Bob Cleek

Come to think of it, a few years back, ModelExpo had a sale on drill bits by size and I ordered a bunch of different sizes. I had the exact same problem and an email to them got solved in the same way. Apparently, the kids the manufacturer had chained to the workbenches in China weren't all that concerned about putting the correct number of bits in the right tubes! I thought it was a fluke and forgot about that until now. They sent the replacements right away, though with no questions asked.

One should carefully consider the downside risks of gluing planking seams, whether by application of adhesive to the seams, or by coating the inside of a hull with epoxy resin adhesive which soaks into the seams from inside. As noted correctly, wood moves with changes in the ambient humidity levels of the environment it's in. This movement is primarily across the grain and its amount varies depending upon the wood species and, within the same species, even the location where the wood is grown. This is called tangential movement. Most woods will shrink tangentially six to ten percent when dried and will swell back depending upon the moisture content absorbed. The amount of movement is relatively small, assuming properly dried wood being used to begin with, but can still be considerable if the distance you are dealing with is relatively large. 
 
So, if you are building a model using vertical grain stock, as one should, the tangential (cross grain) side of its planked hull can easily total six inches. That's six inches of grain to shrink tangentially and even at a rate of movement of one percent, you are getting close to a sixteenth of an inch, which would be a quite noticeable crack in a model's topsides. If the planks are not fastened to each other, each will shrink individually and if you have maybe 24 1/4" planks, that shrinkage will only amount to 1/24th of a sixteenth of an inch. (You can do the math to get an exact fraction... a good example of the advantages of metric measurements!) That amount of movement isn't going to be noticeable at all and most coatings will allow for such movement without cracking at the seams. However, if the seams are all glued together, they all move as one, and the "weakest link law" takes over. In that case, a sixteenth of an inch crack along the weakest glued seam... or a crack in the wood itself... is going to occur at the weakest point. Conversely, swelling will push the glued sheet of planking for that sixteenth of an inch against everything it butts up against, again potentially causing a structural failure at the weakest point, or tend to buckle the "planking sheet" outward, breaking the glue bonds... or the wood... at the frames. 
 
Now, with prime wood species which have low movement factors and with relatively stable humidity, you may not run into any problems at all, but theoretically, the potential is there and I've seen its results in more than one model I've restored. More often than not, parts, cap rails, for example, start popping off and nobody knows why.
 
Monocoque wood hull construction is tricky. For my money, I prefer to give the wood as much opportunity to move on its own as possible without concentrating swelling and shrinking stresses within the structure.
 
Others' mileage may vary, of course.
 

I was always on the "academic track" and ended up in law enforcement and then a lawyer, but I had the benefit of a father whose motto was "If you can't fix it, you don't deserve to own it." Well, back then, that was possible! He was an accountant who'd been born on my grandfather's cattle ranch in Montana and there really wasn't much he couldn't do. I learned woodworking and painting and darkroom photography and general "Mr. Fixit" skills from him. That wasn't the end of it. We lived in the SF Bay Area where there was a lot of education going on, and still is. He put me in a "gifted kid" electrical engineering program on Saturdays between fifth and eighth grades. I got to play with the first transistors and lasers and learn about electronics. My mother stuck my sister and I as "guinea pigs" in a university program for the Defense Department designing what became "language labs" for an entire summer. I still remember enough of that to find a bathroom in Moscow! I took typing in summer school as a freshman in high school and also took commercial art and a couple of semesters of mechanical drawing. Like a lot of modelers, I loved those courses and remember always being disappointed when the bell rang when I was in the middle of a project.
 
I grew up appreciating tools and have amassed quite a collection over the years. I have to admit I've got more tools than time to use them. I never stopped using my manual drafting tools and, while I fiddled with CAD enough to appreciate it's advantages, I also came to quickly realize that I could do an awful lot with manual drafting tools faster and more efficiently than I could with CAD, in large measure because of the learning curve, but also because nobody's really been able to create a CAD program that will spring a fair curve as well as a wooden batten.
 
