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rvchima

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  1. Now the Copper is Green! I experimented with high-test vinegar and ammonia, salt and Miracle grow, cleaning the foil with alcohol and, lacquer thinner. (I did not try peeing on my ship.) Nothing had much of an effect until I tried the Novacan black patina that I use for stained glass and to darken the photo etched parts. It made the foil look like a tarnished penny, dark brown, almost black. I wanted green so I took a chance on a large bottle of Jax Green patina from Amazon. It didn't do much by itself and it tended to rub off. But over top of the Novacan black - wow! The patina seemed durable but I air-brushed several coats of acrylic floor wax over it just in case. Here is a photo of all the samples I tried. No point in identifying the losers, but the Novacan + Jax + acrylic is at bottom right. Here's a shot of the chemicals. Novacan black starts to darken immediately and unevenly, but I brushed it continuously with a stiff 1" paint brush until it evened out (15-20 minutes per side.) I rinsed the hull with a sponge and water. Jax green patina paints on like water, one wet coat, and turns green as it dries. I let it dry overnight. Halloway Quick Shine is an acrylic floor wax that plastic modelers use for a clear coat. I masked above the water line and applied three light coats with an a air brush. I doubt if I used more than 1/2 ounce of anything. Before After There were gaps between the stamped plates on the copper tape that I neglected to remove towards the bottom of the hull. They are pretty well camouflaged now. The green patina is not at all what I was planning on - it's even better. I built the cabin walls while I was waiting for chemistry experiments to react. Now to attach the rudder.
  2. My Copper Won't Turn Green! I finished coppering the hull and rudder, and was ready to age it. In 2013 I used kitchen vinegar and salt on my Syren and it looks great. Today I made up some samples of my copper foil on wood to experiment with. I tried 6% acetic acid kitchen vinegar with salt 20% weed killer vinegar with salt 20% vinegar with Miracle Grow ammonia with salt ammonia with Miracle Grow lightly sanding or rubbing the foil with steel wool first Nothing had any effect at all on my samples. They are just as shiny as before, and I am stumped! Does anyone have other suggestions for ageing the copper foil? I just discovered that Novacan Black Patina for Solder blackens the foil almost immediately. That's not the aged green that I was looking for but it's a start.
  3. Chains are Done, on to the Interior - Temporarily One of the first tasks on the interior is to place 6 eye bolts around each gun port, 120 in all. As Walter says, My curved hemostat was perfect for inserting the tiny eye bolts. Four more bolts with tiny rings go in the floor, and a wooden ring surrounds the mizzen mast. I was getting excited about working on the cabins, but today my extra copper foil finally arrived from China. So back to the hull and rudder.
  4. Chain Gang The chains comprise a zillion PE parts that have to be darkened somehow. The manual suggests paint but I blackened the entire sheet using Novacan Black Patina for Solder. One of my other hobbies is stained glass and I use this product to darken the solder. I set the PE sheet in a plastic tray, brushed on a little patina liquid, rinsed, patted dry, and sprayed with Lemon Pledge. The blakening can rub off here and there, but not back to shiny brass so it leaves a rustic appearance. The bit where the parts attached to the sheet can be touched up with a black marker. The rings for the deadeyes must be expanded quite a bit for the deadeyes to fit. I butchered a few trying to open them with pliers, but found another way. I drilled holes in a scrap of wood slightly larger than the ID of the rings. 13/64" works well for the large deadeyes, 11/64" for the small. I placed the ring over the hole, and used a center punch to open the ring symmetrically. One tap with a small hammer and the deadeyes open right up. Drop the deadeye in, then use needle nosed pliers to tighten the rings back up. UPDATE - I've found that I don't need the drilled wood at all. I can push the rings over the center punch by hand easily. 10 chains done, 42 more or less to go.
  5. Walter, How did you spread the rings that go around the deadeyes? I am having trouble inserting the deadeyes without damaging the finish. Rod
  6. The gunport linings look great, and your use of clothes pins as wedges is brilliant!
  7. External Filigree Complete, 189 Hours, 87 days All the external photo-etched filigree took up most of a sheet of PE, so I masked off what wasn't supposed to be gold and painted the rest in place. That was the only way to keep track of everything. Sorry about the blurry image. The manual recommends attaching the parts with Pledge Future acrylic floor wax. Paint the area first, let it dry, put the filigree in place, then run more polish underneath to hold the part in place. Future is no longer available but the plastic modeling sites recommend Holloway Quick Shine. I got some and tried it on the first piece. It worked, but it was hard to hold the piece in place and the polish left shiny brush marks everywhere. So that didn't work well for me. Does anyone want a quart of floor polish? I ended up cutting the filigree into manageable sections, holding each piece with my double-sided tape sticks (see previous post,) and using a glue looper to wet the back with thin CA. Then I held the piece in place for a few seconds and it was done. In a few places on the starboard side my gun ports were too close to the upper rails and I had to omit some filigree. It took about 10 hours to do all the filigree.
  8. Stern Details One advantage to having a fixed base is that you can do this: All the details on the stern are pretty intimidating, but you just jump in and start attaching parts. Speaking of attaching parts, I have been using canopy glue to hold the PE parts in place. Canopy glue is what RC modelers use to attach their canopies. It looks like plain white glue but it has an aggressive tack, dries clear, and is strong enough to hold a canopy on a fast RC model. It's also what @ccoyle uses to built card models. I use 3M double-sided tape to hold parts to scrap sticks for painting, and also attached to a small stick to hold parts for placement on the model.
