Bob Cleek

I've found that many times, books for full size tools are sometimes pretty useless for ship modeling.  However, they are good to read and think about how to apply what's in them to modeling.  
 
As for modeling tools,  There are "full size" machines such as hobby milling machines, table saws, and lathes sold by companies like Sherline, MicroMark and others.  The methods are similar just scaled down.  Others such as scroll saws work well also on models and many of the full size can be used on models. 
 
This website is very useful and covers more than mini-lathes so I'd start there:   http://www.mini-lathe.com/Default.htm
 
This one also... click on "Learning Center"...  https://www.littlemachineshop.com/Products/product_new.php
 
For small table saws, there's a pinned topic here:  https://modelshipworld.com/forum/18-modeling-tools-and-workshop-equipment/  for the Byrnes saw but much of the info can be used for any of the hobby type saws. 
 
Sherline's helpful pubs are here:  http://www.sherline.com/product-information/sherline-accessory-instructions/
 
I hope that'll get you started.  The biggest warning is that treat any hobby tool with the same respect as you would a full size shop tool.   Even the small power tools can kill or maim if you're careful.
 
 
 
 

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!  

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.

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.

Depends what you expect from the book
If you like cooking, buy a cook-book, if you are interested in history buy a history book. What I mean: your choice may depend on what you need/like
 
Mondfeld gives quite a lot of info, however, it does not very often go into the 'how do I do'.
Mastini (Ship modelling simplified) goes into extensive 'how to', but is rather focussed on 'kits' and not 'working from scratch'
Books like 'Young America' show both detail and how to, but are focussed on a very specific ship (although you can argue that a belaying pin, or a proper executed joint will show up in rather a few other shipmodels.)
 
A second thing you should take into consideration: books like Mondfeld (but lots more) are dating essentially from the late sixties, showing historic knowlegde from that period, building materials from that periode, and techniques from that period. Those techniques may still work, but both technique as well as machinery have come a long way since. The same applies to historic knowledge. You may like Mondfeld, you may consider him outdated. Depends on what you are looking for.
 
Third consideration: the whole digital universe is full of information. Google 'making deadeyes' or 'how to attach a block' and you will find loads of pages and instruction videos showing you how it can be done (the Passaro-tutorials are great indeed) . Far more difficult is finding detailed information on specific ships or of specific periods. The need for a 'general purpose book like Mondfeld is not so large as thirty years ago. You may consider therefore an alternative buying strategy: buy a book on something very specific: framing in the English Navy, Rigging of Tea-clippers, Books that can be read next to a hearth fire, with a glass of something, and getting all the general information from places like MSW. 
(and yes, Landstrom was my first book on ships, Hoeckel the second and Mondfeld came third.) 
 
Jan

I tried bifocals, not my cuppa. I've stuck with ever increasing strength reading glasses. 

Thank you very much, gentlemen, for your kind wishes and the praise !
 
************************************************************
 
Completing the skylights 2
 
Work on the skylights continued with the one over the pantry. The basic structure had been completed quite a while ago, including the protective grilles. Now, the upper part was painted in Vallejo ‘wood’ and then with a couple of coats of Vallejo ‘transparent mahogany’. Several thin coats of Vallejo ‘satin varnish’ gave the ‘wood’ some depth. The lower part was just painted white.
A chimney was turned from a piece of 2 mm brass rod and slotted at the top to simulate the vents. It was chemically blackened to simulate the appearance of heated metal painted black.
 

The completed skylight – rear view
 
I only had side and plan views of the belfry and there is no photograph in which it is really visible. The bell of S.M.S. NATTER survived and is now in a museum-collection, so that we know what is looked like. I invented the shape of the belfry and drew it to be laser-cut. The parts were assembled in the usual manner using zapon-varnish. The bell was rough-turned on the watchmakers lathe and the actual ‘bell-shape’ finished with a hand-graver. I don’t really know, whether this is correct, but the belfry was painted white.
Finally some ‘hinges’ to the raising panels of the skylight were added in form of pieces of 0.1 mm wire. 
 

The completed skylight – front view
 
 
To be continued ....

As far as the running rigging color, I would think it would depend on the story that you are telling.
 