The more I started drawing boat parts and plans, the more I found I needed some mechanical drawing tools that were going the way of the dodo bird. The first tool I decided to treat myself to was a planimeter. (Planimeters measure the surface area of irregular planes.) Not something I'd need to use all that often, but it made calculating vessel displacement tremendously easier and more accurate than the old "rules of thumb" techniques. I couldn't justify the cost of such a specialized measuring instrument, which I knew to be really expensive, until I realized that eBay was chock full of what used to be drafting instruments I had spent a lifetime lusting after and could never have justified spending the money they cost and they were practically giving them away. CAD was king and I'd discovered that "brief fleeting moment" between "obsolete" and "collectable." I started monitoring eBay daily and buying "nothing but the best" I could afford. I started researching and decided to specialize in Keuffel and Esser's "Paragon" line, which was their top of the line. I ended up with everything I could ever possibly find a use for, and then some. Hitting the market at the bottom was also a good investment because the "good stuff" has appreciated significantly as it became more scarce over the past decade or so. 
 
There's still some bargains that come up regularly on eBay and "users" are priced fairly, if you take the time to google up the old catalogs and identify the models that are desirable. Then there's always the thrill of the "bargains" that you come upon. It does the soul good to buy a complete cased set of Copenhagen ships' curves for $100 when they often go for three times that. I bought my mint-condition "old school" Hamilton 4X6' oak professional drafting table from a lady on Craigslist for seventy-five bucks! I did luck out getting into collecting before it became a "thing," though. I haven't seen anything but the standard ISO LEROY lettering templates for years now. They used to make them in all sorts of fonts, but those have apparently all been snatched up now. (You really need those old fashioned fonts to make a drawing look like it came out of the turn of the last century!) The big 10" K&E "universal" decimal proportional dividers, which are so handy for modeling, do still come up from time to time, and once in a while one in a "beater" case will go for less than a hundred bucks. I find a German silver "Paragon" set of drafting instruments, with their matching serial numbers like a prize Luger, resting in their green silk velvet French-fitted case  is truly "jewelry" and I get a lot more use out of the drafting instruments than my buddy does out of his Luger collection!
 
So, now that I've got mine and aren't worried about the competition, I'd encourage any modeler to "go for it." You don't have to go back to school to learn to draw with instruments. Just find an old high school mechanical drawing text book and start reading it. It's not rocket science... but tee-squares and slide rules did put the first men on the moon!
 

 
 

  And it's not just drawing plans, either. Check out this thread discussing the use of draftsmen's ruling pens for striking lines on models themselves. 
 

I was always on the "academic track" and ended up in law enforcement and then a lawyer, but I had the benefit of a father whose motto was "If you can't fix it, you don't deserve to own it." Well, back then, that was possible! He was an accountant who'd been born on my grandfather's cattle ranch in Montana and there really wasn't much he couldn't do. I learned woodworking and painting and darkroom photography and general "Mr. Fixit" skills from him. That wasn't the end of it. We lived in the SF Bay Area where there was a lot of education going on, and still is. He put me in a "gifted kid" electrical engineering program on Saturdays between fifth and eighth grades. I got to play with the first transistors and lasers and learn about electronics. My mother stuck my sister and I as "guinea pigs" in a university program for the Defense Department designing what became "language labs" for an entire summer. I still remember enough of that to find a bathroom in Moscow! I took typing in summer school as a freshman in high school and also took commercial art and a couple of semesters of mechanical drawing. Like a lot of modelers, I loved those courses and remember always being disappointed when the bell rang when I was in the middle of a project.
 
I grew up appreciating tools and have amassed quite a collection over the years. I have to admit I've got more tools than time to use them. I never stopped using my manual drafting tools and, while I fiddled with CAD enough to appreciate it's advantages, I also came to quickly realize that I could do an awful lot with manual drafting tools faster and more efficiently than I could with CAD, in large measure because of the learning curve, but also because nobody's really been able to create a CAD program that will spring a fair curve as well as a wooden batten.
 
