Bob Cleek

Another tip for you and anybody else who hasn't discovered it as yet: There is a wealth of fine detail brushes available at a fraction of the cost charged by modeling and artists' supply stores, in fact, at almost "disposable brush" prices, to be found listed for sale to manicurists. It seems there's a lot of fine detail painting now fashionable in the manicure business. Check out the manicurists' "nail art" sites for ultra-fine brushes of all types, particularly lining brushes. See: Amazon.com : nail art brushes and Nail Art Brushes for sale | eBay
 
 For example: Nail Art Brushes Nail Liner Brush Liner for Nails Easy Hold Thin Nail Art Design | eBay, $7.91 w/ free shipping:

 

Another tip for you and anybody else who hasn't discovered it as yet: There is a wealth of fine detail brushes available at a fraction of the cost charged by modeling and artists' supply stores, in fact, at almost "disposable brush" prices, to be found listed for sale to manicurists. It seems there's a lot of fine detail painting now fashionable in the manicure business. Check out the manicurists' "nail art" sites for ultra-fine brushes of all types, particularly lining brushes. See: Amazon.com : nail art brushes and Nail Art Brushes for sale | eBay
 
 For example: Nail Art Brushes Nail Liner Brush Liner for Nails Easy Hold Thin Nail Art Design | eBay, $7.91 w/ free shipping:

 

Another tip for you and anybody else who hasn't discovered it as yet: There is a wealth of fine detail brushes available at a fraction of the cost charged by modeling and artists' supply stores, in fact, at almost "disposable brush" prices, to be found listed for sale to manicurists. It seems there's a lot of fine detail painting now fashionable in the manicure business. Check out the manicurists' "nail art" sites for ultra-fine brushes of all types, particularly lining brushes. See: Amazon.com : nail art brushes and Nail Art Brushes for sale | eBay
 
 For example: Nail Art Brushes Nail Liner Brush Liner for Nails Easy Hold Thin Nail Art Design | eBay, $7.91 w/ free shipping:

 

Another tip for you and anybody else who hasn't discovered it as yet: There is a wealth of fine detail brushes available at a fraction of the cost charged by modeling and artists' supply stores, in fact, at almost "disposable brush" prices, to be found listed for sale to manicurists. It seems there's a lot of fine detail painting now fashionable in the manicure business. Check out the manicurists' "nail art" sites for ultra-fine brushes of all types, particularly lining brushes. See: Amazon.com : nail art brushes and Nail Art Brushes for sale | eBay
 
 For example: Nail Art Brushes Nail Liner Brush Liner for Nails Easy Hold Thin Nail Art Design | eBay, $7.91 w/ free shipping:

 

Another tip for you and anybody else who hasn't discovered it as yet: There is a wealth of fine detail brushes available at a fraction of the cost charged by modeling and artists' supply stores, in fact, at almost "disposable brush" prices, to be found listed for sale to manicurists. It seems there's a lot of fine detail painting now fashionable in the manicure business. Check out the manicurists' "nail art" sites for ultra-fine brushes of all types, particularly lining brushes. See: Amazon.com : nail art brushes and Nail Art Brushes for sale | eBay
 
 For example: Nail Art Brushes Nail Liner Brush Liner for Nails Easy Hold Thin Nail Art Design | eBay, $7.91 w/ free shipping:

 

And still are available on eBay or from after-market manufacturers... for a price.  
 
Check out "Mr Pete 222" or "Tubal Cain" (same guy) on YouTube. He's a retired shop teacher with great instructional videos on the Atlas/Craftsman 12' lathes. Everything you even wanted to know. 
 
I believe you can look up the age of yours with the serial number on lathes.co.uk under the Craftsman entries. There were a number of refinements over the several decades that this lathe was manufactured. There are many of them floating around and so parts are readily available. They are somewhat of a cult thing now. They aren't state of the art anymore with CNC and DRO features, but they'll do anything you could possibly need to do (including milling with the milling attachment) on a medium to light duty 12" manual lathe. If you have one that hasn't been "destroyed" along the way by misuse, they are certainly worth restoring. They're worth money even if they are trashed because of the continuing market demand for parts. (Threading gear sets are still available if you are missing any. Be careful not to "crash" the gears and damage the gear teeth. The gears are made of Zamac, a relatively weak alloy and it's not difficult to break teeth if you don't know what you are doing operating the lathe. Not to scare you off, but lathes are not a machine you ever want to learn how to use by just "fiddling" with them and they can be very dangerous in the hands of an untrained operator. All the operating manuals for these lathes are available for free online. Google them up.
 
