overdale

Great work Vivian, you are a 'natural' to model building.. I am enjoying watching your confidence and skills grow. I thought you might like this image. I too am very attracted to medieval ships, but as you know, there is little information out there. The only good thing about that is a lot of the time, no one can prove you are wrong so you can be as creative as you like.! I am building this in a waterline setting complete with a hold full of armored soldiers. (I'll post more when I make any progress.) Dan.

Excellent work Vivian, I wasn't even half as skilled as you when I started out many years ago.. You have a promising future..!

It appears to be quite expensive for such a relatively small model.

Hi Mike, I usually use a spirit based stain as it evaporates much more quickly and doesn't 'bead' on varnish like a water based one. All the best, Dan.

Mike, I generally like to 'tone down' some of my models with an overspray of a very dilute oak wood stain. It takes the edge off white very well, blends all the other colors together and ages the model slightly. Then I overspray with a matt varnish to seal it in.

Lovely work Dan.

Lovely work BE. Especially the sails. Dan.

Lovely work Michael. Always a pleasure to drop by and see your progress. Dan.

Cherry takes a nice dark stain and is far easier to work than Walnut.

I plan to use heat treated plates on my next coppered hull. I am still researching the idea, but it seems to be a simple heat and quench technique. The result is a lovely patchwork of colors that give the hull a beautiful 'glow' I found some pictures of a finished hull here http://modelshipbuilder.com/page.php?39 and the results are (I think) extremely attractive. Has anyone tried it, or heard of it..? Dan.

Thanks Michael, it's a glass case. The second that had to be built as the first wasn't tall enough.! The first in a series of setbacks which included, the decal on the stern was misspelled twice, the nameplate was misspelled once and the whole thing had to be resprayed several times..! I think this project was my 'Jonah'

Finally finished. I'm delivering this to it's new home in PA next week and won't be sorry to see it go. I have had more delays and distractions with this model than anything I've built that's twice as complicated.! On to the next one..

Kimberly, If you aren't having much luck with the knots, Here is an alternative for ratlines. On a smaller scale model like yours, real knots can look a little over scale so I run a line of super glue across the shrouds and hold the ratlines against them for a few seconds until the super glue takes hold. then I touch each point where the lines cross with a blob of superglue which makes the 'knot' look bigger then move up to the next row. Use a nail clippers to trim the overhanging lines at the sides and then paint the whole thing with flat black paint. I know some will regard not tying knots as heresy, and it does't work for larger scale models but it is very effective (and quick) on smaller models. Welcome aboard, Dan.

Use progressively smaller brushes to remove the loose dust cobwebs etc. then vacuum with an empty biro tube pushed through a piece of card and placed over the vacuum hose. The narrow suction can be more focused into crevices without tearing off fixtures and fittings. Finally, I spray the rigging with matt varnish which turns the remaining dust particles on the rigging transparent and completely transforms the whole thing.

Hi Erik, were the frames in the Kingfisher kit all laser cut from one piece or were there several parts to each frame?. I just wondered from a strength point of view.

I was looking at a book of navy board models last night and a terribly heretical thought occurred to me. So much of modern kit production is laser cut, I wondered what the pitfalls in making a set of laser cut frames for an admiralty style model might be? The obvious thing that springs to mind is the edges of the wood are burnt and would have to be cleaned up. They would also probably have to be slightly oversize to allow for fairing etc. I suspect the variation in timber expansion rates etc would make it difficult to make them reliably for mass produced kits that might sit on a shelf for months, but the cost of laser cutting is reasonably cheap these days for a 'one off'. So, as a purely technical exercise, is it possible or has it ever been done? *Pulls on steel helmet and ducks into trench* Dan.

I am very fortunate to own two original ship paintings by Geoff Hunt, the artist that painted the book covers of the original series.

I saw this headline and thought it referred to the old practice of placing an actual message inside a ship model by the builder. Quite a few messages have been discovered in 17th and 18th century ship models since the advent of fibre optic cameras allowed conservators to probe the depths of models without disturbing anything. I've seen them myself several times over the years in my work with museums. The messages are mostly greetings from the builder describing the date, the weather, his family, all sorts of things, and is a charming link across the centuries. In fact I've done it myself on most of my ship models in the last 20 years since I first found out about the practice. It's a great way of injecting just a tiny part of your personality into your work. It may never be seen by anyone, but then again.... it might!