The more I started drawing boat parts and plans, the more I found I needed some mechanical drawing tools that were going the way of the dodo bird. The first tool I decided to treat myself to was a planimeter. (Planimeters measure the surface area of irregular planes.) Not something I'd need to use all that often, but it made calculating vessel displacement tremendously easier and more accurate than the old "rules of thumb" techniques. I couldn't justify the cost of such a specialized measuring instrument, which I knew to be really expensive, until I realized that eBay was chock full of what used to be drafting instruments I had spent a lifetime lusting after and could never have justified spending the money they cost and they were practically giving them away. CAD was king and I'd discovered that "brief fleeting moment" between "obsolete" and "collectable." I started monitoring eBay daily and buying "nothing but the best" I could afford. I started researching and decided to specialize in Keuffel and Esser's "Paragon" line, which was their top of the line. I ended up with everything I could ever possibly find a use for, and then some. Hitting the market at the bottom was also a good investment because the "good stuff" has appreciated significantly as it became more scarce over the past decade or so. 
 
There's still some bargains that come up regularly on eBay and "users" are priced fairly, if you take the time to google up the old catalogs and identify the models that are desirable. Then there's always the thrill of the "bargains" that you come upon. It does the soul good to buy a complete cased set of Copenhagen ships' curves for $100 when they often go for three times that. I bought my mint-condition "old school" Hamilton 4X6' oak professional drafting table from a lady on Craigslist for seventy-five bucks! I did luck out getting into collecting before it became a "thing," though. I haven't seen anything but the standard ISO LEROY lettering templates for years now. They used to make them in all sorts of fonts, but those have apparently all been snatched up now. (You really need those old fashioned fonts to make a drawing look like it came out of the turn of the last century!) The big 10" K&E "universal" decimal proportional dividers, which are so handy for modeling, do still come up from time to time, and once in a while one in a "beater" case will go for less than a hundred bucks. I find a German silver "Paragon" set of drafting instruments, with their matching serial numbers like a prize Luger, resting in their green silk velvet French-fitted case  is truly "jewelry" and I get a lot more use out of the drafting instruments than my buddy does out of his Luger collection!
 
So, now that I've got mine and aren't worried about the competition, I'd encourage any modeler to "go for it." You don't have to go back to school to learn to draw with instruments. Just find an old high school mechanical drawing text book and start reading it. It's not rocket science... but tee-squares and slide rules did put the first men on the moon!
 

 
 

  And it's not just drawing plans, either. Check out this thread discussing the use of draftsmen's ruling pens for striking lines on models themselves. 
 

Wipe on polyurethane is simply thinned polyurethane varnish or "clear coating," if you will. It's marketed for folks who don't want to go to the trouble of mixing their own and for that convenience they pay the price of polyurethane varnish for a can half full of far less expensive thinner.   The same result can be achieved using a mixture of half boiled linseed oil and half turpentine. Either way, the "preferred technique" is getting it on the wood however works for you, and then wiping off the excess before it starts to dry. It's really no different than any other oiled wood finish, save for the chemical components of the coating itself. As the man says, "Follow the directions on the can."
 
How many coats to apply and whether you feel the need to sand or not are matters of personal taste. As with all finish and wood species combinations with which the user is not completely familiar,  one should always test the application on a piece of scrap wood of the same species (and preferably the same color, if colors vary in the species) to ensure the result desired. Nothing's worse than ruining a work piece with a botched finish!
 
 
 

Wipe on polyurethane is simply thinned polyurethane varnish or "clear coating," if you will. It's marketed for folks who don't want to go to the trouble of mixing their own and for that convenience they pay the price of polyurethane varnish for a can half full of far less expensive thinner.   The same result can be achieved using a mixture of half boiled linseed oil and half turpentine. Either way, the "preferred technique" is getting it on the wood however works for you, and then wiping off the excess before it starts to dry. It's really no different than any other oiled wood finish, save for the chemical components of the coating itself. As the man says, "Follow the directions on the can."
 
How many coats to apply and whether you feel the need to sand or not are matters of personal taste. As with all finish and wood species combinations with which the user is not completely familiar,  one should always test the application on a piece of scrap wood of the same species (and preferably the same color, if colors vary in the species) to ensure the result desired. Nothing's worse than ruining a work piece with a botched finish!
 