I love mine. I picked it up along with just about every possible attachment (except a taper jig, darn it... but those are still made by an aftermarket manufacturer) from a retired old school machinist's widow for a very reasonable price. 

That's an excellent explanation of how to make a Ballentine coil. There are a number of ways to coil falls for the same purpose as a Ballentine coil. Other's make use of "figure-eight" faking, and so on. The original question, if I understand it correctly, addressed a "Flemished" line coil where the line lays in a tight flat coil on the deck without any overlapping turns. 

Yes, you have stated it correctly. I got it bass-ackwards. Sometimes it's a lot easier to do something relying on "muscle memory," than it is to write an instruction on how to do it! 
 
The photo above is indeed correct. What I should have said was that the coil begins with the bitter end in the center and is rotated until the line is fully coiled with the working end of the line running off of the outside of the coil. Obviously. it one tried to rotate the coil on the flat of the deck with the working (belayed) end in the center, the line would twist up between the center of the coil and the belaying point and get all kinky! Thanks for spotting the error!
 
BOB 

Or a lot of razor blades, as the saying goes!  

Indeed it is! I should have looked more closely at the photos. They appear quite a bit alike. The 6" is a sweet small modeling lathe, but they don't seem as available on the used market as the 12"-ers.  

Well, that would depend upon whether you wanted to color them differently from the natural color of whatever you made them from, no? The color of blocks will depend largely upon the period of the ship one is modeling. Some blocks were oiled bare wood. Later, blocks were painted, usually white or black.

I share your love of drafting, Roger.  As I expect you did also, basic mechanical drawing was a skill I acquired in high school over 50 years ago when drafting was a distinct trade at which many professionals still earned a decent living. I'm sure it's no longer taught anywhere. As a serious hobbyist, I made do with a basic set of drawing instruments until several years ago when I decided to acquire a planimeter for calculating hull displacement and searched on eBay. I discovered to my amazement that the finest instruments ever made, such as Keuffel and Esser's "Paragon" line, which in my youth I could only lust after from afar , having been made obsolete by CAD, were then available for what were extremely reasonable prices.   So I "treated" myself to a couple of years of watching the "drafting" section of eBay and amassed a pretty complete set of the best of everything Keuffel and Esser ever made that could be used for naval architectural drafting. It did cost a few bucks, but none of the purchases were particularly painful and the expenditure was stretched over a couple of years, so it wasn't noticed, if you know what I mean.   I was lucky to "hit the market" at the right moment when some really pristine instruments and complete sets were still available. Since then, I've watched the prices rise as the supply and the quality dwindled, because the demand increased when the "collectors" entered the market. Our mahogany-cased K&E Copenhagen curves sets have gone the way of the dodo bird. As far as I know, there is no longer anyone manufacturing them anywhere in the world. I haven't seen a complete set offered on eBay in perhaps three or four years now. The last full set went, if memory serves, for almost five hundred dollars!  If this is news to you, perhaps you might want to amend your last will and testament!
 

 

 
I'd add that those modelers who are interested in manual drafting should have little problem finding used high school drafting textbooks on line or in used book stores. (Sometimes titled as "Mechancal Drawing" or "Technical Drawing.") Although I've never seen a drafting textbook that specifically addressed the conventions of naval architecture and lofting, the standard texts all have chapters on the use of instruments and the general conventions of "drafting language," which suffice for anyone wanting to pick up the more specialized subject of naval architectural drawing, which will be found addressed separately in any of the boatbuilding books' chapters on lofting.
 
Any modeler who is of a mind to get into manual drafting would also be well advised to grab a high-quality decimally-scaled set of proportional dividers while there are still a few occasionally coming up on eBay. These will enable easily mechanically scaling drawings in books and on plans sheets from the scale of the original to any other scale one desires. These are still available for retail purchase. Micro-mark has a particularly cheesy small pair of proportional dividers offered for $100 which is not decimally scaled. (It's scale lists proportions as "1X, 2X, 3X," etc. A decimally scaled pair allows any scaling in any proportion expressed as a decimal by means of a geared Vernier adjustment.) Much higher quality 10" decimally scaled proportional dividers still come up on eBay occasionally for about the same price as the low quality 6" ones offered by Micro-Mark. I suppose that's not Micro-Mark's fault. The good ones aren't made anymore.
 
Below: Micro-Mark six inch "cheapos" oddly set at what appears to be equal proportions at each end.

Below: Keuffel and Esser "Paragon" ten inch decimally scaled ("Universal") German silver proportional dividers and case.

