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mar3kl

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  1. Greetings all - it's been a while, and I realized I forgot to post pictures of the finished model with all flags flying, so here are some photos. With that I'll sign off. It's been a great project, many thanks for all the encouragement and assistance!
  2. Question for the group: any recommendations for people who make display cases? The company that was making mine is proving flakey...
  3. Jan - I used the image as posted. It's a JPG as converted from a vectorized (SVG) file. Vector graphics are easier to manipulate than raster graphics, but once you're done, you can just export to a JPG as I did for the above post.
  4. Oh, and in response to your question about the lantern - If I recall correctly, it's from Amati, 23mm size.
  5. Yes: http://www.amazon.com/Jacquard-Fabric-Silk-Sheets-pack/dp/B000BGSZ1E. Any ink jet printer will work. I waited 24 hours to make sure it was completely dry, then just make sure you keep it away from solvents.
  6. Well, I've finished the flags and alas before looking at the post above. They turned out pretty well though, and since I have the artwork in digital form, I can always go back and look at the build log above and see if I can improve things. So first I scanned the Corel artwork. Then I noticed the large flag is basically the Vasa royal arms, and I found a vectorized public domain image of the arms that was much nicer looking than the Corel version. My sister's a graphic artist, and she vectorized the remaining artwork, and mirrored it so I could fold each flag back on itself and have nice bright colors on both sides. Here's the artwork layout: Next, I printed the flags onto silk, using an ink jet printer. The silk is backed by paper so it feeds through the printer nicely. Then you peel off the paper and you're ready to go. The silk was fine enough that it printed through to both sides, but was much brighter on the outward face. Then it was time to experiment. First I had to deal with fraying on the edges. Fabric seam sealer dissolved the ink, so that didn't go well. Fortunately I had a pack of ten sheets of silk, and two copies of all but the largest flag per sheet, so the failures weren't a problem. Next, I tried diluted white glue, which ended up working quite well as long as I applied it before I peeled off the paper backing on the silk sheets. I then cut out a flag, peeled off the paper, folded it back on itself, and glued using more diluted white glue. So far, so good. Then once that was dry, I soaked the flag in water, applied more diluted white glue, and bent it to shape. The result was OK, but messy to do, and it was hard getting the flag to hold its drape while the glue was drying. So I decided to try another approach and see if it worked better. I took a sheet of aluminum foil and sprayed both sides with flat white paint suitable for metal: Then I cut a piece to match the flag. I didn't cut the swallow tails - I wanted to do that once everything was together. Then I folded the flag over the foil and glued it with slightly diluted water-based craft glue. Once it was dry, I trimmed the flag to size and ended up with something slightly heavier than plain silk, but not by much. And importantly it would hold bends without starch or glue! Then it was just a matter of creating furls that I was happy with and mounting the flags to the flag staffs. I used the same thread that I used for seizing rigging, glueing it to the inside of the fold at the leech of the flag. I'm pleased with the result. The silk has a nice texture and a very slight sheen. At any rate, the result is much better than I'd get using the kit flags. Here are two of the flags mounted: And with that, the ship is finished! I'll post a few more photos of the completed ship shortly. I'm still waiting for the display case to be finished - should be done in a few weeks.
  7. I'm still in flag limbo. I did find a nice stern lantern which I mounted to the transom: The Corel Vasa flags showed up a few days ago. They are better quality than the Billings ones, and more interesting looking. Printed on both sides, and on lighter weight fabric that isn't so water-repellent. But I'm still having problems getting them to furl, and the artwork has black outlines around the design elements on two of the flags, giving them a cartoon-like quality. So I scanned the flags onto my computer, and I'm getting the images vectorized so it's easy to clean them up. Then I'm going to try three approaches. First, I bought some sheets of ink-jet-printable silk, attached to paper with an adhesive backing. The silk is much lighter weight than the Corel flags. I'm going to print a double image of each flag onto the silk, fold it onto itself, then see if I can get the result to hang naturally. If that doesn't work, I'm going to fold the silk around some aluminum foil primed white. That'll make the result thicker and heavier, but it should be bendable. If that doesn't work, I'm going to try the same white-primed aluminum foil trick, but print onto decal film and attach the decals to each side of the foil. If that doesn't work, the Vasa enters its display case sans flags. A man's gotta know his limitations. The base for the display case is being built, but likely to take a while.
