vossiewulf

I do also, but Chris needs to be cautious while building a small business. Chris, your initial plan sounds good, my suggestion is to keep adding figures to those available at a slow pace that won't distract you from your main kit development goals, and continue to do so as long as they sell reasonably well. Go captains > say three crew figures > lieutenant > bosun > more crew figures. And even if French ships aren't on the docket, if the rest of the figures sell well I would think about doing the same for the French navy. The argument for is that even though I'm not much interested in figures, I've seen thread after thread of people looking for quality figures and not finding much. I think we rarely see figures on ship models partially because there isn't a viable option to put figures on deck of a similar quality to that of the ship build. The other argument is if no one is really serving this market, it's possible without too much cost and difficulty to become the premiere supplier. And that drives traffic to your site from people looking for figures, and a portion of them end up buying ships too.

Unfortunately in my place I made the workshop impossible to cut off, seeing as it's the house's alleged dining room I've had no problems with cats knowing that there are places they aren't allowed on, but of course the young ones will jump up just to prove they can the second you leave the house. So extra safety measures will be required at least until she gets out of bratty cat teenager phase. I didn't have cats until I was 21, when I moved into a house with a girlfriend after college, and pretty soon there were four cats and three dogs. For whatever reason I picked up cat language pretty quickly and have had them since. My wives have always laughed at me having regular conversations with them as they follow me around the house and monitor my activities. Progress remains slow, just haven't had much time to work on it, but steady in that I try to move forward a little bit every day regardless. Unless I talk myself into rudder pendants, the rudder is done. I just don't see pendants on the contemporary models, but I still find it hard to believe they'd go into the North Sea and the channel with nothing holding the rudder on but gravity. At least I'd feel like a colossal moron for drowning in a capsizing ship because the rudder just fell off and I had no backup to catch it. This was also one of those cases where cup burs come into play. I don't use them super regularly, but when I do, boy howdy do they speed along the process. Here as you see below, after I tore off the brass and started using styrene, I drilled holes for .030" styrene rod, and after letting the CA set for 30 seconds on those rod pieces, I just clipped each one off close with a good nail clipper. Then I went over them all with the right size cup bur in the rotary tool, and we have reasonably even nice rounded bolt heads very quickly. By the way, I drilled the holes in situ instead of on the mill or something to give it a more handmade look, but I ended up wobbling more than intended in a couple places. Rarely does a good idea go fully unpunished. Next up is deadeyes, which I've started but am at the moment wondering how to chuck them somehow to properly round them off. I've tried a few things so far with no luck, I'm considering just drilling a hole through the danged things and then filling them later with side grain wood.

Sorry Sam, somehow missed your reply here. Yes, this is going to be a challenge Right as I cross into doing rigging, I'm going to have a 12 week old fuzz-covered energy bundle that some people call Tonkinese kittens. With Takita when she was little, I had to keep an array of pens on the edge of my workbench so she could entertain herself while sitting in my lap by throwing the pens on the floor. I have no idea why cats think that is the funniest thing ever, but they do. I had to keep continuously replacing the pen supply or the next thing on the floor was an important part. I can only hope the new one doesn't decide that ship parts are prey items like yours did. Speaking of the rudder, it's finally more or less done, will post some pics tomorrow.

This actually reminded me that I built that as a kid in the early '70s. It was the first time I tried to do camouflage painting by hand, as I recall it came out awfully, but I learned a lot. I may go buy one just to see it again after all these years.

I don't know how complete your testing is on your site, so this may be expected, but the slideshows in particular were behaving very oddly in Chrome.

The whole "article" was a paid advertisement for Artec Eva, something you see more and more. The Team Chooses to Use the Artec Eva Scanner to Study the Viking Shipwreck And so, upon Auer’s strong recommendation, the team moved ahead with using Eva for working with the Big Ship. Experts using the faster 3D scanner Artec Eva to scan and document the discovery before damage set in to the Viking shipwreck. (Thomas Van Damme)

We're going to need more boxes.

Chris where exactly are we ordering this stuff once you have all the parts?

Globalization is making acronyms way complicated.

