de/en/shop/schloesser-riegel-und-verschluesse/moebelschloss/druckknopf-verschluesse/druckknopf-kastenschloss-buntbart For those who are unaware of it, Toplicht is a chandlery firm in Hamburg, Germany, which carries what is probably the most extensive collection of ship and yacht products anywhere in the world. They are in many instances the only source of many traditional yacht and ship fittings left. Their nearly 500 page free catalog is full of photos and engineering drawings for all sorts of bits and pieces of "jewelry" and I'd nominate it for a "must have" in any scratch builder's reference library. https://www.toplicht.de/en/catalog

Excellent point. I have ground fault interrupters on all of my shop outlet circuits. Cheap as they are, there's no excuse not to. I'd advise them not only for kitchen and bathroom outlet circuits, as per code, but for every circuit where an outlet might be used for an extension cord that runs outdoors.

Gol-lie! I've never seen one of those before! I learn something new every day.

Generally, on other than some storm sails, the leech of sails is not roped. The rope is brought round the corner of the sail for a distance sufficient to reinforce the sail's corner at the cringle and then tapered to a "rat tail" which is sewn onto the leech for that distance alone.

I guess if it's a round hole, the peg that goes into it is a "dowel," even if the peg is square. Square pegs do go into round holes, actually. It's a traditional fastening option. Drill the pilot hole and then take a suitably sized square peg, whittle the lower edges of the peg so it fits to stick in the hole and then give it a good whack with a big mallet. The square peg expands the round hole to a tight fit in the round hole, yielding what appears as a square peg in a square hole. (The pegs should be of a harder wood species than the wood into which they are driven.) They are a characteristic decorative feature of Arts and Crafts furniture construction. Essentially the same principles as the treenail, although treenails are generally blind-wedged at the bottom of the hole and a wedge driven at the exposed end of the peg to lock them in place.