  8. Installation of the flags is not going well. First, they are only printed on one side so the other side doesn't look good. Second, it looks like they are made of some sort of synthetic material that is resistant to water. Finally, the material is somewhat stiff. The combination makes it very difficult to get them to hang in a natural furled manner. I've tried simply dampening them with dilute white glue, but the mixture just beads up. I also tried taking some thin aluminum from a soda can, bending it, and gluing the flags to it. The material adhered to the aluminum, but as soon as it was dry and I lifted it off, it promptly lost its bends. All in all very frustrating. I've ordered a flag set for the Corel Vasa, since it's the same scale and my first model was a Corel and had nice flag material. The Corel flags are also more interesting looking than the Billings ones. So when that shows up I'll try again. Otherwise, no flags for the model.
  9. The anchors, like so many aspects of this model, were more difficult than I thought they would be. The original ship appears to have had several anchors, all of different sizes, and it's not clear which were deployed when the ship sank. The kit provides two identical anchors, so that's what I used. The anchors and stocks are both made of black plastic. Cleaning up the flashing and painting the anchors flat black makes them look fine, but simulating wood using paint doesn't turn out well, so that meant scratching a pair of stocks. None of the pictures I could find showed iron bands around the stocks, so I left them off. The anchors were pretty generic and didn't look like the originals, so I reshaped them, particularly the flukes, so they looked a little closer to the real thing. The kit plans don't say anything about anchor rings either, so I scratched them from wire and puddened them with rigging line. Then I seized a cable to the ring with an anchor bend, using the heaviest rigging line I had, which was about 1.5mm diameter. The result was pretty good, certainly much better than if I'd used the plastic anchor stocks: Then I needed to make a pair of cathead blocks. The 1:10 model has some decent photos, and they show an iron strop around a double block, with a hook on one end. I couldn't make the iron strop look good, so I went with rigging line. The hook was just wire, bent into shape and painted black: Here are a couple of pictures of the port anchor installed. I ended up glueing it to the hull at one fluke edge and one end of the stock, otherwise it flopped around annoyingly. The bottom of the anchor is seized to a frame; the top is rigged to the cathead with the cathead block, the hook going around the anchor ring. I couldn't find good detailed photos of the 1:10 cathead rigging, so I took my best guess. The free end of the line winds around the front railing a few times and then is left in a coil. The starboard anchor was more complicated because of the anchor davit on that side. I rigged the top of the anchor just like on the port side, but the bottom is attached to the bottom of a pair of blocks, the top block in turn being attached to the davit. The free end of the rigging is looped around a belaying pin: And finally, a picture of the anchor cable. It's pretty thick, so I needed to soak it in water for a bit to get it pliable enough to hang properly. After brushing it with diluted white glue and letting it dry, it hung down nicely. Wow, getting very near the end now. The display case is ready for pickup, and I need to install the flags, clean up any final bits and pieces, and I'm done! The flags look to be tricky - the material is somewhat water-repellent, which will make wetting and glueing difficult.
  10. So on to making rope coils. I made more or less three different kinds. One was just a basic coil on the deck, which I made by winding rigging line around a plastic cylinder of the right diameter, brushing the result with diluted white glue, and letting it dry. Then slip it off the cylinder, trim the line and you're ready to install. Installation was mostly putting a few tiny drops of CA glue on the coil and gently pressing the coil onto the deck. I did this for lines belayed to deadeyes in the tops, plus some of the lines belayed to the bitts behind the fore and mainmasts, and the braces belayed to frames on the poopdeck. Here are some examples: The second kind was more difficult because it had to be done in place. This was for coils around the kevel bitts. I did two kinds, one just wrapped in a series of loops around the bitt, then down to a coil on the deck. The second was a series of figure eights around the bitt, then down to a coil on the deck. This involved brushing the line with water to get it nice and supple, then winding it around the bitt, then brushing with diluted white glue, then coiling, and brushing the coil with glue. Doing this in place was very fiddly, but I couldn't think of a better alternative. Here's a photo of the kevel bitts with their coils: And finally, coils for belaying pins. This was straightforward but tedious since there are so many - I lost count at 40 or so. I made a simple jig on a piece of scrap balsa, consisting of dowels below, and removable toothpicks above. The height between the dowels and the base of the toothpicks was 10mm, which was a good universal height for the coils. I wound figure eights, then looped the end of the line around the middle of the figure eight, brushed everything with glue, and let dry. I did six at a time, then carefully dislodged them from the jig and dropped them over the belaying pins with a little CA glue on the base to hold in place. Most were pretty easy to get into place, but some were located in hard to reach spots. I didn't use the kit's belaying pins because they were too large for my liking. Instead I bought some thinner Amati ones in bronzed metal. I painted them with a brown wash to tone down the metallic sheen and the result looked pretty good. Here's the jig: And the coils: With, it's on to the anchors.