Chris, my ten pence worth, how about HMS Sussex 1693. for an Amati subject.? Not a period that's well covered, and it's a beautiful ship. Dan.

I'm glad you enjoyed the excerpt. I'll see what I can do about posting some more. It's fascinating stuff. I think the officer was quite young as I detect a little homesickness here and there in the letter. A model of HMS Lively would be a nice companion for the letter but I have so much work lined up that I don't know when could fit it in.

I read the O'Brian series over a period of 5 years. Dragged out to last as long as possible. I gave them to my wife and she read them all finishing the last one a year ago with much regret that there were no more. We decided to put them all in a box and hide them away for five years and then start again..Only four more years to go..! I am particularly impressed with O'Brian's grasp of the period. I'm a bit of a collector and I have a letter written in 1808 by a Royal Navy officer on the 38 gun 5th rate HMS Lively (which was briefly one of Aubrey's ships in the series.) The letter was written to the man's father in Scotland while the ship was docked in Lisbon. It's a long handwritten letter and amongst many other things, mentions politics, prize money, pirates and even a fire in the coal hold. I understand O'Brian used a lot of contemporary ship's logs and letters to frame his stories, reading this letter one could certainly see why. Here's exactly what's written about the fire. "On Friday last, a dinner and ball were given on board, a day a little remarkable also on account of the risk we ran of being blown up: for as we were at breakfast the drum beat to quarters and we understood there was a fire forward. It was discovered by the smoke bursting from the coal hole and was immediately messaged to the 1st Lt. and was soon extinguished, having burned through the thickness of one stanchion. The coal hole is divided from the fore magazine only by a thin partition. After flogging the man who had been down there last and thro whose carelessness the accident had happened, the captain expressed his satisfaction at the general reliance and alertship with which every man attended to his duty and provided against accidents of the sort happening again by forbidding any man going down without a midshipman present." It's a fascinating read and sometime when I'm not so busy I'll do some research into the writer. Dan.

Thanks Brian, I had to go by contemporary accounts for the ship. It had spent six weeks at sea crossing the Atlantic and just come through a pretty bad storm where it lost a lot of rigging before it sank. The witnesses described it as 'filthy' (as most slave ships were) but it's very easy to overdo it so I had to be careful. The boat will be covered in escaping slaves climbing out of the hatches and scrambling ashore so a general sense of disarray and panic is what I was aiming for. I agree with you about copper plates the shinier they are the worse they look (to me) Weathered copper looks more interesting too. Dan.

I use a combination of oil based washes (thinned wood stains) and pastels. A great many things on a ship are subject to the same kind of wear and tear as a locomotive so I find the railway weathering kits ideal.Steel chains rust, wood gets grimy from smoke, grease and soot, and parts get crusty and white from sea salt so if you want to weather a ship a set of railway pastel powders will be very useful. Wash the decks and other wooden parts you want to age with thinned wood stain and allow to dry. Seal everything with a matt spray varnish and then apply the pastels. You can't seal them as the varnish darkens them too much and the effect is lost. I have attached a couple of pictures of a small (1/80) slave schooner shipwreck model I'm building. This is to be set in a large seascape with a lot of figures so the amount of weathering and distress have to be quite high. Weathering is a very personal decision, there's no hard rule about it. I consider it a similar argument as to whether to show all the woodwork 'naturally' on a model, or paint the model as it would have looked in reality. It's up to you. The beauty of pastels is that if you put too much on, you can wash it off with a damp brush. Left alone and not handled excessively, they also stay put retain their color for many many years.

Very good point Jaxboat, if complex fittings are currently keeping manufacturers from providing modelers with the subjects they want due to cost, why not use the technology to broaden the subject matter and perhaps expand the number of people in the hobby? If a figurehead takes a week to carve, why not get it made by 3d printer and free up that week for other work? The choice is largely whether you want to spend your time on increasing your skill level or your output. Neither is a bad thing.