Navy - Just leaving the rigging dock for the first time - depending on the dock stores, all could be from the same lot - uniform color. new rope
Merchant - even then I could imagine that differences could happen - chasing a deal, there could be more than one source for rope. 
 
Hemp color may not have been uniform - different seasons, different varieties grown by suppliers.  Since they probably had to save seed from year to year from themselves, I wonder if there was even a common concept of "variety" yet?
 
Been at sea  -  the most used lines could have been replaced with new.     If only a section was worn,  even a single line could have a different color section where a patch was made.

Given the constraints you mention, wouldn't it be wiser to look for plans of a real ship. Then you know that everything will fit together in the end.
 
As you are talking about buoyancy, is this going to be a working model ? People have used styrene for say POB-construction, but that tends to become quite heavy. At 900 mm LOA, you will not have a lot of displacement available.

Just looked at the pictures in the gallery, very nice result indeed !
 
I love these little unpretentious boats, that were just meant to scrape out a living for their owners. I found them more interesting than all the VICTORYs and what not ...

I only build ship models from scratch, but do faithfully read other’s experiences on the forum.  Remember, this advice is worth exactly what you paid for it!
 
We are constantly asked by novice builders to help them to salvage projects that have gone awry.  In a remarkable number of these, the kits are poorly engineered, the materials are of very poor quality, or both.  In many cases, builders are expected to defy the laws of nature to achieve results.  In the end, the builder decides that he or she can never develop the skill required and the project is abandoned.
 
Please, pick a well engineered kit built from quality materials!  Small open boats like you want to build can be difficult for beginners as their “scantlings” (structural members) are small.  Model Shipways, for example, offers a high quality longboat kit but it is 1:48 scale.  While this is the “museum scale” for ship models,  applied to this small boat it produces a tiny model.
 
The Medway Longboat Kit mentioned by Allan above is engineered by the same designer as the Model Shipways Longboat Kit.  It uses quality materials and at 1:24 it’s scale is twice that of the other Longboat Kit.  There is also a dedicated group build on the forum that you can join.
 
Re:  Lifeboat kits:  I assume that you are referring to a Titanic Lifeboat Kit.  Avoid like the plague!  This kit requires materials of dubious quality to be lapstrake planked.  There was a recent thread by someone trying to plank this poorly engineered kit.
 
Roger
 
 
 
 

ANCRE provided a sheet with color chips for paints from before synthetic pigments were created by the German chemical industry.
 
The paint product that I found that matches is:
Winsor & Newton Winton Oil Color Paint, 37-ml Tube, Vermilion Hue
Every artist's oil company probably has Vermilion.
A 37 ml tube should last a very long time.
This is a more sophisticated way to apply color.  It is organic solvent based.  Bob Cleek  @Bob Cleek has written at least one sufficiently detailed description of how to use this system of pigments.   From what I have read, the particle size is fine enough to be easily adapted for use in an airbrush as well as brushing. 
It is a time proven system.  If that is a factor with you.  The water based acrylic plastic matrix is an on going experiment as far as how it fares over time.

Always listen to that little inner voice! Never, ever discount it. This applies to life as well as workshop. I could have saved myself al lot of grief in life that way!

Yes, it is rather strange, how often we do things against better knowledge and spite of recognising at the moment that we shouldn't do it ... I gather it is often lazyness ...
 
My father had a peculiar way of rolling up his shirt-sleeves, not inside-out, but outside-in. He explained to me that he was taught that by his father, who trained as locks-smith, joined the Imperial German Navy in the early 1900s and after WWI worked on shipyards. The purpose was to prevent sparks or hot metal swarf from being caught in the rolled-up part.
 
There used to be special blouses and overalls for mechanics operating lathes etc. that had very close-fitting and buttoned cuffs and where cut with sleeves as tight-fitting as possible.

I've been keeping my powder dry, but now that It's been said before, I'll pile on. Start simple. Those who provide you with such advice usually have decades of highly involved interest in ship modeling and all have the experience to verify that modeling is a craft, and indeed an art, in which one's skill and ability always increases in the doing of it. This forum is probably the premier ship-modeling forum in the world. There are some amazing artists and craftsmen posting build logs here and the concentration of master modelers in this forum may mislead the beginner into thinking such work is the norm. Their work certainly isn't commonplace and it definitely isn't easy. 
 
