Bob Cleek

I rely on the micrometer stop to accurately cut spacer blocks which I then use to make repetitive cuts of identical distance between the fence and blade. Faster than any other way I know.

Shellac. Two pound cut or thereabouts, right out of the Zinser "Bullseye" quart can. The old ways still work. In some, if not many, respects, they work easier and/or less expensively.

Okay, I get it now. It's about the sharpness of the smaller side of the hole's edge, right? I was aware of the mechanics, but I always figured that was why a metal workpiece was pulled through the plate entering on the "big side" and exiting from the "small side," while a wooden workpiece was pulled through entering on the small side of the hole and exiting from the "big side." (That also reduced the chance of the wooden piece breaking if it flexed too much when being pulled.) Am I right about the directions the metal and wooden pieces are to be pulled through the plate, or not? Now you've really got me going. It's such a simple tool. I'd hate to be using it the wrong way. (This coming from a guy who's picked up two or three good planes that "didn't work" cheap at garage sales only because their irons were installed upside down!)

I learn something new every day in this forum! I knew that jewelers' drawplates were for pulling metal wire, as you say. I never knew there was such a thing as a drawplate specifically for wood and one specifically for metal. I always thought all drawplates were all-purpose for wire or wood, depending on your mood. I've pulled wire and wood through the same drawplate and didn't notice any difference. Shows what I know. How do you tell the difference between a wood and a wire drawplate?

I have the Byrnes drawplate and was surprised, but not disappointed, to find when I got it that it is for rather small diameters. The cheapo Asian-made drawplates I have are for larger diameters, so that's fine, but certainly not likely to be as accurate as the Byrnes model. I'd snag another one from Byrnes if they made other models in larger diameters. The Byrnes one I have is really well made. The other two I have are from MicroMark and some other mail order outfit, probably made in India, and they are really very poorly made compared to Byrnes or professional model draw plates. Drawplates are available in just about every sectional shape imaginable, not just round. The Byrnes drawplate is a real bargain compared to the similar quality professional drawplates, the price of which can generate some serious sticker shock. https://contenti.com/draw-plates/steel-draw-plates

My problem isn't putting them away or remembering where I put them away, it's setting them down on the workbench for a moment while working and not being able to remember where in all the "work in progress" cluttter only moments later!

I believe the jeweler's slotting saw blades are available from an outfit called "MALCO." (Not "Madco," which is an easy mistake to make. I first looked for "Matco," which is another tool company. Jim Byrnes carries arbor bushings which can be slid over the arbor too accommodate larger arbor holes. Sometimes it's hard to find a blade with the right sized arbor hole. If it matters, from what I've seen, Jim Byrnes' blades are priced the same as anywhere else. He's not marking them up significantly. You may save some in shipping, but they are shipped in an envelope like a letter, so it can't be much.

She's coming along wonderfully, Rob! The sails really bring her to another level. She's going to be a real masterpiece!

She looks to be off to a great start, Kevin! Don't let the drawing errors get you down. It seems there are always errors in working construction drawings. That goes with the territory. In addition to her historic significance, the somewhat unusual "drive tunnels" promise to make this a most interesting model.