Over the years, it seems that as soon as I finally get the workshop I want built the way I want it, the occasion to move arises! It's almost like a jinx. I'm afraid to finish my fifth, presently a fifteen year work-in-progress 1,500 square foot "man cave" workshop in a stand-alone building wired with 440 3-phase power, for fear I'll have to leave it! (The wife loved the house. All I cared about was the shop building out back! ) Designing a workshop is really about personal taste and needs and one's own creativity. In no particular order, here are a few general principles I've discovered over the years. 1. Everything needs to have a place to live. "A place for everything and everything in its place." It all has to be easily returnable to its storage place so its location is always (or pretty much always!) easily accessed. This will save an amazing amount of time otherwise wasted looking for things. Storing small hand tools in rolling tool storage chests is a good way to go, the cost of the chests notwithstanding. There's a reason professional mechanics keep their tools in those big "Snap On" tool chests. Unfortunately, you can drop a few grand on a big one. Harbor Freight has some lighter weight models which are entirely sufficient for lighter weight tool collections such as ours at very reasonable prices. (The professional models are expensive because they have to survive daily use sometimes carrying a ton or two of mechanic's tools.) (See: https://www.harborfreight.com/search?limit=108&q=tool chests) 2. Workbenches are for doing work on, not for storing stuff on. Any flat surface in a workshop is an invitation to family members to pile high with junk they don't want in the house. Vigilantly protect your workbenches from that. The smaller the benches, the easier that is to do. Many workbenches are too big. There's no need to consume scarce shop floor space with a four by eight foot free-standing workbench if you aren't using that much space on a daily basis. If you have a larger job to do, lay some plywood on some sawhorses and reclaim valuable floor space by putting them away when the job is done. (Big workbenches can be placed on heavy-duty casters and the space below the bench top used for storage. There's lots of space for drawers there.) 2. Recycled kitchen and bathroom cabinets are great for workshop building purposes. If you don't have a local building materials recycling place near you, make friends with a local kitchen and bath remodeling contractor. They frequently simply bust up perfectly good cabinets and counter bases and throw them in the dumpster when remodeling kitchens and bathrooms. Get them to save a good set for you. Most will be happy to have you haul them away for free, so long as you promise to pick them up from the job site as soon as they pull them out. It saves them the work of busting them up and paying the dump fees. (In one of my earlier shops, I scored the Formica-covered cabinetwork from a dentist's office. It was full of small, shallow divided drawers designed for storing small dental instruments. I really hated to leave that one behind!) 3. Put anything that isn't fastened to the walls on casters so it can be moved around. There is no reason to have a big Delta Unisaw cabinet saw with table extensions dominating the center of a workshop when it's only used occasionally. If everything is on casters except counters and cabinets on the walls, and if those counter and cabinet faces are sitting flush with the floor, being able to roll everything out of the way gives you an unobstructed floor that is easily swept clean. That's a huge time-saver and a clean shop is a happy shop. (Do as I say, not as I do!) 4. You can't ever have too many electrical outlets. There are uniform electrical codes that dictate how many outlets can be on a circuit, but those codes seem to assume every outlet on a circuit will be used at once. In reality, there is little need for concern about overloading a circuit in a workshop because nobody uses more than one high-amperage tool at a time. It's not about how many outlets you have on a circuit, or how many things are plugged into them, but how many are running at one time. Add up the total amperage of what's running at the same time to see if you have enough juice if you're concerned about that. (If your power service is ancient and insufficient for modern energy use, that will be the exception. If you're tripping circuit breakers or the lights dim when you turn on your table saw, call a licensed electrician. Your electrical system probably needs major surgery.) I place outlets and power strips not only on the wall behind a workbench, but also on the front of the bench, just below the overhang of the bench top. Corded hand-held power tools are almost always easier (and safer) to use on the bench when the cords don't have to be strung across the bench and your working space from a plug in a wall outlet. 5. The better the light, the better the work. I use florescent shop lights supplemented by articulated work lamps, some with magnifying lenses, on my workbenches. I'm going to switch over to LED shop lights in the near future. The cost of the LED lights has dropped tremendously in recent times. The savings in power costs is substantial, as is the increase in their bulb and ballast lifespans, but, best of all, they are super-bright. Hang a lot of them. No more flickering and humming, either. (E.g.: https://www.amazon.com/Barrina-Integrated-Fixture-Utility-Electric/dp/B01HBT3BVM/ref=sr_1_13?hvadid=77721863975721&hvbmt=be&hvdev=c&hvqmt=e&keywords=led+shop+light&qid=1579894392&sr=8-13 ) 6. Pegboard is your friend. If there's any unoccupied wall space in your shop, it's best paneled with pegboard. I have dozens of small baby food jars that snap onto plastic holders that hang on pegboards. They store all sorts of small parts and fasteners that are immediately visible when I need to find what I'm looking for. There are a lot of things that don't lend themselves to being stored in a drawer because of size or shape. (E.g.: carpenter's squares, long levels, handsaws, etc.) (See: https://world-axiom.com/pegboard-jars-fanatic/ and https://www.hardwareandtools.com/crawford-jc12-pegboard-jar-organizer-2-pack-jkca-2116.html?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=PLA&scid=scbplpJKCA-2116&sc_intid=JKCA-2116&msclkid=10db724b5d881dff92b82c600de48792 ) 7. Make it comfortable. Climate control will depend upon one's circumstances. At worst, a sweater and a space heater should suffice to keep one from being uncomfortable in the winter and a fan and open windows in the summer time. Depending upon one's preference, a music system or television is welcome company and a small refrigerator for preferred libations can be welcome additions, so long as they don't distract one while operating dangerous machinery! 8. Finally, every shop needs a comfortable "moaning chair." A moaning chair is essential when one realizes they've made one mistake or another, or can't figure out which way to go next when faced with a problem. Often, sitting down with a tall cold one and just "moaning," inspires a solution to the problem at hand. Also, if it's suitably placed, a visitor can be kept out of the way while your working without risking offending them. Keep us posted on your project!