Others certainly have more experience with kits than I do, but I am familiar with what has hit the market in close to the last fifty years and I feel confident in saying that I know of no kit model of any fully-rigged Seventeenth Century vessel of the type you are contemplating that I would consider suitable for any but the most highly-experienced kit-builder to undertake. I know there are those who have done so and succeeded to one degree or another, but they are rare exceptions indeed. A beginning modeler is well-advised to select a kit suitable for beginners. These less complex kits are capable of producing every bit as elegant a model when done well as are the "monster" kits. I wouldn't advise a beginner to attempt to build any planked kit other than the high quality ones of recent vintage which provide laser-cut planks. A beginner has enough of a learning curve to deal with besides doing their own lining off and spiling the shapes of the planks and, it should also be mentioned that the shape of a hull in large measure determines the difficulty involved in planking it. A transom-sterned longboat is much easier to plank than an apple-bowed and counter-sterned warship. The beginner is also well-advised to steer clear of square-rigged vessels until they have two or three fore-and-aft-rigged kits under their belt. The increase in the complexity of square rig is exponential. The way to success is first "Do the common thing uncommonly well."
 
Read up as much as possible on any specific kit you are considering. This forum has extensive kit review data available. Be aware that many kits are wholly incapable of producing model in the color glossy picture on its box's cover. That model was built by a highly experienced modeler who almost certainly did not limit themselves to the parts and materials contained in the kit and honest kit manufacturers will disclose that in the fine print somewhere. Most experienced kit modelers who have not "gone over to the dark side" and abandoned kits entirely routinely at least replace all the kit-supplied planking wood and rigging blocks and line because they are simply not up to their standards. (The after-market for such materials and fittings is testimony to the shortcomings of many kits!)
 
A last bit of advice to a beginning kit builder is to select a kit that has been well-covered in the build logs section of this forum. They will provide a very valuable source of instruction as a new builder builds the same kit. Others' mistakes can be almost as instructional as our own! You don't have to re-invent the wheel.
 
While I doubt there's any reliable data available on the subject, I believe most experienced modelers would agree that the percentage of kit models completed is but a small fraction of those purchased, which is pretty remarkable considering the price of many of the more complex kits. There's no point in encouraging the undertaking of a project which is beyond the abilities of the builder. The whole point of the exercise is to enjoy doing it.
 
If you want to get an idea of what a top of the line kit suitable for a "determined beginner's," first and second builds, I'd recommend you check these two out. Their entire "how to build it" monographs are accessible from their websites. The longboat also has a "group build" project posted on this forum and linked from the webpage.
 
https://syrenshipmodelcompany.com/medway-longboat-1742.php
 
https://syrenshipmodelcompany.com/revenue-cutter-cheerful-1806.php#
 
 
 
 

It depends upon your pocketbook. In order of lowest to highest cost, I'd advise one of the following. Don't waste your money on Asian knockoffs. Only buy the name-brand stuff below.
 
Dremel Moto-tool. The bottom of the line model starts at $40 and they go up from there. Expect to pay $75 to $85 for a top of the line model. Spending a bit more for a model with variable speed is probably a wise move. Buy the self-centering chuck adapter accessory.  Dremel 100-N/7 Single Speed Mini Rotary Tool Kit with 7 Accessories- Hobby Drill, Small Pen Sander, Garden Tool Sharpener, Craft & Jewelry Drill, Black - Power Rotary Tools - Amazon.com
 

 
 
 
Proxxon Rotary Tool. Starts around $115.00. Like the Dremel but probably better quality construction and its ergonomics are preferred by some. Likely more readily available in the EU than the Dremel. proxxon rotary tool - Bing
 

 
 
Foredom Flex-shaft tool. Serious money at around $300 and up. Extremely versatile. Industry standard for heavy duty rotary tools. Used by commercial jewelers and dental labs. Everything you'll ever need in a rotary tool. Many different handpieces available. Get the drill chuck handpiece and the collet chuck handpiece (shown) for the greatest convenience and flexibility. The foot pedal is a big plus. Comes in a bench base model or for hanging from a bench-mounted hanger. Your preference. Sometimes available used.  Amazon.com: Foredom 2230, SR motor, Jewelers Kit
 

