Bob Cleek

It does appear that the paint was applied too heavily and, hence, the "orange peel" effect, although I've encountered much worse. As has been said, the surface preparation has to be perfect... smooth as the proverbial baby's bottom. Your fingertips are the best measure of this. You can feel the imperfections better than you can see them. I always use a sanding base coat which is made for the purpose of filling minor imperfections and easily sanding to a perfectly smooth surface. Anything more than very minor surface imperfections require filling with "surfacing putty." I generally take down my base coat to 320 or 400 grit. There's not much point in going finer than that before airbrushing.
 
If the entire surface is as in the last picture, I'd say that if you want it to be good, you are going to have to sand the entire hull with 320 and then 400 to get the surface fair to begin with.  Be sure to allow the paint to really dry for a few days so it's good and hard and doesn't gum up your sandpaper. As you will be sanding hard paint instead of sanding base coat, it may be a pain, but take your time and make sure it's really perfectly smooth. Hopefully, you won't sand through the paint surface and won't need to repaint, but if you do, then make sure your paint is thinned well. Several thin coats, allowing time to dry well between each, is the way to go. Try to resist trying to get that last bit of "cover" over a wet surface. Too much wet paint is going to give you that "orange peel" again. You might also consider adding some "flowing" conditioner to the paint. This retards the drying and allows the paint to "level" better. Your paint may require a proprietary "flowing" additive. If it's an acrylic, you might experiment with Flood's "Floetrol." https://www.flood.com/products/paint-additives/floetrol-latex-based-paint-additive
 
After you've sanded the hull fair, you can apply another coat of paint if need be. (Again, build up your paint coating with multiple thin coats. Never apply paint thickly.) I wouldn't waste time messing with proprietary varnishes of varying glosses. They are often tricky to use and get just right. Instead, I'd let the paint dry well and then rub it down to the gloss level you desire using rottenstone and pumice. These provide two degrees of very fine "grit," rottenstone being the larger grit. They are powdered abrasives applied with a water-dampened soft cloth. It will probably take some time rubbing, but you will be able to see the level of gloss as you use them. If you want, you can also speed up the process a bit by using finer grit sandpapers, and then go to the finer rottenstone and pumice abrasive. Continued rubbing with the finer pumice will bring the gloss up as high as you want. You can get pretty close with an airbrush, sometimes even "close enough," but rubbing out the surface is the only way I know to get a perfect finish.
 
Here's a two-part video that shows how to do it on bright-finished wood, but the process is the same for varnished or painted surfaces. You won't need an electric polisher because you've only got a small piece to do and the electric polisher won't do so well on your curved surfaces. (In these videos, he uses fine grit sandpapers instead of the rottenstone and pumice because they work better with a powered sander on flat surfaces. I use rottenstone and pumice on model hulls because the surfaces are curved and a damp cloth abrades more evenly on the curves. Rottenstone and pumice, available at any paint store, are a lot cheaper than fine grit sandpapers, too!) I'd advise you paint up two or three pieces of scrap wood and use these to practice on before attacking your model. It's a process of experimenting to see how much sanding and polishing you really need to do to get to where you want the finish to be.
 
 
 
 
 

It does appear that the paint was applied too heavily and, hence, the "orange peel" effect, although I've encountered much worse. As has been said, the surface preparation has to be perfect... smooth as the proverbial baby's bottom. Your fingertips are the best measure of this. You can feel the imperfections better than you can see them. I always use a sanding base coat which is made for the purpose of filling minor imperfections and easily sanding to a perfectly smooth surface. Anything more than very minor surface imperfections require filling with "surfacing putty." I generally take down my base coat to 320 or 400 grit. There's not much point in going finer than that before airbrushing.
 