  9. Hey Mugje, I just ran into a problem where my rudder with the tiller arm wouldn't fit into the opening in the hull. I had to remove about 6mm of the rudder post to make it fit. I recommend removing the main rudder piece from the 3 mm sheet now to see if it fits. It will be easier to fix now than later.
  10. Channels, Knees, and Bow Trim The channels are all attached with multiple brass pins. The laser markings show exactly where to put those pins. There are 26 knees to cut, sand, and paint, so it all took awhile. Fore channels. The stove is temporary for now. Main channels Mizzen channels I put some blue on the bow and added the bow grating and some trim. I have a little more work to do up front, then on to the stern.
  11. Minor Problem with the Rudder After assembling the rudder I realized that the top with the tiller would not fit into the hole in the hull. The manual shows the top of the rudder post ending a bit lower, at the juncture between the planking and stern piece, so I cut about 1/4" off of the rudder post and everything fits now. I don't know why the rudder post was too high - everything else fit together perfectly. I ran out of copper foil and had to order more from China, so it will be 3 weeks before I can complete the rudder.
  12. Side Trim Completed The upper sides of the hull are mostly blue with splashes of red. The gun ports are red inside. This all required a lot of masking. I started to mask off each gun port with 4 strips of tape but realized that I could put a large piece over each port and cut out the centers. After painting, a number of extremely delicate trim strips were attached. I stained them all with Watco natural oil stain on the top only. The bow pieces were soaked in water and pre-bent. The manual says to glue them with PVA and lots of clamps. I did exactly that, but as soon as I removed the clamps half of the pieces fell right off. It's tempting to blame the oil stain, but I was very careful to leave the wood bare on both sides of the joint. Maybe the PVA is soaking in and drying too quickly? Anyway, I cleaned off the dried PVA and reglued everything with CA. It's not going anywhere now. Did I mention that I finished the quarter galleries a few days ago? There are a lot of pieces in there that required a lot of trial and error fitting. Just checking that everything fits.
  13. Yes, those are the gaps. Big mistake leaving them there. I cut them out further up the hull.
  14. Thank you for all the clarifications, and especially for the link to the RMG collections site. I have browsed RMG many times and never stumbled on the best part! And now I'll have to buy several of Brian Lavery's books, even if it's too late for the Sphinx.
  15. I will admit to complete ignorance on this. Who is Lavery? If I search for Sphinx on https://www.rmg.co.uk there are zero results. Is there a separate site for research?
  16. An Almost Brilliant Method for Coppering In the last few months since I ordered my model this product has popped up on eBay. It is standard copper foil for stained glass with plate patterns for model ships stamped on it. It is available in 1:48, 1:75, and 1:96 scale, 500 pieces to a roll. There are now over 30 vendors, all in China, selling what appears to be identical products. I ordered two rolls at 1:75 scale at the end of November. They were delivered about three weeks later. I just used them up on the Sphinx, ran a bit short, and just ordered another roll. I also ordered a second roll at 1:48 scale to cap the keel and rudder post. The plates were nicely spaced for the first few feet, and I thought I could cover entire rows without cutting the strips. Then the spacing became irregular, with small gaps between the plates. I decided that I could live with that. Then very long gaps started to appear in the roll, and I had to cut individual plates. It's easy to cut the foil with scissors but tedious to remove the plastic backing. A much easier technique is to cut a length of foil about 18" long, attach the end to the hull, and tear the foil against a razor blade held after the next plate. Then repeat. I coppered the rest of the hull in this manner, basically with individual plates. I wondered if I had been cheated of plates, so when I opened the second roll I measured the length and counted the plates - 32 feet, 509 plates as advertised. The 1:75 plates are 18 mm x 6 mm, almost exactly 1 cm^2. They stick very well and look good. I do regret leaving the blank gaps near the keel. Live and learn. The product would be perfect if the plates were spaced without gaps so that you could lay down entire rows without cutting (at least until the curvature got too great.) It would be nice if some US vendors carried it. I have about an inch left to cover on each side, plus the keel, the rudder, and a band around the water line. I will weather the copper with vinegar and salt when it is all applied.
  17. Just to make sure that I understand, around 1782 Sphinx had 6 12-pounder carronades added to her quarterdeck, and possibly 2 more to the forecastle, in addition to the 20 9-pounder carriage guns on the gun deck. Is that correct?
  18. That's what I will do. I wondered about having iron and copper in contact, but ship builders didn't understand Galvanic corrosion at the time. 😬 Yikes! I was afraid that other changes would show up in six years. Since the coppered hull is much more obvious than gun barrels to the casual observer (like me), I think I will copper the hull and ignore a few years of historical inaccuracy. But thank you kindly for the information.
  19. Spoiler Alert - I am about to copper the hull. The Sphinx was coppered in 1781. Would the copper go under, over, or around the iron reinforcement plates? Same question for the rudder hinges.
  20. Filler 2 hours with Timbermate wood filler. It looks like my hull is made out of clay. 5 minutes with a random orbit sander - nearly smooth. 20 minutes with a sanding pad and Proxxon sander - ready to paint.
  21. Sanding Done, Filler Needed I did maybe 80% of my sanding with a random orbit sander, and much of the rest with a Proxxon pencil sander. It's mostly done but I had to order some new wood filler to match the color of the pear. It should come tomorrow. In the meantime I marked the waterline with a high-tech marking tool, and wet-bent the main wales to shape.
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