Below: Keuffel and Esser "Paragon" "three bow set" of basic German silver drawing instruments in case.

They aren't "bulkheads" or frames. They are station lines. The stations are depicted in a standard draft at each station line on the baseline. (The lines pictured were drawn for the purpose of modeling and have some modeling-specific information in them, however.) These station lines, together with the other lines in the draft, define the shape of the vessel. The table of offsets, correspondingly, defines the dimensions of the lines. While, in smaller craft particularly, frames may coincide with station lines, that is more a matter of coincidence than anything else. In a larger, heavier vessel, such as the one above, were every frame to be represented with a station line, the drawing would be so full of lines as to be unreadable and for the purposes of defining the shape of the hull, unnecessary.
 
Station lines have nothing to do with the construction details of the vessel.  The construction of a vessel is addressed by the construction drawings, if there are any. (And in period vessels, there rarely are, as such details were left to be worked out by the master shipwright.)  If you want to build a model using bulkheads, stations may be used to define your bulkheads.  If you wish to build a model with frames the way the vessel was actually built, as with an Admiralty model, you will have to research the methods of construction at the time the vessel was built and apply that research to determine how the parts were fashioned to build it.  The Admiralty had detailed rules for construction, sometimes called "scantlings," which you can look up in resource materials.  These scantling rules dictate, based on the overall size of a vessel, the size of framing timbers and frame spacing, the thickness of planking, and on and on.
 
The task of translating "lines," as above, to patterns for the actual parts of a vessel is called "lofting," because it was usually done on a wooden floor in a loft at the shipyards. Using the scale lines drawings and the scantling rules, the loftsman draws all the parts of the vessel full-scale and "takes up" (transfers) these "loftings" to create full-sized patterns which are then used to define the shape of all the parts that go into the vessel. If one wishes to build a model of the vessel with the lines above, they will have to "loft" the construction drawings at the desired scale and work from those in constructing the model "Admiralty style" in the same way the full-sized vessel was built. (Which, without the actual prototype available, will always be an educated approximation, since the form of the parts was often dictated by the size and shape of the raw wood available to the builders at the time.) 
 
A command of lofting is essential to using lines drawings to create scale models.  With it, one has a huge selection of vessels from which they might select a subject to model. Without it, they are left to those relatively few subjects for which plans for modelers have been drawn up and offered for sale. (This is one reason why so many models of the same few ships keep getting built from commercially produced kits. Therein lies the distinction between "kit building" and "model making.") A good basic explanation of lofting is contained in Howard I. Chapelle's book, Boatbuilding. A far more comprehensive treatment of all aspects of lofting, including, for example, the methods for determining the degree of bevel on each frame of a hull, are contained in Alan Vaites' book, Lofting. (Both are readily available.)
 
The common use of lines drawings is relatively recent, coming into use sometime in the Seventeenth Century, IIRC. Like all drafting, naval architectural drafting is a "language" which must be learned. The Lords of the Admiralty and the other bureaucrats who decided which vessel would be built were often, like most laymen, completely incapable of "reading" a set of lines on a sheet of paper. This why the Admiralty models came into being... to provide a readily understandable three-dimensional representation of the vessel proposed to be built to people who were unable to translate a two-dimensional set of lines to three-dimensions in their heads.

Indeed it is! I should have looked more closely at the photos. They appear quite a bit alike. The 6" is a sweet small modeling lathe, but they don't seem as available on the used market as the 12"-ers.  

And still are available on eBay or from after-market manufacturers... for a price.  
 
Check out "Mr Pete 222" or "Tubal Cain" (same guy) on YouTube. He's a retired shop teacher with great instructional videos on the Atlas/Craftsman 12' lathes. Everything you even wanted to know. 
 
I believe you can look up the age of yours with the serial number on lathes.co.uk under the Craftsman entries. There were a number of refinements over the several decades that this lathe was manufactured. There are many of them floating around and so parts are readily available. They are somewhat of a cult thing now. They aren't state of the art anymore with CNC and DRO features, but they'll do anything you could possibly need to do (including milling with the milling attachment) on a medium to light duty 12" manual lathe. If you have one that hasn't been "destroyed" along the way by misuse, they are certainly worth restoring. They're worth money even if they are trashed because of the continuing market demand for parts. (Threading gear sets are still available if you are missing any. Be careful not to "crash" the gears and damage the gear teeth. The gears are made of Zamac, a relatively weak alloy and it's not difficult to break teeth if you don't know what you are doing operating the lathe. Not to scare you off, but lathes are not a machine you ever want to learn how to use by just "fiddling" with them and they can be very dangerous in the hands of an untrained operator. All the operating manuals for these lathes are available for free online. Google them up.
 