If the entire surface is as in the last picture, I'd say that if you want it to be good, you are going to have to sand the entire hull with 320 and then 400 to get the surface fair to begin with.  Be sure to allow the paint to really dry for a few days so it's good and hard and doesn't gum up your sandpaper. As you will be sanding hard paint instead of sanding base coat, it may be a pain, but take your time and make sure it's really perfectly smooth. Hopefully, you won't sand through the paint surface and won't need to repaint, but if you do, then make sure your paint is thinned well. Several thin coats, allowing time to dry well between each, is the way to go. Try to resist trying to get that last bit of "cover" over a wet surface. Too much wet paint is going to give you that "orange peel" again. You might also consider adding some "flowing" conditioner to the paint. This retards the drying and allows the paint to "level" better. Your paint may require a proprietary "flowing" additive. If it's an acrylic, you might experiment with Flood's "Floetrol." https://www.flood.com/products/paint-additives/floetrol-latex-based-paint-additive
 
After you've sanded the hull fair, you can apply another coat of paint if need be. (Again, build up your paint coating with multiple thin coats. Never apply paint thickly.) I wouldn't waste time messing with proprietary varnishes of varying glosses. They are often tricky to use and get just right. Instead, I'd let the paint dry well and then rub it down to the gloss level you desire using rottenstone and pumice. These provide two degrees of very fine "grit," rottenstone being the larger grit. They are powdered abrasives applied with a water-dampened soft cloth. It will probably take some time rubbing, but you will be able to see the level of gloss as you use them. If you want, you can also speed up the process a bit by using finer grit sandpapers, and then go to the finer rottenstone and pumice abrasive. Continued rubbing with the finer pumice will bring the gloss up as high as you want. You can get pretty close with an airbrush, sometimes even "close enough," but rubbing out the surface is the only way I know to get a perfect finish.
 
Here's a two-part video that shows how to do it on bright-finished wood, but the process is the same for varnished or painted surfaces. You won't need an electric polisher because you've only got a small piece to do and the electric polisher won't do so well on your curved surfaces. (In these videos, he uses fine grit sandpapers instead of the rottenstone and pumice because they work better with a powered sander on flat surfaces. I use rottenstone and pumice on model hulls because the surfaces are curved and a damp cloth abrades more evenly on the curves. Rottenstone and pumice, available at any paint store, are a lot cheaper than fine grit sandpapers, too!) I'd advise you paint up two or three pieces of scrap wood and use these to practice on before attacking your model. It's a process of experimenting to see how much sanding and polishing you really need to do to get to where you want the finish to be.
 
 
 
 
 

It depends upon how thick the primer will be applied. It should be applied very thinly on a model, so I'd say 320 would be as coarse as you dare. 400 would be better. 600 is probably finer than you need it.
 
Wet or dry, doesn't matter. Dry is a lot less messy.
 
It has to be perfectly smooth. Use your finger tips to feel for imperfections. Touch is better than sight.

It depends upon how thick the primer will be applied. It should be applied very thinly on a model, so I'd say 320 would be as coarse as you dare. 400 would be better. 600 is probably finer than you need it.
 
Wet or dry, doesn't matter. Dry is a lot less messy.
 
It has to be perfectly smooth. Use your finger tips to feel for imperfections. Touch is better than sight.

So true! The fact is, it's only been in recent times that kits with a high level of historical accuracy and quality materials have been available at all. There are now some pretty darn good kits on  the market, but you have to know what you are doing to make sure you're not buying junk. The old kits some of us cut our teeth on forty or fifty years ago were really scratch builds more than anything else. You'd get a set of plans, a rough shaped hull block, some dowels and some sheet wood, a bit of wire and string, and some (often poorly) cast metal fittings. After that, you were on your own. Laser cut wood parts were unheard of.   
 
That said, if you invest the time and effort to learn how to read and draft plans, there is a near-limitless supply of ship modeling subjects all over the place. You can buy really nice plans drawn for modeling purposes, or spring for some of the Anatomy of the Ship books, or you can scale up something from Chapelle's and Chapman's books, order plans from the HAMMS collection at the Smithsonian or The Historic American Engineering Record Survey (HAERS) plans that are free online from the National Park website, the latter being some of the best historic ship plans available anywhere.
 
People buy kits because they think the kit is going to make it easier. Kits do make it easier for those who are starting out, but you really pay a price for that. Kits cost many times more than scratch-building. For what some pay for kits that often remain unfinished, they could amass a great collection of fine tools and be able to build anything, anytime, anywhere, for next to nothing... and be able to sell the tools when they were done and spend the money on a nice tombstone. The only catch is that one must do their own research and look up what they need to know to get the job done. Thanks to the internet, that task is easier today by orders of magnitude than it was before. There's a lot more to this hobby than just following instructions and assembling a model no different than hundreds or thousands of others out of parts from a box. When the day comes that you start to think about freeing yourself from the constraints of the model kit marketplace, you know you've begun to arrive at an entirely different level of interest and enjoyment.