PVA glue is soluble in isopropol alcohol. Placing a slip of paper between the faying surfaces before gluing a part will make it much easier to separate the part thereafter. the glue and paper can then be scraped from the surfaces and/or soaked off with isopropol alcohol. I've also had success with the judicious use of hot-melt glue from craft glue guns. ("The Martha Stewart school of ship modeling?") The less tenacious hot-melt glue sticks come apart pretty easily and that can be assisted by a bit of gentle heat from a heat gun. The jig you are using will provide a surprising amount of rigidity when combined with a temporary batten or three to a side. (The battens can be tied to the frames with string or wire. "Spacer sticks" cut to the width of the frame spaces can be hot-melt glued to the top of the upper jig piece, running across between the frames. (These would have eliminated the need to cut all those tedious notches!) A spot of hot-melt glue at the corner between the spacer stick and the frame side will permit the upper jig frame from being removed and turned upside down on the jig base to permit free access to the bottom of the hull. (Providing you've located the threaded rods identically on each side of the jig as should be done.) The temporary longitudinal battens are removed as they are reached in the fairing process and then replaced, or not, as needs be, and similarly removed as the planking progresses, the planks replacing them and maintaining the frame's rigidity. Once the frames are bound together in such fashion, sanding the frame bevels fair with sandpaper glued to a flexible batten is easily done, although the area obstructed by the top frame of the jig will be inaccessible. That can be left to be attended to after the planking below it is hung. Once that is accomplished, the hull can be removed from the jig entirely and should have no problem holding its shape and can be sanded and planking hung in that area as well. (Don't plank above the upper jig frame while the hull is in the jig frame. If your upper jig frame isn't made in two pieces separated on the centerline or you may not be able to remove the hull from the upper jig frame, of course.)

And this, Dear Friends, is the difference between just craftsmanship and real art!

Yes, that was supposedly the genesis of the "widow's walks" on coastal homes. The "widows" would watch for their husbands' return from their long whaling voyages and identify the ships from a distance by the house flags they flew. Whether that was actually true, or the balconies were simply an architectural embellishment popular in the era, is a matter of some dispute.

I should mention, however, that under USN regulations, dressed ship and full-dressed ship are not displayed while the ship is underway. Only at anchor or alongside a dock. That wouldn't necessarily apply to a merchant ship, although they generally followed the Navy practice. If you've got a contemporary photo of her underway, I'd go with that for authority. Even if the display wasn't proper, nobody could fault the portrayal on the model.

Indeed. IMHO, the essence of modeling is the exercise of striving for perfection. I certainly didn't mean to imply otherwise. My comments were limited to limitations with the use of CAD programs for drafting as a means to perfection, which is the constant in the equation. The work of a master machinist is a wonder to behold, but there's more to a "perfect" miniature than proper scale measurements. It's the minute, nearly imperceptible imperfections wrought by the free hands of man that give life to a true work of art.

I much preferred the earlier practice of naming carriers after famous sailing ships of the early US Navy. It's all a hodge-podge these days.

That explains it. I didn't realize the circumstances of your portrayal and that there were more flags coming! However, under the "dressed ship" circumstance you describe, the largest ensign should be flying from the stern flagstaff. There would be another smaller national ensign at the spanker masthead, but none from the gaff peak because only one national ensign is properly flown from any given mast. When a house flag is flown on a "dressed ship, it's always flown alone from the main top. A ship that is dressed or full-dressed for a U.S. holiday or other special event flies its largest available ensign at the flagstaff and an ensign at each masthead at which a personal flag or command pennant is not hoisted. If it is dressed in honor of a foreign nation, that nation's naval ensign flies at the head of the mainmast. (Navy Regulations 1279) A merchant ship's personal or "house flag" is always flown from the top of the mainmast unless preempted by a foreign nation's naval ensign (AKA: "courtesy flag.") (Merchant ships do not fly command pennants.)

