Beef Wellington

Just amazing - I think it would have been amusing to not reveal that this was actually a CGI build and see the comments of incredulity on the 'build'.  

Looking great Hennie, still can't believe you did all this work without damaging the upper works, well done indeed, you must have a very delicate touch :-)

Looking great Hennie, still can't believe you did all this work without damaging the upper works, well done indeed, you must have a very delicate touch :-)

After spending a few days up north with family for the Thanksgiving holiday, I'm back and have finished work on the hull and deck. The final work involved making and mounting the windlass, running the anchor cables around the windlass and down into the hold, and adding some cleats. I also remounted the galley stack.
 
The windlass was made up from boxwood strip, which was drilled and filed for the bars, beveled on the edges and then assembled around end pieces cut and filed to fit the octagonal shape of the windlass barrel. I had to make some small adjustments to the uprights to fit the barrel as made. After mounting the windlass, I wound the anchor cables around it and then ran them down into the hold, where they were glued to rope coils that had been placed down there long ago.
 
The cleats are 7mm laser cut pieces from Syren, shaped with files and mounted with pins.
 
This completes work on the hull and deck, except for the swivel guns and anchors, which will be done after the rigging. I will now be moving on to the masting and rigging.
 
Bob

Looking really good Rob, you'll be overtaking me soon.  Ah the coppering, best of luck and patience!  I had always thought for some reason that the lower counter ports would have been used as an access point for hawsers if there was a need to run an anchor astern or access to rudder head- these would have opened up into the gunroom (wardroom on a frigate) and the shape of the hull would make mounting a cannon impractical.  I'm not sure how these hawsers would have been secured though.  There are also concealed gun ports in the stern fascia of the great cabin if you look closely which could have been used when cleared for action and the lights removed.

Time for an update.......
I just finished painting the hull. I did the white paint 4x and now I am satisfied how it looks.
 
 

More weathering. Do the life rafts look ok to anyone? I'm thinking about repainting them. 
 
 

Time for a long overdue update.
 
I didn't get a lot done on the model over the summer, but have been busy of late. All of the aftermarket Caldercraft carronades have been assembled painted and installed on their sleds. I substituted small pieces of round styrene rod for the rollers, rather than a simple square of walnut as Caldercraft suggests. I also added breech rings from brass wire. Rather than blacken they were airbrushed with an off-black color, and then brushed with powdered pencil lead to give it a subtle metal look that I think came out rather nice. Breech ropes were then rigged and carronades installed.
 
The two six-pounder chase guns (not sure of the source, they were in my  spares collection) were installed on Syren carriages  and rigged with 2mm Syren blocks. 
 
I've also completed the chainplates, which took a little effort. Caldercraft supplies the lower link and toe link as a photo-etch pieces but the middle link is open and just slips on. I had an issue with that not looking realistic, and with the angle of the chainplates they really needed to be of varying lengths, which they were not. I therefore bent some brass wire around varying sized jigs as appropriate for the angle of the chains and soldered the middle link closed. This to me looks much better. 
 
I have a Syren order inbound with hooks, so I can complete rigging of the carronades. 





 

Hi, and tank you, Albert
Another pictures:
 

Scharnhorst 20

 
We stick yet another roof onto our layercake of roofs. We also build a couple of side roofs to stick into the recesses because there's an obvious lack of roofs there.
 
I realize this is incredibly boring being stuck at doing minute and invisible things to the forward deck structure week after week. Luckily next week is the last one to deal with this particular section for a while.

I'm looking at areas that i know I will have trouble reaching into later when masts, rigging, etc. are in place. Looking at Dirks build I went on and did the anchor ropes on deck now. I found this a little difficult to do.Making sure everything attached at just the right place wasn't that easy for me.
 
For ropes that need serving I'm using a homemade machine. I was talking to a friend of mine about wanting to get Chuck's. He wanted something to do so he went and made this. Not really what i wanted but it works. For someone who doesn't really understand serving or anything in miniature he actually did pretty good. It is a little rickety but it will do for now until I get a better one.
 
Jesse

Noticed that I hadn't done the rudder chains. Started to do it like the instructions say but after reading what Dubz says about this I did it the way he did. 
 
Jesse

Another  photographic test: Taking pictures with an Ikea $20 LED lamp.
 
On the second deck, there will be 10 windows aft. 6 windows are inside the limit of the frames and the other 4 will be added later. Looking at the plan it is difficult to set the width of the windows,  so I looked at it a different way to set the position of 8 vertical beams.
3 beams are installed : 1 on each wall and the middle one. Then, each half was divided in 3 spaces between beams.
In a global way, these are the only measures  needed to set the vertical beams.
The width for the gun opening is derived from the setting of 2 upper beams.
 

British Naval Aviation in WW1
Short 320 Seaplane takes off from the river Forth off Rosyth.SSZ 57 is a Costal airship stationed at Longside in Angus. HMS Pegasus at at anchor
jim

Another small conundrum to resolve before I finalise the rigmaiden lanyards (see last image - From The Mechanics Magazine - out of copyright).
 