I love mine. I picked it up along with just about every possible attachment (except a taper jig, darn it... but those are still made by an aftermarket manufacturer) from a retired old school machinist's widow for a very reasonable price. 

This may be a little bit on the edge of the rope coiling topic which has been very informative.    Now I know where the beer logo came from or more likely the other way around and the rope coils are named for the beer logo.  If there is indeed really some connection with the Ballantine name for what looks similar to Borromean rings the connection with the rope coiling name may be related.   Ballantine opened their brewery in 1840 but the logo came about nearly 40 years later.  Legend has it that Peter Ballantine saw three wet rings from bottles on a table that overlapped and came up with the logo from that.
 
Allan

This is an Atlas 6" lathe. You can get "Lathe Operations" by the Atlas Lathe Company, from various places, do a goggle search. There is also a book by Southben, "How to Run a Lathe". Both are excellent books on teaching how to run a lathe. They are both for the larger 10 or 12" Atlas and 9" Southbend, but the same principles apply. The Mr. Pete videos recommended above are also great.
 
Atlas is still in business, sort of. They bought Clausing Machine tools, and use the Clausing name. They don't make the Atlas lathes, or parts for them any more, the Atlas line was dropped in the 70s, or early 80s.

And still are available on eBay or from after-market manufacturers... for a price.  
 
Check out "Mr Pete 222" or "Tubal Cain" (same guy) on YouTube. He's a retired shop teacher with great instructional videos on the Atlas/Craftsman 12' lathes. Everything you even wanted to know. 
 
I believe you can look up the age of yours with the serial number on lathes.co.uk under the Craftsman entries. There were a number of refinements over the several decades that this lathe was manufactured. There are many of them floating around and so parts are readily available. They are somewhat of a cult thing now. They aren't state of the art anymore with CNC and DRO features, but they'll do anything you could possibly need to do (including milling with the milling attachment) on a medium to light duty 12" manual lathe. If you have one that hasn't been "destroyed" along the way by misuse, they are certainly worth restoring. They're worth money even if they are trashed because of the continuing market demand for parts. (Threading gear sets are still available if you are missing any. Be careful not to "crash" the gears and damage the gear teeth. The gears are made of Zamac, a relatively weak alloy and it's not difficult to break teeth if you don't know what you are doing operating the lathe. Not to scare you off, but lathes are not a machine you ever want to learn how to use by just "fiddling" with them and they can be very dangerous in the hands of an untrained operator. All the operating manuals for these lathes are available for free online. Google them up.
 
I love mine. I picked it up along with just about every possible attachment (except a taper jig, darn it... but those are still made by an aftermarket manufacturer) from a retired old school machinist's widow for a very reasonable price. 

And still are available on eBay or from after-market manufacturers... for a price.  
 
Check out "Mr Pete 222" or "Tubal Cain" (same guy) on YouTube. He's a retired shop teacher with great instructional videos on the Atlas/Craftsman 12' lathes. Everything you even wanted to know. 
 
I believe you can look up the age of yours with the serial number on lathes.co.uk under the Craftsman entries. There were a number of refinements over the several decades that this lathe was manufactured. There are many of them floating around and so parts are readily available. They are somewhat of a cult thing now. They aren't state of the art anymore with CNC and DRO features, but they'll do anything you could possibly need to do (including milling with the milling attachment) on a medium to light duty 12" manual lathe. If you have one that hasn't been "destroyed" along the way by misuse, they are certainly worth restoring. They're worth money even if they are trashed because of the continuing market demand for parts. (Threading gear sets are still available if you are missing any. Be careful not to "crash" the gears and damage the gear teeth. The gears are made of Zamac, a relatively weak alloy and it's not difficult to break teeth if you don't know what you are doing operating the lathe. Not to scare you off, but lathes are not a machine you ever want to learn how to use by just "fiddling" with them and they can be very dangerous in the hands of an untrained operator. All the operating manuals for these lathes are available for free online. Google them up.
 
I love mine. I picked it up along with just about every possible attachment (except a taper jig, darn it... but those are still made by an aftermarket manufacturer) from a retired old school machinist's widow for a very reasonable price. 

Or a lot of razor blades, as the saying goes!  

I'm sure I'd have driven Stirling and Sons batty if they were building her for me. I'd make sure they provided for ventilation in the locker doors as well, whether that were a decorative cut-out scroll sawed into the face of the door, a row of holes along the top edge, or a panel of bronze wire or woven cane mesh to make sure things in the locker didn't get all musty and moldy, too. 
 