 
 

One should carefully consider the downside risks of gluing planking seams, whether by application of adhesive to the seams, or by coating the inside of a hull with epoxy resin adhesive which soaks into the seams from inside. As noted correctly, wood moves with changes in the ambient humidity levels of the environment it's in. This movement is primarily across the grain and its amount varies depending upon the wood species and, within the same species, even the location where the wood is grown. This is called tangential movement. Most woods will shrink tangentially six to ten percent when dried and will swell back depending upon the moisture content absorbed. The amount of movement is relatively small, assuming properly dried wood being used to begin with, but can still be considerable if the distance you are dealing with is relatively large. 
 
So, if you are building a model using vertical grain stock, as one should, the tangential (cross grain) side of its planked hull can easily total six inches. That's six inches of grain to shrink tangentially and even at a rate of movement of one percent, you are getting close to a sixteenth of an inch, which would be a quite noticeable crack in a model's topsides. If the planks are not fastened to each other, each will shrink individually and if you have maybe 24 1/4" planks, that shrinkage will only amount to 1/24th of a sixteenth of an inch. (You can do the math to get an exact fraction... a good example of the advantages of metric measurements!) That amount of movement isn't going to be noticeable at all and most coatings will allow for such movement without cracking at the seams. However, if the seams are all glued together, they all move as one, and the "weakest link law" takes over. In that case, a sixteenth of an inch crack along the weakest glued seam... or a crack in the wood itself... is going to occur at the weakest point. Conversely, swelling will push the glued sheet of planking for that sixteenth of an inch against everything it butts up against, again potentially causing a structural failure at the weakest point, or tend to buckle the "planking sheet" outward, breaking the glue bonds... or the wood... at the frames. 
 
Now, with prime wood species which have low movement factors and with relatively stable humidity, you may not run into any problems at all, but theoretically, the potential is there and I've seen its results in more than one model I've restored. More often than not, parts, cap rails, for example, start popping off and nobody knows why.
 
Monocoque wood hull construction is tricky. For my money, I prefer to give the wood as much opportunity to move on its own as possible without concentrating swelling and shrinking stresses within the structure.
 
Others' mileage may vary, of course.
 

Wipe on polyurethane is simply thinned polyurethane varnish or "clear coating," if you will. It's marketed for folks who don't want to go to the trouble of mixing their own and for that convenience they pay the price of polyurethane varnish for a can half full of far less expensive thinner.   The same result can be achieved using a mixture of half boiled linseed oil and half turpentine. Either way, the "preferred technique" is getting it on the wood however works for you, and then wiping off the excess before it starts to dry. It's really no different than any other oiled wood finish, save for the chemical components of the coating itself. As the man says, "Follow the directions on the can."
 
How many coats to apply and whether you feel the need to sand or not are matters of personal taste. As with all finish and wood species combinations with which the user is not completely familiar,  one should always test the application on a piece of scrap wood of the same species (and preferably the same color, if colors vary in the species) to ensure the result desired. Nothing's worse than ruining a work piece with a botched finish!
 
 
 

I use nothing but PVA (wood glue) for the vast majority of my construction and for all of my planking, no reason IMO to use the super-glue type glues if you properly shape your planks before fitting.  If you get super-glue type glues on a wood surface that you don't plan to paint, it can be impossible to remove the stain left which can soak deep into some types of wood.
 
 
 

Wood glue is not absolutely necessary, but some modelers don't trust the durability of CA glue bonds. CA doesn't resist shear stress well, making its bonds somewhat brittle. This isn't a problem if you avoid sudden shocks to your model. But, on the other hand, I once saw a CA-bonded model fall off a table and literally shatter into all of its component parts once it hit the floor. Know the risks and advantages in advance, and then choose whichever glue suits your fancy.