 
 
Dental lab engine, any brand. (Wells Model shown.) Expect to pay close to a grand retail for one of these ($750 with foot pedal speed control and handpiece arm plus $250 and up for the handpiece,) but your dentist may have one that he's replaced with an air-turbine handpiece unit and would be willing to give to you. They are a lot of them on the used market as air-turbine and micromotor units have come on the market, and they are sometimes at great prices. (E.g.: $400  Belt Drive Wells Dental Engine set Dental laboratory Model EURI Hobby/Carving | eBay and $100 Super-Dent Rugby Dental Laboratory Engine w/ Arm, Handpiece | eBay) The advantage of the "old school" dental engine is that it has a tremendous speed range (40,000 RPM downward) and good torque at low speeds, unlike other rotary tools. This rotary tool is still the workhorse of dental laboratories and parts and service are widely available, if needed. It excels at very fine work (like filling cavities) with it's wide range of very ergonomic handpieces, including angled ones for working in tight spaces.  It can be rather difficult to do fine work while holding a heavy, fat, Dremel or Proxxon rotary tool. It does what your dentist does inside your mouth, so you should have no problem reaching inside a framed hull to sand and bevel frames! And, if you ever tire of ship modeling, it will always be handy to have around the house to use for "enhanced interrogation techniques."  
 

 
While others' mileage may differ, I would recommend staying away from 12 volt rotary tools and anything running on batteries. They lack the power to really hog off the material when you want to do that. The same is true for the relatively new "micromotor" rotary tools. As much as they try, the laws of physics just won't permit replacing torque with speed. When it comes to power tools, the emphasis has always to be on power. 
 
As for burs and abrasives, note that the quality of those made for the professional jewelry manufacturing industry and the dental professionals will be of much higher quality than anything that uses the word "hobby" in their advertising and they will often be less expensive and longer lasting. Look for them in the online catalogs. They don't sell them in brick and mortar stores.
 
Shop around. This stuff goes on sale regularly. As interesting as it is to read their catalogs, the "hobby" mail order outfits are the most expensive retailers of all with this stuff, although, once in a blue moon, they do offer significant discounts.
 
Don't forget, always buy the best tool you can afford. It will last you a good long time, maybe even longer than you do, and if you find you don't need it anymore, you can almost always sell it for something reasonable. Cheap tools actually cost you more because you have to keep buying them over and over again. (Don't ask me how I know this!  )
 
Oh, and did I say, "Don't buy Asian knock-offs of Dremel and Foredom-type tools." There are lots of them on the market these days.  They may look identical and be a quarter the price, but they aren't the same. ("Cleek's Law" #27: "Never buy anything with a cord from Horror Fright!") Rotary tools live hard lives and if they are to live long lives, they have to be made of quality materials. There's no point in spending the money on a machine that will burn its bearings out in six or eight months of occasional use!

Your opinion certainly isn't contrary to mine. The OP asked about rotary tools. Had he asked, "What's the best tool for cleaning up portholes?" my answer would have been a round file or a hand reamer of some sort. My first rotary tool was that same Sears Craftsman rotary tool you mention. I still have it. I can't remember when I used it last. I believe they were made by Weller and labeled "Craftsman" by Sears, as was Sears' practice with all of their products. (Sears and its subsidiary, K-Mart, had over 3,000 stores and they were two of the largest retailers in the US fifteen years ago. Now there are about 19 Sears and 16 Kmart stores left. Stanley Black & Decker now own the Craftsman brand and, while they claim to honor the famous "lifetime no questions asked replacement warranty" on Craftsman hand tools, they only honor it if the store that sells Craftsman tools to which you bring your broken tool happens to have that very same tool in stock, which often they don't. If the broken tool is part of a set, and they don't have loose stock to replace it, they won't break up a set to do the exchange, so you're out of luck. This is classic "thread drift," I know, but I thought it was an interesting footnote.) In retrospect, compared to the Dremel I bought later, the Craftsman/Weller rotary tool was rather inferior.)
 