I prefer to use my own shop-made cotton swabs because I can use a longer stick to get in where I need to get while minimizing inadvertent damage to the model. "Spit cleaning" was long the "industry standard" for museum curators, although in recent years they have gotten a lot more sophisticated. They now chemically analyze the dirt to be removed and use specifically formulated fluids to attack it, sometimes using several different formulations to remove successive layers of dirt and varnish and old paint. Our ship models don't require this level of care and saliva or very mild solutions of water and detergent are suitable. Human saliva an enzyme, amylase, which functions to break down food, which is why it also breaks down dirt on an art object. Saliva has long been a pretty good cleaning solution for oil paintings and other items which were not coated with water-soluble materials. The drawback with saliva is that you have to keep working up spit and drinking lots of water, and, of course, you can only wet each swab once. You don't want to be putting what you've cleaned off back into your mouth! This isn't a problem with very mild solutions of water and detergents like Windex or Dove dish washing liquid. I happen to prefer a mild detergent solution over spit. I think it works better, but your mileage may vary. The main problem, however, is that we have to be sure that the spit or cleaning solution used doesn't react poorly with what the model is made of and/or with whatever grunge is on it. I always start with a small spot that is not readily observable and see how whatever cleaning solution I'm using is working. Examining the swab will give some clue of how dirty the surface is and when it is completely clean, as well as whether any paint or other finish is being removed. You never know what kind of water-soluble materials might be lurking underneath the layers of grime on your object. Rule One is "First, do no harm." I'm always keeping an eye on the color of the material coming off on the swabs to make sure I'm not rubbing too hard and removing varnish or paint. Sometimes I dip the swabs in the cleaning solution. Other times I mist the solution over small areas from an airbrush. This works particularly well for the "wide open spaces" of topsides and bottoms which can be wiped down with light, soft toweling instead of cotton swabs. It pains me greatly to see how often folks will spend months, if not years, building a model and then not case it properly. Sometimes they will say, "Well, I'm going to be displaying it in my home, so it doesn't need the protection so much." when homes are the worst environments possible! I don't know why commercially made cases are so expensive. The prices amaze me. Probably, it's because they generally have to be custom made and given size and insurance costs, are expensive to ship. I'm not a fan of plastic cases. Professional curators report that the plastic off-gasses vapors than can be acidic and cause the model to deteriorate. Plastic is also harder to clean than glass and more expensive. Gluing "invisible" plastic corners takes lots of experience and is best left to the pros. I've found that the least expensive way to build your own case is to have your glass cut to size by a frame shop. They are used to cutting glass to exact sizes for picture frames. (The chain crafts stores that also do framing, like Michael's, are the least expensive.) Specify UV shielding glass, which will cost a bit more, but is far more protective. The frame can be easily made with a table saw, ripping grooves for the glass. The saw kerf is usually just the right size and, if not, the saw can be set up so that reversing the piece and taking a second cut will just leave a groove exactly the right size. I fasten the case joints with dowels set in carpenter's glue.

Sounds like you're on the right track. Easy does it is the way to go.

An epoxy fairing compound will give you some strength and be easily sand-able, but it's not essential for a display model if you have good glue bonding between the planks and the stem and keel parts. If so, any fairing compound is suitable. Epoxy is a pain to use. It tends to get all over and clean-up is a problem. It's also relatively expensive. For fairing, i use Interlux Surfacing putty, a product sold in chandleries for marine use. It's thinned with acetone and a can lasts forever. (Put a tablespoon of acetone into the can when you are through with a use, tap the lid down to get a good seal, and store the can top down. It can be "thinned" in this way by letting it sit overnight.) It sands very easily and has a very fine grain, unlike some other alternatives like drywall "mud." Any of the modeling "puttys" will work, of course, but on a per ounce basis, they are hugely overpriced, IMHO. See: https://www.jamestowndistributors.com/userportal/show_product.do?pid=4154

The thickness sander isn't a replacement for a resawing on the bandsaw. The thickness sander is basically a thickness planer for taking relatively small amounts off a piece and making the surface perfectly smooth and uniformly flat, which is generally necessary anytime you resaw anyway. As with his other machines, the Byrnes thickness sander is extremely accurate and well-powered. There's none better that I have ever seen. His clever arrangement for attaching the abrasive is much better than the abrasive sleeves some other models use. Order the optional full length abrasive retention bar so you can also use a full sheet of the same grit to do wider pieces. The stock machine comes with two bars half the length that will hold two different grits on the drum at the same time. That's handy for thinner stuff, but sometimes you may want to do wider stuff. That said, it's not really the tool for turning 3/4" stock into 1/4" stock. I find the disk sander very handy for shaping pieces to fine tolerances. IMHO, sanding is a poor way of shaping wood. Cutting or sawing are much more accurate and leave a better finish on the workpiece, but what's so nice about the Byrnes disk sander is that its table and miter gauge are perfectly accurate and infinitely adjustable, as well as adjustable to fixed angles with his peg setting system. If you want to square an edge, or put any particular angle on it, the disk sander is perfect for that. It's also great for shaping any flat, of course. Like the thickness sander, though, it's not the proper tool for removing large amounts of wood, even though it will do it easily. Like the table saw, both the thickness and the disk sander have really good dust extraction ports. A shop vac is all you need to enjoy dust-free sanding.