I'm probably stating the obvious for many, but for those who aren't aware, drawn lines are actually as much as 1/4" thick at full scale, if not more, depending upon the scale of the lines drawing. Offsets are, more often than not, taken from measurements made from the drawings and if taken from a half-model, the scaling issue is no different. (N.G. Herreshoff, perhaps the greatest American naval architect of the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, rarely drew lines, designing his creations by carving half models and taking the offsets directly from his models. The loftsmen then lofted from those offsets directly, without any drawn lines or construction plans.) Theoretical accuracy is dependent upon the placement of the dividers' points and reading the distance between them on the scale. As the saying goes, "There's many a slip between the cup and the lip." A table of offsets generated manually from a manually drawn set of lines will never be sufficiently accurate to serve as CAD inputs directly and a lot of CAD "fairing" is always going to be necessary if the CAD drawings are to "work" the way one might desire, but that level of accuracy on paper was never necessary for traditional builders. Manually generated offsets were never expected to translate directly to the loft floor and so produce completely accurate patterns. Rather, it was the loftsman's "eye" that was expected to fair the lines if not outright errors, in the offsets "right on the loft floor"and so correct the inaccuracies inherent in the manual technology, (And outright errors, be they in measurement or entries in the manually developed tables, are not infrequent.) In small boats, the "tweaking parameters" experienced are often measurable in inches, and in large vessels, easily measurable in feet. You're right: The input demands of CAD's close tolerances can indeed be crazy-making. It's high level of accuracy is solely dependent upon the accuracy of the input data, which, if manually generated, will never be up to the task. This was not so much a problem with model making in the days before highly accurate machine tools came into use among the modeling fraternity. What can be accomplished, and is being accomplished, by modelers today who are working to tolerances of thousandths of an inch is amazing, but a whole lot of the "machinists' approach" to modeling can be dispensed with by employing many of the fitting and joinery techniques of traditional full-size boat and ship building. There used to be a saying about woodworking tolerances: "The house carpenter works to the closest quarter of an inch, the finish carpenter works to the closest eighth of an inch, and the boatbuilder works to the closest boat!" The experienced human eye is far more convenient a mechanism for discerning the fairness of a line and a sprung batten a far more user-friendly tool for generating a fair curve than any CAD program. Or at least that's my story and I'm sticking to it!

I believe there was a destroyer named after Doris Miller previously. The vessels of the Navy shall be named by the Secretary of the Navy under direction of the President according to the following rule: Sailing-vessels of the first class shall be named after the States of the Union, those of the second class after the rivers, those of the third class after the principal cities and towns and those of the fourth class as the President may direct. 13 USC 1531 (1862) Since 1862, many changes in the naming conventions have occurred for a variety of reasons and many exceptions have been made to the existing rules. Since 1968, carriers have been named for presidents, beginning with the JFK, although exceptions have been the rule. From all indications in practice, the Secretary of the Navy makes the name call and, given the increasing politicizing of the DOD, a lot of names seem to be chosen to satisfy the dictates of the political party of the presidential administration that's in power at the time of the naming. Remarkably, we have in recent years seen ships, including the George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, named for living persons, which previously was never done.

Yeah, but don't forget the last paper cut you got!

I'm curious why a small ensign is flying from the mizzen top instead of the aftermost gaff peak. I know there must be a reason. I've just never seen that before. How come?

Those rubber donut and springed sheet horses are quite common on larger top-end yachts of the "Golden Age," but I never really understood the point of them. I've never come across anything on them in the literature. Maybe they were a fad and wealthy owners commissioning their yachts came to expect them, so the architects satisfied their expectations. They are unquestionably impressive, but the springs I've seen have always been quite strong. You'd have a hard time compressing one by hand, and the rubber donuts were hard, like tire rubber, and no more "compressible" than the springs. (After a few decades in the weather, the old rubber was hard as a rock, too!) Maybe they served to remind helmsmen that in boats of that size an uncontrolled jibe was to be avoided at all costs, but in the event of one, those shock absorbers wouldn't have made much difference. Generally, the stretch in the sheets and the flexibility of the spars provide all the "shock absorbing" that's needed in regular operation. (The stresses aren't sharp shocks, like when tires hit potholes, but rather fluctuations in tension.) On the other hand, they may have been developed to compensate for the lack of stretch in more modern construction when wire cable standing rigging and better cordage with less stretch came into use (and certainly later, when synthetic cordage came along.) I do recall an old timer from the "Big Boat" ocean racing fraternity telling me how a lot of the large ocean racers suffered a lot of busted gear, broken frames, deck leaks, and such when everybody went to Dacron line and sailcloth and hydraulic backstay tensioners and big geared deck winches to squeeze a bit more speed out of their boats. They were then able to really crank down on the rigging far beyond what the boats had ever been engineered to handle. Those "buffered" sheet horses may have been some attempt to compensate for some of that. I don't know, but they are certainly an interesting and impressive fitting.

Perhaps you're joking. If not, actually, the fittings are bronze (always bronze, never brass) and, properly, they are left unpolished and left to weather and form a patina, as with bronze statues.