Perhaps I should have gone into more detail on rotary tools, I suppose. Truly, rotary tools can be and generally are too aggressive when used on anything but metal. (The Dremel Moto-tool was originally designed and marketed as a die grinder.) As I mentioned in my post above, it's all about torque and not about speed. One of the big drawbacks to a high-speed rotary tool is that it too aggressively removes soft material. Combine that limitation with a heavy, less ergonomic tool and controlling it becomes very difficult, especially with fine work. Additionally, slowing down these high-speed motors, particularly the newer very high speed rare earth magnet "micro-motors," results in a corresponding loss of what was not a lot of torque to begin with. Trying to do work with wood, and particularly plastics, which can melt when cut with high speed tools, with a tool that is really only effective at high speed, is very difficult and, in the case of plastic, sometimes impossible.
 
Painting with a somewhat broad brush, I offered four options, intentionally omitting 12 volt and battery-powered options, as well as the entire range of "micro-motor" rotary tools which are becoming more popular in some quarters these days. The micro-motor tools are small handpieces with the motor in the handpiece itself. These are very high speed tools with little torque, but they are easier to control due to their ergonomics. They are primarily useful for very fine detail work and lack the broader range of attachment capabilities of the other rotary tools.
 
All of which is to say that in my opinion the best option of all in terms of versatility and power at low, more easily controllable speeds, as may be needed, are the dental engines. These days, if you watch eBay and similar sites carefully, one can find a dental lab grade dental engine that was built to last a lifetime, in very good condition, for a couple of hundred bucks or less. Considering the maxim that much touted "multi-tools" do none of the things they say they do well, one has to realize that with a dental engine, they may want to acquire a separate mini-drill press or the like because the dental engine isn't going to do it for them on that score, but then again, mounting a Dremel-type motor in a drill press attachment is a poor option anyway.
 
And no matter what, one will need to have a good set of wood-cutting files and rifflers anyway.
 
 

Oh yeah! Definitely! Professional jewelry supply houses, and medical and dental instrument supply houses are goldmines full of useful modeling tools and supplies, generally at higher quality and even at lower prices that the "hobby" online suppliers. 
 
In the US:     https://www.riogrande.com/category/tools-and-equipment
                 
                      https://contenti.com/professional-jewelry-making-tool-kit   
 
                      https://www.ottofrei.com/jewelry-tools-equipment
 

This is very interesting, important, and helpful information. Those of us "of a certain age," are keenly aware of how short a span of time 35 years is. I have a 1/4" scale pilot schooner model (cased) I built forty years ago which is in excellent condition despite the limitations of materials technology available at that time. She is rigged with cotton thread.
 
Your experience with polyester thread mirrors my own experience using it (mistakenly) to sew full-scale marine canvas work. It lasted less than a year or so and then turned to crumbles. Prompted by your post, I did a bit of research and found to my surprise that polyester thread isn't recommended for use in UV exposed applications and in such only has a life-expectancy of about two years according to the manufacturers. Surely, polyester thread that is protected from direct UV exposure will last longer, but "longer" is a relative thing in this instance. Like most plastics, it will deteriorate over time, characteristically by becoming increasingly brittle, UV or not. The present state-of-the-art thread in terms of longevity is supposedly polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) thread. PTFE is basically Teflon. It's also the same stuff that white plumber's thread tape is made of. The manufacturers claim it is impervious to UV exposure and has an unlimited lifespan. It has a lower strength rating than polyester thread, but polyester thread's strength rapidly decreases as it ages until it is quickly less strong than PTFE thread. More recently, similarly "bulletproof" threads have become available, such as Kevlar and Nomex thread which are extremely strong and fire-resistant, respectively. 
 
As always, there's a catch. PTFE thread, which is the present "gold standard" costs three to ten times what polyester thread does. Kevlar and Nomex are even more expensive than that. Moreover, all of these polymer (plastic) threads are extremely difficult to color and generally require coloring at the time the fibers are manufactured, adding pigment when the plastic is compounded. This stuff can't be dyed by dipping it in strong coffee, to say the least. As the issue raised in this thread is primarily the increasing cost of natural fiber thread, it quickly becomes apparent that "you get what you pay for" and natural fiber, even at higher prices than in the past, is the most cost-effective alternative for getting the job done right.
 