That seems to be a bass-ackwards way of doing it. Generally, the stem is attached to the keel and the planking is fitted to the stem as the planks are hung. You are going to have to carefully trim your planking so the stem fits in there and the planking edge, which will be very thin at the end, lays in a fair line when viewed from the side. Usually, there will be a rabet (grove) cut into the stem for the plank ends to lay into, rather than the plank ends being feathered against the flat of the stem. That way, there's a fair line between the plank seam and the stem and full-thickness meat at the end of the planks to place a fastener through into the stem to keep the planks from popping loose. You'll have to use a good strong glue to keep the planks attached to the stem there. It will be difficult to do it neatly if you want to keep the wood bright (clear finish.) It will be a lot easier if you use epoxy fairing compound or an equivalent and paint the hull.

Not such a bad idea, actually. I have simply glued the bottle to a square of scrap wood or bristol board, whatever's handy, when the need arose. When I was done with the glue bottle for a while, I just peeled off the wood or cardboard and tossed it.

Check with Jim Byrnes about the shipping cost on the sliding table. I'm guessing that you would save a bunch on shipping if it were included in the package with the saw. The separate shipping cost savings might convince you to get the whole shebang shipped at once. As for the Mrs. ... It's a "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" sort of thing, but did you ever notice how they always do it? "This pair of shoes is wearing out. They don't owe me anything, though. I've had them for years. I guess I'll have to replace them." Then, the new shoes arrive and it's, "They were on sale! I got a great deal. I think they were only like a couple of hundred bucks." Then the bill comes. You ask (timidly,) "Did the store make a mistake on this $375 credit card charge for your new shoes?" She says, "No. There was other stuff I had to get at the same time." You say," I see that, but the itemized receipt says the shoes were $325 and you said they were only a couple of hundred bucks!" She says, "I don't have to answer to you for every dime I spend!" and the fight is on! Be creative. I doubt she'll throw you under the bus over the $135 for the sliding table. She'll get over it.

I'd suggest you see if there's an auction house that might be interested in selling them for you. They really need to be appraised by a qualified appraiser who can get a closer look at them. Some appear to be kit models and they would not be worth as much as one-off scratch-built models of high quality or very old models with reliable provenances.. (I'm wondering what he's got in those nice storage boxes!) What you have pictured there look to be basically marketable as quality decorator pieces, not investment grade, museum-quality, models that bring the big bucks. Like a lot of things, ship models generally don't sell for anything near what the time to build them is worth. If your uncle spend 30 years building and collecting them, he probably has a pretty good idea what they are worth already.