So true! The fact is, it's only been in recent times that kits with a high level of historical accuracy and quality materials have been available at all. There are now some pretty darn good kits on  the market, but you have to know what you are doing to make sure you're not buying junk. The old kits some of us cut our teeth on forty or fifty years ago were really scratch builds more than anything else. You'd get a set of plans, a rough shaped hull block, some dowels and some sheet wood, a bit of wire and string, and some (often poorly) cast metal fittings. After that, you were on your own. Laser cut wood parts were unheard of.   
 
That said, if you invest the time and effort to learn how to read and draft plans, there is a near-limitless supply of ship modeling subjects all over the place. You can buy really nice plans drawn for modeling purposes, or spring for some of the Anatomy of the Ship books, or you can scale up something from Chapelle's and Chapman's books, order plans from the HAMMS collection at the Smithsonian or The Historic American Engineering Record Survey (HAERS) plans that are free online from the National Park website, the latter being some of the best historic ship plans available anywhere.
 
People buy kits because they think the kit is going to make it easier. Kits do make it easier for those who are starting out, but you really pay a price for that. Kits cost many times more than scratch-building. For what some pay for kits that often remain unfinished, they could amass a great collection of fine tools and be able to build anything, anytime, anywhere, for next to nothing... and be able to sell the tools when they were done and spend the money on a nice tombstone. The only catch is that one must do their own research and look up what they need to know to get the job done. Thanks to the internet, that task is easier today by orders of magnitude than it was before. There's a lot more to this hobby than just following instructions and assembling a model no different than hundreds or thousands of others out of parts from a box. When the day comes that you start to think about freeing yourself from the constraints of the model kit marketplace, you know you've begun to arrive at an entirely different level of interest and enjoyment.

So true! The fact is, it's only been in recent times that kits with a high level of historical accuracy and quality materials have been available at all. There are now some pretty darn good kits on  the market, but you have to know what you are doing to make sure you're not buying junk. The old kits some of us cut our teeth on forty or fifty years ago were really scratch builds more than anything else. You'd get a set of plans, a rough shaped hull block, some dowels and some sheet wood, a bit of wire and string, and some (often poorly) cast metal fittings. After that, you were on your own. Laser cut wood parts were unheard of.   
 
That said, if you invest the time and effort to learn how to read and draft plans, there is a near-limitless supply of ship modeling subjects all over the place. You can buy really nice plans drawn for modeling purposes, or spring for some of the Anatomy of the Ship books, or you can scale up something from Chapelle's and Chapman's books, order plans from the HAMMS collection at the Smithsonian or The Historic American Engineering Record Survey (HAERS) plans that are free online from the National Park website, the latter being some of the best historic ship plans available anywhere.
 
People buy kits because they think the kit is going to make it easier. Kits do make it easier for those who are starting out, but you really pay a price for that. Kits cost many times more than scratch-building. For what some pay for kits that often remain unfinished, they could amass a great collection of fine tools and be able to build anything, anytime, anywhere, for next to nothing... and be able to sell the tools when they were done and spend the money on a nice tombstone. The only catch is that one must do their own research and look up what they need to know to get the job done. Thanks to the internet, that task is easier today by orders of magnitude than it was before. There's a lot more to this hobby than just following instructions and assembling a model no different than hundreds or thousands of others out of parts from a box. When the day comes that you start to think about freeing yourself from the constraints of the model kit marketplace, you know you've begun to arrive at an entirely different level of interest and enjoyment.

Oh my God! I've just spent the better part of a Saturday morning completely enthralled with your website: www.shipphotographer.com  I can't recommend it highly enough to the forum members. The photography is fantastic. I've see a lot of ship model photographs in my day, but always too few taken by a photographer who was a master of both photography and ship modeling at the same time. Your series on the Ukrainian ship modeling competition entries was humbling. I've never seen so much spectacularly fine work in one place outside of a museum. It would be so helpful to the ship modeling hobby here if more of us were multilingual. There seems to be so much ship modeling going on in Eastern Europe that we miss here because of the language differences. (Google translate is my friend, but our English language search engines seem to often pass over foreign websites.)
 