  11. I do feel pretty good! When I started the project 2+ years ago I wasn't sure if I had the skills to do it justice. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out - I feel like I improved my skills and enjoyed myself, and you can't beat that. Some more small tweaks to the rigging. The kit plans call for three cleats on the bowsprit, to which the sprit halliard, sprit top halliard, and fore topgallant stay attach. Looking at the museum plans, as well as the 1:10 model, there are only two cleats, and the stay looks like it loops around the bowsprit. That also tallies with one of my books, so I decided to remove the cleat and re-rig the stay. Then I went back and looked at way the museum plans and the 1:10 model route the sprit sheet. It was slightly different from the way I did it, which if I remember right was based on the kit plans. The kit plans routed the sheet to a sheave in the bulwarks a bit aft of the large sculpture through which the main tack is routed. The museum plans and the 1:10 model route the sprit sheet to one of a pair of sheaves farther aft. They carry the sheet forward to the same kevel bitt, it's just that the sheet's somewhat longer. I liked that look better, so I redid it. You can see the profusion of sheets and tacks in this picture - I still need to gently tweak the lines so they hang properly, but they look pretty good. Then there was more messing with the main sheet. The kit has a bunch of pinrails that are mounted to the bulwarks in various places, including just forward of the doors to the helmsman's cabin. Apparently none of these pinrails are supposed to be there, so I removed them all. In particular, the ones by the helmsman's cabin doors were more likely a kevel bitt around which the main sheet was belayed. I'd run the sheet behind the main channels, to a kevel bitt farther forward. So I fabricated a new pair of kevel bitts, installed them where the pinrail was, and moved the sheet back a bit, as you can see in the following photo. I found I had a number of parrel beads left over after rigging all the yards, so I made up a parrel for the sprit topmast. The kit just specifies a sling, but all the other sources agree there's a parrel there. It looks like it should have ribs and two rows of trucks, but I couldn't see how to make that look good at scale, so I went with the same single row that the topgallants and mizzen topsail yard have. And the finished rigging! It's much easier to see all the complexity without the sails, although the model looks less realistic. I don't think I could have done a good job with the sails anyway. I'm going to spend a tedious chunk of time making rope coils now, so no postings for a bit.
  12. Thank you all for the positive feedback. This build has been a great experience - lots of new stuff to learn. Here are the lifts for the mizzen topsail. The kit plans are odd here - the lines seem to start at the end of the yard, then travel inward to pendant blocks and down to the deck. All the other sources route the lifts like the other yard lifts - from a ring bolt at the mast cap, then out to a block on the end of the yard, back in to the pendant, and down. So I ignored the kit plans. The clewlines are run exactly like the other topsail clewlines - from the yard, down to a clew block at the end of the crossjack yard, back up to another block and is then belayed at the caprail. The sheet has a stop knot in one end, and runs through the clew block, inward to a pendant block at the mizzen top trestles, and is then also belayed at the caprail. The museum plans show the lifts belayed at the mizzen top, but the 1:10 model and Clayton's model show the lifts belayed at the caprails. I took the lines down to the caprail, mostly for some consistency with the other topsail yards. The only difference is that the fore and main mast have bitt rails where you can belay the lines, and there isn't one for the mizzen. Here's a photo of the clewline, lift, and sheet lines and where they are belayed. Depending on how you locate the lift pendants under the mast cap, you might have to run the line in front of the crossjack yard; if you install sails, that may cause you some problems. Here's an interesting overhead view of the mizzen topmast cap and the profusion of pendants sprouting from it. One for the mizzen yard lift, two for the topsail lifts, and two leader blocks for the main topgallant braces. And an overhead view of the mizzen topsail rigging. And finally the mizzen running rigging all in place. Now I have to go back and make some minor changes to various parts of the running rigging that I don't like. Then it looks like the only remaining tasks are rope coils and belaying pins, anchors, and flags. I've already ordered a plexiglass box for the model, but I need to find a nice wood base for it. The case is huge - almost four feet long, 1 1/2 feet wide, and almost 3 feet high, so finding a place to display it is going to be challenging.
  13. More beautiful detail. The tackle pendants were the first rigging elements I installed on my model, and I relied on the (incorrect) kit plans; once I figured out they were wrong it was too late to add the hooks and extra blocks.
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