From what I can see, polyester thread is about the last thing I'd ever want to use on anything I wanted to last. It is definitely not "archival." I'm with you. I can't for the life of me figure out why a respected museum would specify polyester thread for rigging models. Chuck apparently "has to dance with the girl he brought," because the museum which "pays the piper gets to call the tune," but if I were faced with similar circumstances, I'd make sure I'd made a record by sending them written notice that while the job would be done exactly as specified, I could not warrant the suitability of the materials specified. Nobody wants to have a customer coming back to bite you in the butt three or five years later, as they always do when their otherwise contraindicated specified method or material fails. That's been the case so often in boatyards with customers who insist the newest untried product on the market they saw advertised in a boating magazine be used for expensive maintenance jobs that the yards routinely "paper" the customer to make sure they are covered if the new coating or whatever turns out to be a dud.

I've been "lurking" from time to time to watch the development of this masterpiece. I have to confess, I had no idea the scale was so small! It's truly impressive. Thanks for sharing it with us.

I'm not sure if this link has been posted before. The Introduction and Use of Copper Sheathing - A History, by Mark Staniforth, Academia.EDU PDF first published in 1985, bulletin of the Australian Institute of Maritime Archaeology (28 pages.)
 
This is a very interesting academic work on the history and technology of copper sheathing. https://www.academia.edu/358814/The_Introduction_and_Use_of_Copper_Sheathing_A_History?email_work_card=view-paper
 

First off, the "ponce wheel effect" produces convex "dimples," while the picture shows concave dimples. Big difference.
 
Second, the workmen in the picture are doing a really lousy job of it. (The hardhats are a dead giveaway. They're probably government subcontractors who belong to the roofers' union, not the caulkers' union, which I don't think exists anymore, although there once was one. See footnote below.) They are driving the tacks with carpenter's hammers, which leave large dimples and creases in the copper surface. A ship's bottom should be as smooth as possible to reduce friction resistance in the water. Copper sheathing is properly fastened with a "coppering hammer," which has a convex-shaped striking face with a rounded edge that permits the tack head to be driven flush with the surface of the copper sheet while minimizing dimpling and preventing creasing the sheet itself.
 
 

 
A newly coppered yacht hull properly done. 
 

 
A  copper plate on USS Constitution photographed during restoration:
 

 
 
 
Note the absence of "rivets (sic)" on a well-portrayed copper bottom on a fine model of Cutty Sark:
 

 
Footnote: 
Caulking in the United States became a trade widely practiced by free African Americans in the mid-nineteenth century. Many caulking crews were itinerant workers who would travel from shipyard to ship yard to caulk hulls on contract as their skills were required. Racial discrimination in the workplace resulted African American caulkers buying their own shipyard, the Chesapeake Marin Railway and Dry Docking Company in 1866. This was quickly followed by the formation of the Colored Caulkers' Trade Union in 1868, one of the first African American trade unions  to be created and the precursor to the Colored National Labor Union. When the founding president of the Colored Caulkers' Trade Union became the president of the Colored National Labor Union, he was followed as president of the Colored Caulkers' Trade Union by Frederick Douglass. Famed as a leader of the American abolitionist movement, few today realize that Frederick Douglass was a ship's caulker by trade and trade unionist, as well.  See:  https://aflcio.org/2021/2/11/pathway-progress-baltimore-caulkers-take-charge-their-own-future and  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Myers
 

The paper does indeed have to be to scale, of course. IMHO, the problem arises because folks can't let go of trying to use "real" copper on their models and trying to portray their scale copper sheathing as shiny as a new penny. Real coppered bottoms look a lot more like old copper pennies, not new ones. New copper sheet will be "new penny shiny" straight from the mill, but within weeks, if not days, in the salt air, will be developing a patina, first bright green (verdigris) and later moving to "copper brown." Once the hull hits the water, all bets are off, since the hull will rather quickly foul with marine growth. A verdigris patina will develop at the waterline where air and water mix, while below the waterline it will become copper brown covered with "bottom crud" to one degree or another.
 
Save for the time when it's actually applied, brand new shiny copper sheathing just isn't seen in real life. Folks who are impressed with "real copper plating" are drinking kit manufacturers' Kool Aid. It's just marketing hype.

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)