I'm sure I haven't yet seen a quarter of what you have posted on your website and I have to get on with today's chores, but I've got it bookmarked for later study. Your blog is really informative, as well, and your YouTube videos are wonderful.
 
I'm not the sort to gush over things, but I really have to say that your contributions are a remarkable addition to our craft. Thank you so much for sharing them. I can't imagine how one person could manage to have the time to put together such a great collection of ship modeling information and photographs and also hold down a full-time job as a highway engineer! Perhaps it's the synergy of having a marine archaeologist for a husband. What a great combination. You're both very lucky people!
 
I suggest the moderators consider some way to introduce and highlight your website and videos to the forumites. There's so much there of such great beauty and value and I fear many might overlook your complete body of work when all we have of it on MSW at present is one kit-build log, which is wonderful, but hardly representative of the scope and complexity of your total body of work to date.  You're unquestionably right up there with the finest modelers posting on this site, none of which, I might add, are anywhere near you when it comes to photographing their work.   

Ever seen what happens to the standard cheap ply used in most kits when it's a little damp...

A progression from here is to forego all of the pre-made parts and scratch build.  Your possibilities increase by a couple or three magnitudes.  The limits here are the available plans.  And if your devotion to historical accuracy has flexible limits, it will be limited by your skill either at a drawing board or a CAD program.  And with a lot of the legacy plans for notorious vessels, the origins and specifics only wink the reality of what they purport to represent.  But, to be fair,  at the time most were produced,  there was not much else available.  Of course,  more than a few kits share this same tenuous attachment to reality.

... but the number is growing 🙂
 
XXXDAn

Thanks for the tip, Rob! We've had unusually high temperatures here in Northern CA the last couple of days, breaking 100F in some places. I'm close to the coast with sea breezes keeping things cool most of the time, so I just need something for the summer heat spells. I saw someplace that they are now making them with a hose that can be run out a window to deal with the "exhaust" and condensate. I'll be looking for that feature for sure!

Have you considered the new freestanding portable air conditioners? I haven't played with one, but I'm seriously considering it. If anybody has any experience with them, please chime in. I like the portability, the absence of installation work, and no hard wiring required.
 
https://www.google.com/search?q=freestanding+portable+air+conditioner&oq=freestanding+portable+air+conditioner&aqs=chrome..69i57j0.7120j1j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

I have a Fein Turbo III (purchased 2008) combined with an Onieda Dust Deputy cyclone.  As you can see I built a movable cart with the vacuum on the bottom and the Deputy topside.  After a while I saw that I could gain more space for storing more "stuff" if I raised the Deputy up another level.  I made it more useful to me by being able to store the big table saw sliding table as well as some extra clamp storage. 
 
In my mind the cyclone is a must.  Over the past 12 years I have used two filter bags in the Fein, everything goes in the cyclone.  All my tablesaw, router, jointer, drum sander exhaust go thru the Deputy.  Anyways I think the cart with the vaccum and cyclone on top is an efficient combo.

Oh my God! I've just spent the better part of a Saturday morning completely enthralled with your website: www.shipphotographer.com  I can't recommend it highly enough to the forum members. The photography is fantastic. I've see a lot of ship model photographs in my day, but always too few taken by a photographer who was a master of both photography and ship modeling at the same time. Your series on the Ukrainian ship modeling competition entries was humbling. I've never seen so much spectacularly fine work in one place outside of a museum. It would be so helpful to the ship modeling hobby here if more of us were multilingual. There seems to be so much ship modeling going on in Eastern Europe that we miss here because of the language differences. (Google translate is my friend, but our English language search engines seem to often pass over foreign websites.)
 
I'm sure I haven't yet seen a quarter of what you have posted on your website and I have to get on with today's chores, but I've got it bookmarked for later study. Your blog is really informative, as well, and your YouTube videos are wonderful.
 