Wipe on polyurethane is simply thinned polyurethane varnish or "clear coating," if you will. It's marketed for folks who don't want to go to the trouble of mixing their own and for that convenience they pay the price of polyurethane varnish for a can half full of far less expensive thinner.   The same result can be achieved using a mixture of half boiled linseed oil and half turpentine. Either way, the "preferred technique" is getting it on the wood however works for you, and then wiping off the excess before it starts to dry. It's really no different than any other oiled wood finish, save for the chemical components of the coating itself. As the man says, "Follow the directions on the can."
 
How many coats to apply and whether you feel the need to sand or not are matters of personal taste. As with all finish and wood species combinations with which the user is not completely familiar,  one should always test the application on a piece of scrap wood of the same species (and preferably the same color, if colors vary in the species) to ensure the result desired. Nothing's worse than ruining a work piece with a botched finish!
 
 
 

I was always on the "academic track" and ended up in law enforcement and then a lawyer, but I had the benefit of a father whose motto was "If you can't fix it, you don't deserve to own it." Well, back then, that was possible! He was an accountant who'd been born on my grandfather's cattle ranch in Montana and there really wasn't much he couldn't do. I learned woodworking and painting and darkroom photography and general "Mr. Fixit" skills from him. That wasn't the end of it. We lived in the SF Bay Area where there was a lot of education going on, and still is. He put me in a "gifted kid" electrical engineering program on Saturdays between fifth and eighth grades. I got to play with the first transistors and lasers and learn about electronics. My mother stuck my sister and I as "guinea pigs" in a university program for the Defense Department designing what became "language labs" for an entire summer. I still remember enough of that to find a bathroom in Moscow! I took typing in summer school as a freshman in high school and also took commercial art and a couple of semesters of mechanical drawing. Like a lot of modelers, I loved those courses and remember always being disappointed when the bell rang when I was in the middle of a project.
 
I grew up appreciating tools and have amassed quite a collection over the years. I have to admit I've got more tools than time to use them. I never stopped using my manual drafting tools and, while I fiddled with CAD enough to appreciate it's advantages, I also came to quickly realize that I could do an awful lot with manual drafting tools faster and more efficiently than I could with CAD, in large measure because of the learning curve, but also because nobody's really been able to create a CAD program that will spring a fair curve as well as a wooden batten.
 
The more I started drawing boat parts and plans, the more I found I needed some mechanical drawing tools that were going the way of the dodo bird. The first tool I decided to treat myself to was a planimeter. (Planimeters measure the surface area of irregular planes.) Not something I'd need to use all that often, but it made calculating vessel displacement tremendously easier and more accurate than the old "rules of thumb" techniques. I couldn't justify the cost of such a specialized measuring instrument, which I knew to be really expensive, until I realized that eBay was chock full of what used to be drafting instruments I had spent a lifetime lusting after and could never have justified spending the money they cost and they were practically giving them away. CAD was king and I'd discovered that "brief fleeting moment" between "obsolete" and "collectable." I started monitoring eBay daily and buying "nothing but the best" I could afford. I started researching and decided to specialize in Keuffel and Esser's "Paragon" line, which was their top of the line. I ended up with everything I could ever possibly find a use for, and then some. Hitting the market at the bottom was also a good investment because the "good stuff" has appreciated significantly as it became more scarce over the past decade or so. 
 
There's still some bargains that come up regularly on eBay and "users" are priced fairly, if you take the time to google up the old catalogs and identify the models that are desirable. Then there's always the thrill of the "bargains" that you come upon. It does the soul good to buy a complete cased set of Copenhagen ships' curves for $100 when they often go for three times that. I bought my mint-condition "old school" Hamilton 4X6' oak professional drafting table from a lady on Craigslist for seventy-five bucks! I did luck out getting into collecting before it became a "thing," though. I haven't seen anything but the standard ISO LEROY lettering templates for years now. They used to make them in all sorts of fonts, but those have apparently all been snatched up now. (You really need those old fashioned fonts to make a drawing look like it came out of the turn of the last century!) The big 10" K&E "universal" decimal proportional dividers, which are so handy for modeling, do still come up from time to time, and once in a while one in a "beater" case will go for less than a hundred bucks. I find a German silver "Paragon" set of drafting instruments, with their matching serial numbers like a prize Luger, resting in their green silk velvet French-fitted case  is truly "jewelry" and I get a lot more use out of the drafting instruments than my buddy does out of his Luger collection!
 