I got to fly a Stearman at an airfield north of Charlottesville where you could rent various biplanes and aerobatic planes. You had to take an instructor with you, but if you were certified for tail draggers you could take the entire flight. Really a wonderful airplane to fly, controls very responsive without being too much and control forces are not huge, although I never approached the Vne (don't go this fast) speed, so they might get heavier at high speed. But on a nice summer evening in Charlottesville with the sun setting over the mountains, it's a really fun experience being in a sweet biplane with an open cockpit and a giant radial in front of you, you end up flying big arcs back and forth because it feels like you can point the nose anywhere you want so you get to pointing the nose around. And easy in a loop, don't have to dive much for the needed speed and it just has the to be expected significant rudder input up and across the top and back down as the p-factor of the big prop tries to yank the nose around. People tend to think of gyroscopic forces from the prop would be a problem, but in reality the vast majority of the time the p-factor that varies continuously with your angle of attack is what the pilot is fighting. It basically causes asymmetric thrust that yaws the nose one direction the higher you point the nose, and in the opposite direction the lower you point the nose. Jack, that one was in USAAC blue and yellow also, your colors look good, I recall the yellow being on the green side. You've also done very well with the assembly, nice and clean and the decals are well done so they'll look very good once they get their final flat coat. It's a nice model to put up on the shelf and if you want to get rid of it for some reason I'll find room for it on my shelf

I'm just going to shorten it to SOA: Singing Of Angels.

I was going to say something typically smartass about being right, but then I realized I'd been married twice for 20 years total and remembered that no, I'm not right about much of anything. Including, I'm pretty sure, the direction in which gravity points and how many suns we have and other similarly controversial subjects.

The fit is quite reasonable for a first-time planker, and it looks like you're getting better as you go along with the fit into the stem. That's tricky as you have to set two different angles on the end of the plank and fit it while bending it, at least to some extent. But nothing worth having ever came easy.

Yes, I happened to live in Tulsa when Jack Kearby was working on and finishing his production-accurate SE5a using Replicraft plans. I got to crawl all around, unfortunately before the days of good cell phone cams. I didn't see the first flight, but I think I visited the weekend after and saw him fly it. At the time I was flying actively and would have strongly considered donating a testicle if it would have allowed me to fly it, but not surprisingly he never offered... sigh. I don't think anyone else flew it when he owned it, if I recall he sold it at some point. Jack Kearby's S.E.5a

Yeah a few pieces is not a good reason to spend hundreds of dollars. Do you have a rotary tool or cordless drill? Lots of people make very nice turned parts by chucking them either in a Dremel tool or a cordless drill depending on size. All you need is a round needle file to shape the sheave correctly and then you can saw them off one at a time.

What he said. For regular taper point drills, they will "skate" all over the surface before biting into the material. Accurate hole-drilling in wood by hand definitely requires a starter mark to prevent the drill from skating. What he means about wood drills is that there are drills specialized for wood, they are called Brad Point drills. They skate much less. However, I still always use an awl to mark a spot even when using Brad points.

My recommendation is finish sand the piece of wood, and either use Indian ink directly, or an Indian ink marker (artist supply stores have them, most "black" markers are actually dark purple). Both will penetrate the wood and leave the wood texture totally exposed, so it looks like the wood is black and not painted.

What Mark said, you can expand a hole just by twisting a round file in said hole, and you can make it move one direction or another by pressing more on one side. You should be able to fix any minor spacing issues just by expanding the holes slightly and controlling the direction in which they expand.

Of course up to you, but the one with the spinner is the one I'd do, as that might have been the best S.E.5a that ever flew. You know the story of him tuning the engine to death and completely stupefying the Rumpler pilots by diving on them at like 19k? Well, other tempting one would be the mid markings set of No.56 Squadron and do it as it appeared on the day that he and Rhys-Davids and the rest took down my namesake.

Does it have the spinner McCudden put on his S.E.5A? He stole it from a LVG C.V or something.

They don't look bad, did you use an awl to make a starter hole? It's nearly impossible to drill a hole in an exact spot with a big handheld cordless drill without using an awl or a nail to make a starter hole at the right spot(s).

Yeah, I read an account where a Buccaneer tore off its tail pod at Red Flag, pulling UP into power line.

I'm glad you were working with a little Byrnes saw, learning those lessons yourself on a full-sized table saw could cost you fingers and whole hands. If you have a Woodcraft store local, they give table saw training classes. Or simply have a friend who's worked with saws walk you through the basics, you can also damage blades or the saw if you haven't had intro table saw training.

Ditto, it's too unlikely a name for a small modeling tools company.

(more sounds of angels singing)