I'm not the sort to gush over things, but I really have to say that your contributions are a remarkable addition to our craft. Thank you so much for sharing them. I can't imagine how one person could manage to have the time to put together such a great collection of ship modeling information and photographs and also hold down a full-time job as a highway engineer! Perhaps it's the synergy of having a marine archaeologist for a husband. What a great combination. You're both very lucky people!
 
I suggest the moderators consider some way to introduce and highlight your website and videos to the forumites. There's so much there of such great beauty and value and I fear many might overlook your complete body of work when all we have of it on MSW at present is one kit-build log, which is wonderful, but hardly representative of the scope and complexity of your total body of work to date.  You're unquestionably right up there with the finest modelers posting on this site, none of which, I might add, are anywhere near you when it comes to photographing their work.   

Lovely models. I very much like to see small models like these done well. The "modern" wire and turnbuckle rigging is particularly difficult, but worth the challenge. There are entirely too many Victory and Constitution, and the like, models out here, but not nearly enough of small wooden craft. Very nice presentation on the camp plaques, too!

Lovely models. I very much like to see small models like these done well. The "modern" wire and turnbuckle rigging is particularly difficult, but worth the challenge. There are entirely too many Victory and Constitution, and the like, models out here, but not nearly enough of small wooden craft. Very nice presentation on the camp plaques, too!

Johann made me smile seeing the way you used a second Unimat bed and put the tailstock there to extend the length, a brilliant out of the box way of thinking.
 
Michael

Lovely models. I very much like to see small models like these done well. The "modern" wire and turnbuckle rigging is particularly difficult, but worth the challenge. There are entirely too many Victory and Constitution, and the like, models out here, but not nearly enough of small wooden craft. Very nice presentation on the camp plaques, too!

If space limitations apply, the lighter weight lathe is an decided advantage. However, weight equates with accuracy when it comes to machine tools. That's just a fact of life.

Unimats came with 110 VAC and 220 VAC motors. They were metric machines. They haven't been made since the late Seventies.
 
Very true. A common machine tool with lots of units in production over a long period of time which will accept lots of generic after-market tooling is a huge savings. Less common, more specialized machine tools with lots of proprietary tooling get expensive very quickly.  Precision machine tools and tooling have always been expensive, but prices have really gone up for quality stuff in recent times.

Ditto to everything that's been posted above.
 
There are many discussions here on these topics. I'll just mention a few observations as the owner of three lathes of various sizes and types. (A well-equipped Unimat SL, a fully tooled Atlas/Craftsman 12x48, and a Craftsman full size wood-turning lathe.)
 
1.  The price of a basic lathe or mill is, at best, only about half of what one would reasonably end up spending to equip the basic tool with the tooling necessary to perform the work usually done on them. 
 
2.  A good quality used lathe or mill, assuming it is in good condition, which often requires knowledgeable examination and testing, is always a better buy than a new one. This is especially so if one is able to purchase a lathe or mill in good shape with a considerable amount of tooling included in the deal. The "package" deals on new lathes and mills aren't anything special, generally. The "extras" are simply very basic tooling that would permit one to do one or two very basic operations. You may save a few bucks on the "package" over the retail prices, but you'll be spending far more than you save on the new machine than you would buying a good used one. They are like cars that way. Once you drive them off the lot, their value depreciates immediately.
 
1. The Unimat SL and Unimat 3 are excellent precision machines. They can be set up as either a lathe or a mill. The SL has been recognized by many as the finest modelmakers" lathe ever built. That said, they haven't been made since the seventies and you will certainly pay more for a Unimat than for anything close to one new. (The new "Unimats" are not the same. Somebody just bought the name to capitalize on it and brought out very poor products under the Unimat label.) Parts and attachments for the Unimats are no longer available except on the secondary market, such as eBay, and are extremely expensive. Don't even think about buying a basic machine and trying to fully equip it buying tooling on eBay and not paying a lot more than the equivalent for another machine. The old Unimats are great, but something of a collectors' cult item these days. The one advantage of that is that their value increases over time. I was lucky enough to be given mine. I spent another $750 or so just getting the basic tooling I wanted without any of the attachments for it, like the threading attachment, the jigsaw attachment, the table saw attachment, the rotary table, and so on, just to give you an idea of what it all costs. If it weren't a matter of "dancing with the girl ya brought," I'd have bought a used mini-lathe with better parts availability.
 