So, now that I've got mine and aren't worried about the competition, I'd encourage any modeler to "go for it." You don't have to go back to school to learn to draw with instruments. Just find an old high school mechanical drawing text book and start reading it. It's not rocket science... but tee-squares and slide rules did put the first men on the moon!
 

 
 

  And it's not just drawing plans, either. Check out this thread discussing the use of draftsmen's ruling pens for striking lines on models themselves. 
 

Drafting by hand is an art form and the lettering is more noticeable than the line work on all forms of it. Other than Mechanical Drawing Classes in High School, my Professional experience was with Civil Engineering and Survey Drafting by hand. The trick to good usable drawings was the correct dimensions and accurate data in the tables used to support the drawing details. Someone had to provide that data or you did the Math Yourself, scaling was not good enough. We did our Survey Drawing by plotting grid points and connecting the dots, to do that we needed coordinates, we used Rectangular and Polar both and computed them by hand using Log and Trig Tables, 'not Slide Rules', then the HP 35 came along, beginning the race to computers using COGO. A good Coordinate Geometry Program, 'COGO', was a God Send, from it Cad developed and refined enough to be useful. Hand Drafting was a mighty tool for a long time, but it seldom stood alone. If you wish to design or build from your own plans, uses cad, or learn some Geometry and Trig to run and intersect vectors for dimensions, full size, your drawings with hand fitting oversized parts will work as it has for years.
 

I'm just curious,  does anyone still sit at a drafting board and design and draw anymore?
 
What feels like a thousand years ago, I went to school to be an architect. To my Fathers dismay after graduation I chose to go into a unrelated profession.  But I have used those skills I learned throughout my life.  When I went to school CAD or computer technology was far off into the future. When CAD came into its own over time I never had any desire to take a class or had any use for it to be honest.  IMHO I feel it is not a true form of drafting in the sense it is digital to where actual drafting to me is a form of art.  I'm sure many will disagree with me and I know it is needed in today's digital world with CNC use and with digital 3D perspectives being the norm now for any form of construction or presentation. Maybe I'm just a dinosaur and set in my ways but I cannot see myself having the same sense of personal pride of of accomplishment showing off a digital design viewed from a computer screen or printed on a printer vs. something hand drawn on quality sheet of drafting film.
I worked for a public school district and over the years I watched as they discontinued and dismantled the Middle and High School Drafting Classes along with the Wood and Metal Shop programs. THe teaching done today is focused in how to design in a digital world and how to program machines to do the actual work of construction.
I watched as they gutted those rooms and shops, removing all the tools and machines and drafting tables. Those rooms today are carpeted and air conditioned and full of computers. Students are glued to computer screens all day never learning to take their own idea make a scaled drawing of it, to  build it using their hands and machines and tools like their fathers and grandfathers.  But in today's world of manufacturing this is what is needed to become employed. Its a shame that we no longer teach students to use their hands to design and create.
Today your able to take a CAD design and using a CNC machine produce carvings in wood just as well as a craftsman had done by hand in the past. I guess in time craftsman will be a thing of the past.
Sorry for the rant, I have searched through the forum and I'm just curious if anyone still sits at a Drafting Table and draws by hand anymore. If so, I would like to hear from you.
Thanks,
Tim
 

Interesting topic-- one that hits home. I took mechanical drafting and architectural drafting in high school (2 years of each; 1984-1988) right before they got CAD.  I enjoyed it plenty, and found it challenging.  ...Then went on to study art and English at college.  In 1998, I found myself documenting small watercraft and the skills from high school all came back . . . or rather were 'necessary,' as it took awhile for the skills to actually return. CAD is a wondrous tool (never used it myself) with so many more aspects attached (calculations, rotations, etc.), but to strike a line by hand on a fairing batten is to truly see and feel the curves of a vessel.  Not much I love more than inking the lines of a unique vessel whose form has not been recorded on paper in 3-view before. Right up there is my love for looking at others' hand-drawn lines. 