Not really all that many options, really, and most all of them are really worthwhile. I'd suggest the following in descending order of importance: Micrometer stop. There's no point in owning a saw that is as accurate as this one without this convenience. Extended rip fence. It really is important because the stock fence is really low. It's nice to have something more substantial to lean the workpiece up against when cutting larger stuff, cutting rabets and grooves, and such. Miter bar gives you more control. The miter gauge comes stock with the saw and is very accurate. The bar is $8 and worth it. If you get the sliding table, you probably won't be using the miter gauge as much, but the added length is handy. Miter gauge adjustable extension. It's just a stick of aluminum, but for the price, handy to have. I don't own a miter gauge that I haven't put some kind of extension on and I think I have four or five of them. Sliding table. Yes, it's really worth the money... it expands the saw's utility tremendously and is super-accurate. For repetitive cross-cuts, you gotta have it. This is the most expensive of the "must haves." If all you are going to be doing is ripping strip wood, you can do without it, but any sort of cross-cutting, making gratings, super accurate miter cuts for case building, lots of little short pieces all exactly the same length, and so on makes this a "gotta have" for me. It's really solid and accurate and slides as slick as greased goose poop. The integral blade cover is also a really nice safety feature. You should also get a selection of saw blades and zero clearance inserts, because they do make a big difference depending on the application. You can make your own inserts, if you want, but for eight bucks, you might as well get the perfectly-fitting ones from the factory. I don't know that the blades are available for much less anywhere else. I'd ask Jim Byrnes which blades he recommends for the work you expect to be doing. He won't steer your wrong. Same goes for the "spare parts package." For eight bucks, it's worth having an extra of all the little screws that you know you're going to need when you drop and lose one every so often. You'd spend more than eight bucks in gas driving around trying to find someplace that had them in stock locally. A replacement belt is worth having handy as well. Keep in mind that if you order all this little stuff at the same time as the saw, you'll probably save a bundle on shipping costs over buying them piecemeal. As you can see, that doesn't leave much not to buy. Everybody seems to agree that the tilting table is really not something anybody uses all that often, for ship modeling, at least. maybe the model railroaders do, or whatever. You can always make your own taper gauge, but I bought one of Jim's because they're just so damn pretty. I guess the accessories are pretty much essentials, although optional, depending on the use to which a buyer is going to put their saw. Like the man says, if you can afford a BMW, you'd be nuts not to pay a few bucks more for the leather seats!

Instead of looking for a certainly very rare model kit that exactly mirrors full-scale construction and may well be designed for advanced modelers, why don't you simply pick a simple full-size design and scale it down and build a model of it. "How to build it" plans for full-sized boats are all over the place. WoodenBoat Magazine's WoodenBoat Store has many highly detailed plans available (Their website: https://www.woodenboatstore.com/ ) It is almost a certainty that even model kits that claim to exactly replicate full-scale construction details will be "customized" for modeling purposes and contain parts which have been prefabricated or omitted. Obviously, if construction corners haven't been cut and assembly simplified, what's the point of a "kit?" Anybody can obtain plans and buy wood and string. (And any small fittings one might desire are readily available from any number of sources.) I'm not knocking kits, which are a great way to get started in modeling, but building a kit to build a model really bears very little resemblance to building a full-size boat. There'd be no point to a kit if it did. If you want to learn how real boats are built, you should read books on real boatbuilding, not books on ship modeling. It's a whole lot easier for a knowledgeable boatbuilder to build a model of a boat than for modeler to build a full-sized boat. The skills aren't equally complementary in both directions. In terms of your long-range plans, you might also spend some time following the posts in the WoodenBoat Forum (http://forum.woodenboat.com/) You can learn a tremendous amount from the professional and amateur boatbuilders who discuss their boatbuilding projects there. Beyond small rowing and sailboats, building your own boat of any size is a lot like building your own car. It can be done, but it's a very labor and expense intensive enterprise that requires a lot of knowledge and experience in many different trade crafts.