2. Sherline makes good, solid machines. To my way of thinking, however, they aren't cheap and they are limited by their size and power. For the same money, or much less on the used market, one can acquire a larger, more powerful and more versatile lathe such as the Chinese-made "7X's" or similar. (The prudent buyer obtains these for a bit more cost at reliable retailers like Grizzly Industrial or LittleMachineShop. Theirs have better quality control. Buy one at a bargain rate retailer and you can expect casting sand in the gearbox, etc., etc., etc. Precision costs money. Buying "seconds" is a false economy.)
 
3. Because so much of the price of any lathe or mill is dependent upon the tooling you will eventually be buying, and because much of it may be proprietary, careful consideration needs be given to the brand that one is purchasing and how available less expensive generic tooling might be. Similarly, one needs to decide between metric and Imperial standards. The advantage of the Chinese 7X's for modeling, or anything else for that matter, is that there's millions of them so there's tons of tooling available in standard thread patterns. That often makes a huge difference in cost in the long run. On the other hand, a proprietary part for an "oddball" lathe or mill can sometimes cost so much repairs become pointless.
 
4. A lathe with a milling attachment can do milling operations. A mill cannot do lathe operations.  
 
5. Within broad limits, of course, every size lathe can do smaller work, but none can do work larger than the physical limits of the diameter and length of work pieces. (For example, the Chinese mini-lathes will spin a 7" diameter work piece which is as long as its bed. A "7X14" allows you work anything within a 7" by 14" size envelope.) You won't go wrong with a larger lathe, but many find they need to later buy a larger lathe, or wished they had. 
 
6.  Not only is a lathe the most versatile machine tool of all, but it is also the most dangerous. Rotary saws may injure a greater number of people, but only because there are so many more of them. A lathe is not a machine to be operated intuitively. It demands at least a basic understanding of its operation and a thorough grounding in safety protocols. Get somebody who knows what they are doing to instruct you or take a class at the local adult education junior college or something. Even a relatively small lathe can kill you.  A mini-lathe might not kill you, but it can still maim you pretty good. Never forget that.  https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/nyregion/yale-student-dies-in-machine-shop-accident.html
 
7.  If I were buying a mini-lathe today, I'd be looking at something like these:
 
https://www.grizzly.com/products/Grizzly-4-x-6-Micro-Metal-Lathe/G0745
 
https://www.grizzly.com/products/Grizzly-7-x-14-Variable-Speed-Benchtop-Lathe/G0765
 
https://www.grizzly.com/products/Grizzly-8-x-16-Variable-Speed-Benchtop-Lathe/G0768
 
https://www.grizzly.com/products/Grizzly-9-x-19-Bench-Lathe/G4000
 
 
 
 

I use plenty of aluminum oxide abrasive sheet material, too. I haven't had problems with the longer-lasting heavier abrasive belt material, though. They will tend to clog with softer wood species and I've found that on edges of laminations glued with PVA, the glue will soften and clog the abrasive if allowed to heat up excessively when sanding. I've not had any problem with wood clogging when the abrasive is cleaned with a crepe rubber abrasive cleaning block. Keeping the abrasive clean extends its useful life considerably. 
 

I use plenty of aluminum oxide abrasive sheet material, too. I haven't had problems with the longer-lasting heavier abrasive belt material, though. They will tend to clog with softer wood species and I've found that on edges of laminations glued with PVA, the glue will soften and clog the abrasive if allowed to heat up excessively when sanding. I've not had any problem with wood clogging when the abrasive is cleaned with a crepe rubber abrasive cleaning block. Keeping the abrasive clean extends its useful life considerably. 
 

I use plenty of aluminum oxide abrasive sheet material, too. I haven't had problems with the longer-lasting heavier abrasive belt material, though. They will tend to clog with softer wood species and I've found that on edges of laminations glued with PVA, the glue will soften and clog the abrasive if allowed to heat up excessively when sanding. I've not had any problem with wood clogging when the abrasive is cleaned with a crepe rubber abrasive cleaning block. Keeping the abrasive clean extends its useful life considerably.