You can't go too far wrong for twenty-one bucks at Lowe's or the equivalent. https://www.lowes.com/pd/IRWIN-3-in-Cast-Iron-Clamp-on-Vise/1003168304?cm_mmc=shp-_-c-_-prd-_-tol-_-google-_-lia-_-106-_-clampsandvises-_-1003168304-_-0&placeholder=null&ds_rl=1286981&gclid=CjwKCAiArIH_BRB2EiwALfbH1CdIcRalCVC77wuXWEehSCPYcPtaMqs88v8737EcXADBIyQoZlRvhBoCRc8QAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
 

 
Bessey vacuum base vise at thirty bucks: https://www.amazon.com/Bessey-BVVB-Vacuum-Base-Vise/dp/B0057PUR88/ref=asc_df_B0057PUR88/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312322422714&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=1449783815818756065&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9032112&hvtargid=pla-435893379511&psc=1
 

 
Vost vacuum vise for twenty-five bucks at Home Depot: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Yost-2-75-in-Multi-Angle-Pivoting-Vacuum-Vise-V-275/205583839?source=shoppingads&locale=en-US&mtc=Shopping-B-F_D25T-G-D25T-25_1_HAND_TOOLS-Multi-NA-Feed-PLA-NA-NA-HandTools_PLA&cm_mmc=Shopping-B-F_D25T-G-D25T-25_1_HAND_TOOLS-Multi-NA-Feed-PLA-NA-NA-HandTools_PLA-71700000034127224-58700003933021546-92700031755124844&gclid=CjwKCAiArIH_BRB2EiwALfbH1BvgCGn1dN3GZDH5JwUpr035zxhEBxvih7Arp1UiAVLuoxi1oVqnihoCAH4QAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
 

 
 
 
Top quality Grobet Vacu Vise jeweler's vise for thiry-five bucks: https://www.penntoolco.com/grobet-usa-vacu-vise-with-swivel-base-58103/?matchtype=&network=g&device=c&keyword=&campaign=744568461&adgroup=pla-53104812259&gclid=CjwKCAiArIH_BRB2EiwALfbH1GDETTlOtNNzUF14rtxs9IEImktpr5p8qzDhKjKj83I0-lcarVGBUxoCpIYQAvD_BwE
 

 
Proxxon suction base vise at forty-five bucks at Home Depot: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Proxxon-Precision-Vise-FMS-75-28602/203459683
 

 
I fail to see what's so special about Proxxon tools. They do have things others don't and sometimes they are available in areas where other options aren't, but they seem quite overpriced in my humble opinion. This appears to often be the case with any retailer who targets the hobbyist market. 
 
 

I once helped a master boatbuilder friend plank a whole 35' sharpie hull with the stuff. I loved it. He used it throughout the boat. I saved a few pieces for small projects of my own, but, sad to say, we threw the rest of the offcuts into the shop woodstove. We weren't thinking of it as modeling wood at the time! It's amazing stuff. There's whole stands of it standing dead in southern Alaska. It will last for almost a hundred years like that. It's range is moving due to climate change. Counterintuitively, due to global warming, the thinning winter snowpacks expose the roots to freezing which kills the tree. For this reason, it's under consideration for threatened or endangered status.  One could probably harvest all they wanted up there, but it's not commercially viable getting it out of where it is.
 
it makes you want to cry.
 

Wow! That's sweet! A cast iron mini-patternmaker's vise. That one's on my Christmas-to-me list! Thanks for the tip.

Wow! That's sweet! A cast iron mini-patternmaker's vise. That one's on my Christmas-to-me list! Thanks for the tip.

Thank you all for your feedback and likes.  
I continue to work on the ventilation pipes. 
I make a mechanism for turning the trumpet.

Ventilation pipes .

Wheelhouse and its details.

I continue to build - conning tower  and navigation bridge.

I am glad to help you with anything.  

Stern balcony.