Whereas in most earlier sailing ships using deadeyes and rope lanyards, the chainplates conform/align with the angle of the shroud the associated plate attaches to at the channel.  From what I can see in the following photo (one marked up, the other as is for verification of detail) and the two lithograph details (curtesy of the State Library of Victoria), it appears that the chainplates on Victoria were simply at right angles to the channel and hull when looking straight a them (still bent to get the right angles to approach the hull when looking fore-and-aft).
 
      

 
cheers
 
Pat

Hi folks,
Work to progress all the parts that need to prepositioned or prepared prior to painting continues.  I have been working on:
the common Service Lifebuoy for the stern, started on the rigmaiden lanyards (these are used in lieu of the rope lanyards and deadeyes), refined the anchor release mechanism parts, the stern bench, the cable stoppers are finished, and I have fitted the heads (lids still to be fitted) - these align with the discharge pipes in the earlier photo to which a canvas hose was fitted to keep the sides clean. The Common Service Lifebuoy had two vertical rails on the stern which, when released, the buoy would slide down; at the same time smoke/flare in the top part would also be ignited by a gunlock.  The weight at the bottom would pull down a rod telescoped into the vertical tube which would act as a keel for the two 16 inch (real life) copper balls and keep the flare/smoke vertical to the water.  The buoy hung from the stern on the vertical rails by a small chain (just visible in the photo).  I now have to predrill the four holes for the rods before painting.  One standoff rod is slightly bent at the moment but easily fixed.
  
Most of these parts are very small with the camera being very close it shows all the tiny imperfections just not visible normally  - that is an inch ruler in the photos.






 
I will be able to start painting very soon I hope.
 
cheers
 
Pat

Meanwhile, back at the Ranch.
HMS Belfast launches her Walrus
W/C  23" X 16"

Hi, another pictures

Clan Macintosh(3)
How to avoid painting Sea and Sky, a quick wash of light blue.
W/C 15 X 10 inches 
Jim

Thanks everyone for the very kind words and continued interest...not really much to report with only some ad-hoc shipyard activity, but a cautionary tale whilst its still fresh.  Started to make up the gun carriages, all 28 of them :-(  The axles took quite a bit of time to shape appropriately which I did with a file to rough shape and then turned in the lathe to fine tune.  Cautious going is the name of the game, and of course some turned out not at well as I'd hoped but these should be able to be "hidden at the back".
 
The issue I encountered was that I didn't think to check the thickness of the Syren sheets the parts come from and assumed these would all be consistent.  The prototype I had already built all seemed to go together nicely and to make life a little easier I built a simple jig to make alignment easier.  By chance, I then noticed that there are some reasonably significant differences in dimension.  If you look at the second picture where I stack those that look thicker against those that appear thinner the difference is apparent (both 11 in number).  What this means is that to build the carriages to the same dimensions will need some parts to be custom made from spare stock as the laser cut part is too small.  It appears by chance that the prototype was built using the 'thicker' variety.
 

 

Congratulations Bob! A beautiful ship and very clean, precise work.
 
                         Cheers
                         Peter

Back after a long break!
 
Partly enforced due to eye ops, but also made a mess of the deck planking so decided to start again from scratch.
 
Deck planking and copper on the hull completed.

I'm almost to the end of work on the deck. I've now mounted and rigged the remaining four guns, added the cross piece to the fore bitts and permanently mounted the previously made stack for the galley stove. I also threaded the anchor cables through the hawse holes and up through the openings on the forecastle deck (a ticklish job that probably should have been done earlier).
 
All that remains to be done is the windlass and probably a few cleats for rigging attachment. I'm still working out how to go about doing the windlass.
 
Bob
 
 

Well it's finally finished.  Both sets of anchors are now on (this was a really rotten job), and the rudder is on, chains and all.  Joy - and the whole thing only took about five years. 
 
The rudder and chains may be easily removed to transport the model to wherever it ends up.  At the moment I have no idea where.
 
Here it is in all its glory....  There is no ensign. I decided that the double-layer ensign earlier hoisted on it was too heavy, making it foul some of the rigging.  I will buy a couple of single layer becc ensigns to see how they go,  If I'm unhappy with them the ship shall remain ensignless.
 

Here are the two port anchors.
 

 

 

The rudder -
 

 

Just a note on the Granado gun carriages.  I received the Syren carriages a couple of days ago.  They are very good quality indeed, but unfortunately just too large. I will have to go with the Caldercraft carriages. I made a couple up over the weekend and they turned out reasonably well, though the ply shows.  A couple of extras were supplied so I will experiment to see if I can improve the result. 
 
I will post a couple of pictures when I get around to it, but aside from this, this is the last post.
 
 
 
 

Update :
 
Made the stove for cooking on deck, but moved it under the sheltered deck, it will get a chimney through the deck above later on.
Also for the doubts of those finding the rudder possibly a bit slim, I increased the width by 1,5 mm....
 
Nils