True, a disguised swinging latch handle could be done, but from a stress distribution standpoint, that would probably be considered some pretty poor engineering. If one was thrown off balance by a wave while holding on to such a moveable handle, I'd expect it would be pretty easy to bend the shaft of the handle. I'd file that idea under "If it's such a good idea, how come nobody else thought of it before?"  The options pictured in the Toplicht and Davey and Co. catalogs have been "state of the art" since at least the late 1800's. I've probably been aboard hundreds of fine (and not so fine) yachts over the years. I've never seen a disguised "grab and twist" locker handle. They do make one like this, though:
 
 

 

 
https://www.toplicht.de/en/shop/innenbeschlaege/vorreiber-und-riegel/vorreiber/vorreiber-1
 
These are the sorts of details that the great designers like Nathaniel and L. Francis Herreshoff, Fife, Camper and Nicholson's, and J. Laurent Giles so enjoyed inventing, many of which became trademarks of the yachts they designed.
 
There's a lot of room for artistic license in modeling, so go for it! It's such an amazingly beautiful build. Wouldn't it be wonderful when it's done to be able to walk into one of the premier yards with it in hand and tell them, "Build me one just like it full size!" 

Parenthetically, my own "dream yacht," which will forever remain just that, in this life, at least, is Giles' Dyarchy, a cutter quite similar to your model. I have copies of all Giles' original drawings and a license to build one model of her. One of these years, I hope to do so. Your build log is plowing the hard soil ahead of me!
 

 

 
Your model's saloon reminds me of a very similar old British cutter I crewed on close to fifty years ago in a classic yacht race. As is often the case, the owners had no racing experience, and so recruited a bunch of us "young bucks" thinking we'd bring home the silver for them. As it wasn't our boat, we weren't particularly concerned about "babying" her. The owners lived aboard and, unbeknownst to us, the wife had a big bowl of soured milk covered with a dish towel out of which she was trying to make her own cheese. (I kid you not!) She'd stowed it chocked in with towels and whatever else on the pilot berth above and behind the saloon settee. As we were plowing along, we had to cross the wake of a large ship and, when we did, that bowl of curds and whey became airborne with quite a bit of velocity, flying across the saloon and coming to rest on the sole after bouncing off the base of the settee on the opposite side. It wasn't pretty, but the worst thing about for the crew was trying to keep a straight face while we continued to race along despite the cries of dismay from below!  
 

That's an excellent explanation of how to make a Ballentine coil. There are a number of ways to coil falls for the same purpose as a Ballentine coil. Other's make use of "figure-eight" faking, and so on. The original question, if I understand it correctly, addressed a "Flemished" line coil where the line lays in a tight flat coil on the deck without any overlapping turns. 

That's an excellent explanation of how to make a Ballentine coil. There are a number of ways to coil falls for the same purpose as a Ballentine coil. Other's make use of "figure-eight" faking, and so on. The original question, if I understand it correctly, addressed a "Flemished" line coil where the line lays in a tight flat coil on the deck without any overlapping turns. 

Or a lot of razor blades, as the saying goes!  

And still are available on eBay or from after-market manufacturers... for a price.  
 
Check out "Mr Pete 222" or "Tubal Cain" (same guy) on YouTube. He's a retired shop teacher with great instructional videos on the Atlas/Craftsman 12' lathes. Everything you even wanted to know. 
 
I believe you can look up the age of yours with the serial number on lathes.co.uk under the Craftsman entries. There were a number of refinements over the several decades that this lathe was manufactured. There are many of them floating around and so parts are readily available. They are somewhat of a cult thing now. They aren't state of the art anymore with CNC and DRO features, but they'll do anything you could possibly need to do (including milling with the milling attachment) on a medium to light duty 12" manual lathe. If you have one that hasn't been "destroyed" along the way by misuse, they are certainly worth restoring. They're worth money even if they are trashed because of the continuing market demand for parts. (Threading gear sets are still available if you are missing any. Be careful not to "crash" the gears and damage the gear teeth. The gears are made of Zamac, a relatively weak alloy and it's not difficult to break teeth if you don't know what you are doing operating the lathe. Not to scare you off, but lathes are not a machine you ever want to learn how to use by just "fiddling" with them and they can be very dangerous in the hands of an untrained operator. All the operating manuals for these lathes are available for free online. Google them up.
 
I love mine. I picked it up along with just about every possible attachment (except a taper jig, darn it... but those are still made by an aftermarket manufacturer) from a retired old school machinist's widow for a very reasonable price.