I've never seen this book, but I've heard good things about it. (Alan Vaiteses' Lofting is my go-to when I need to look up something really technical. I like the spiral binding that lays flat on my drafting table!) I've never seen anything from Adlard Coles that wasn't top notch, though. My guess is it is one of the best of the bunch. While lofting can get really complicated in some instances, e.g. curved and raked eliptical transom development, it's not rocket science. I think a good grounding in mechanical drawing will be found invaluable. I find the questions asked by people who are having problems with lofting usually indicate a lack of understanding how three-dimensional engineering drawings work, and of boatbuilding, more than a lack of the more arcane techniques of lofting. Like a lot of things, it's a lot easier to learn by doing it than trying to master it all in your imagination by just reading a book. Get a drawing board, a tee-square, some battens and curves, a good compass and pair of dividers, some hard pencils and a good soft eraser and start trying to draw a set of lines from a table of offsets using the book for reference and I think you'll pick it up quickly enough. Keep in mind, too, that there are a lot of things that can be developed in lofting that really aren't necessary when building, particularly when building small boats and models. For example, it's a whole lot easier to cut planking rabets using a "fit stick" (a stick the same thickness as your planking that is laid against the frames to see how the plank edge has to fit into the rolling bevel of the rabet) than developing a rabet line, back rabet, and bearding line on the loft floor and they trying to figure out a way to pick those lines up and put them to use cutting your rabets! The same goes for frame bevels. It's often easier to fair the rolling bevels with the frames erected than to try to cut them on a band saw. The bevels need to be worked out when cutting huge frames for a large ship on a massive ship's saw, but for small craft work, you can do the job more quickly and accurately with the frame up using battens, spokeshaves and draw knives. All of which to say that to understand lofting requires knowledge not just of lofting itself, but of mechanical drawing and boat and ship building. Take one out of the equation and the other two get exponentially more difficult to understand.

I recently discovered that Humbrol enamel model paints are readily available on line. (Amazon has them.) Hornby Hobbies in the UK produces the line. They have a US factory/warehouse in Washington state and a US website. They are making the entire line. I haven't bought any as yet, but with Floquil now gone, Humbrol is the next best thing. https://www.humbrol.com/us-en/shop/paints/enamel-paints.html Why some enterprising people don't resurrect the Floquil line, I'll never know.

Ho, ho, ho! Merry Christmas!

Thanks! I'm saving your post to show to my wife!

Just a bit of semantic sparring in good fun. Given the politics of the moment, it would seem neither the US nor England can justify riding a high horse!

Not in the least. To the contrary, that assertion simply makes excuses for imprecise speech and, as I noted, betrays an uninformed, if not lazy, intellect, in much the same way that incorrect spelling might not impair the meaning of a word, but, to those who know better, says something about the writer who made the error. There is nothing elitist about that at all. Real life is nothing like the Special Olympics where everybody wins a prize regardless of the place in which they may have finished. An ornithologist who will use the taxonomic name, Erithacus rubecula, would understand the name, "robin" or "robin redbreast," when speaking with a layperson because those are the colloquial English names for the European robin, but an amateur ornithologist or "birdwatcher" who referred to it in a conversation with other ornithologists or knowledgeable birdwatchers as simply a robin would, by their failure to employ proper nomenclature, betray their lack of knowledge and sophistication concerning the subject matter being discussed. To put a finer point on it, there is also an American robin, which has the taxonomic name of Turdus migratorius. Even though it's properly called a a "robin" or "robin redbreast" in colloquial American English, it's taxonomic name identifies it as a member of the genus Turdus, while the European robin, is as clear from its taxonomic name, is a member of the genus Erithacus. We know from these taxonomic names that the North American robin is a thrush, while the European robin is a chat, (although formerly classified as a thrush.) North American robin: Then there are 49 species in 19 genera of Australasian robins, also with a red breast, and also commonly called "robins." These are in the family Petroicidae, and unrelated to either the North American or European "robins." So, if a birdwatcher shows up to an international conference of ornithologists and starts pontificating about "robins," they are not likely to be taken too seriously, just as someone who aspires to being taken seriously by mariners and maritime historians will probably be disappointed with the reception they get when they use the term "tall ships." Context is everything. As with birds, in a serious discussion about maritime subjects, proper use of the nomenclature makes a difference. BTW, I don't know about your side of the Pond, but over here in the USA we've got lots of people who tar their hair, get covered in crude tattoos and walk with knuckles dragging on the ground and nobody thinks they know squat about ships and the sea, or much else for that matter.