vossiewulf

Work on the guns, they're all painted, carriages have breeching rope and gun tackle rings, just need to add the middle piece to the trunnion cap irons (guessing that would be the name). Next they'll be mounted and rigged. I also took a few days to make a knife for Gaetan, I felt bad about having talked him into knives rather than scalpels and then he couldn't find what he wanted. I'll show pics of that once he gets to see it, it just shipped today. I used my favorite gun technique of painting the guns with Tamiya XF-1 flat black and then rubbing them down with my fingertip once they are dry. This makes the high points shiny and leaves the low spots flat, much more realistic than dry brushing. I'm not aware of any other paint for which this technique will work. To make the middle piece of those cap irons, I cut a styrene tube lengthwise on the Byrnes saw and then sanded and filed it a bit, slices off that will make the cap pieces. Once the caps are painted and rubbed down, you have to get very very close to see that they don't actually connect with the pieces on either side.

I suggest the Master Korabel kits. Every part including the planking is laser cut, they seem to almost fall together with very little effort.

It's compatible with all clear coats, you can use anything. I use lacquer, lots of other people use polyurethane.

What Roger said except I don't generally let it sit on, I wipe on, clean dry cloth wipe off. Repeat as necessary. Although it looks like it penetrates deeply, it generally does not, and therefore another nice thing about dyes is that if you screw up and don't like the color, grab a piece of sandpaper and it's gone very shortly and you can try again. Get some mason jars. When you mix a color, you'll never use it all and there's no reason to throw it away, put it in a mason jar, label it, and use it again later. I always mix up enough to fill up a small mason jar, doing that you rapidly build up a library of stain colors and the cost is just a bit of denatured alcohol. This is just a plain old piece of maple, see how dyes enhance the grain rather than obscure it:

That looks better.

That looks a little far up the stem to me.

Alternatively, you can just slow down the feed rate if doing so doesn't cause burning. The other day I was ripping some stuff and got sloppy and the saw was trying to kick back this piece of wood at me, but all it could manage was a groaning sound and tugging the piece in my hand a little bit. I laughed and told it not to worry, it would grow up to be a big dangerous saw one day.

I will use less slang this time to say the guns look great. What is the finish on the guns themselves?

Love the randomized deck planking, very realistic for the period.

I don't think he'd need to stock both, he could stock the basic kit and do a wood upgrade package on demand, that would be the most efficient. Or again on demand, he could produce a cut-down version of the kit with everything but the planking wood, and leave it to the builder to purchase the wood they need. If I was setting up as a kit manufacturer these days, I'd try to have as many upsells as possible, and only assemble the kits with the common parts and with each sale pack the right wood and upgrades and ship. Upgrade to brass cannons, upgrade to fancier blocks (Syren), upgrade to better rope (Syren), upgrade to better/different wood, upgrade to add super CNC machined decorations, upgrade to add photoetched parts, and allow the customer to choose. I would think most will rationalize themselves to all the bells and whistles and you make more money than with just a basic kit. The downside is that probably limits you to mail order, but if the Chinese pirates are making it and Chuck is making it mail-order only, I think that's viable.

Very nice work Valeriy, as usual. The thing about torpedo nets is how many ships carried them for... maybe 25 years? And as far as I know, they only did what they were designed to do once, at the Japanese attack on Port Darwin in 1904.

Thanks Patrick for the additional info! And your build is beautiful, no matter how accurate it is or isn't. There you go Mark, you look just a little bit, and you start learning all sorts of interesting things. If you haven't, you should read up on Drake's depredations of the Spanish both in Europe and in the Americas, there was extremely good reason the Spanish hated the man so much.

I use dye stains. It's what guitar makers use because there are no pigment blobs, it doesn't obscure their fancy 5A bookmatched flame maple tops. So go to Luthiers Mercantile Internationale. I recommend alcohol-based as that means no raised grain of the water-based. Get the 6 color set plus maybe a few other browns, with those you can mix anything you like and that supply is enough to last many, many ship models.

Mark, search MSW for Golden Hind. There are a couple promising build logs, the one below has numerous links to informational sources on 16th century ships.

This is where much of the challenge is, researching what the ship really looked like and deciding which improvements you're going to make to the basic kit. Just following the instructions is a parts assembly exercise, stepping out of that into making your own better parts is where you'll keep pushing the edges of your envelope. And when I build something, much of the fun is not the process or the finished product, but educating myself as to how that thing was designed, built, and operated, and how it fit into the history of the technology tree. Ships were the space shuttles of their day, the most complex machines operated by man for hundreds of years. Learning the details of how it all worked is a REAL challenge, and it's fascinating to see the highly engineered solutions they had to problems when they were limited to wood, rope, and pieces of iron. Many people start as you did by mostly assembling a kit, then they cross into making some of their own parts, then they move on to full scratchbuilding because that's where the hardest challenge is.

Go to Amazon and get several hundred tattoo ink cups for about $10. Drill a hole in a 3"x5"x1/2" or so piece of wood to hold the ink cup. Set in there it will never spill. Fill the cup with the CA container, put CA container away where you can't knock it over. Use a piece of wire with a loop in the end to apply the glue. Cut off and make a new loop as necessary. Apply the CA in dots, don't try to smear it around. This increases the open time of the glue and will result in fewer mistakes of glue where you don't want it. Also, keep your CA glue container in the refrigerator, it will last far longer. You can purchase a better buy bigger container and not worry about having to throw half of it away.

Go to Crown Timberyard. Order whichever you like of his woods. Most prefer Castello boxwood or Swiss pear both for appearance and working characteristics.

Yes, plans and instructions vary wildly in quality from wrong and internally inconsistent to non-existent to 100 page instruction manuals and 12 full sheets of plans. Knowing the quality of those items is very important before you buy. The most consistently good in this respect is Model Shipways, their plans and instructions are always quality. Otherwise even within one manufacturer's offerings, some kits can have good instructions and the next is crap. And the ones that often get the crappiest instructions are the beginner level kits where they're trying to keep costs down. Details will be a bit tricky due to Golden Hind's 16th century origin, we don't have good plans or even accurate sketches or paintings of ships, artists during this period did not think perspective and accuracy were important. I recommend you pick up Historic Ship Models as he takes each major functional element of a ship and shows versions of how they looked from the earliest records onwards. Otherwise with a ship this early your best best is to search the build logs here for similar period ships, and also in the gallery of completed kit and scratchbuilt ships. Starting from the point you finish your second planking, the order in which you do things becomes increasingly important, and it's critical to do things in the right order with rigging. Very basically, finish the deck planking and bulwarks and attach anything to the bulwarks that belongs there, drill holes in the deck for any eyebolts, and then finish the deck and bulwarks. After that finish has dried, add the eyebolts to the deck. The deck furniture should be assembled, prepped and finished off-model and only placed on deck when absolutely necessary (just prior to doing the guns). Guns are the same, finished off-model and put in place after deck furniture and then gun rigging is added.

The colorful geometric shapes were an at least English style of the time. See below a review of Revenge, Drake's ship during the Armada campaign, and a build log from Xodar who is working on the Revenge. It would look a bit odd to have an English ship of the period not have some geometric styling, so don't rule out the paper. Or at least don't rule out the concept of the paper, if you don't like the quality they've provided, you get a graphics program and make and print your own, either on paper or white/clear decal film. You also need to decide the level of detail you're going for in your model. You can work quickly building just what the kit specifies, or you can make improvements and corrections and add missing detail until most of the kit parts are thrown away, or somewhere between. But it's a basic specification of the build to which you need to be consistently working.

Looking at it with an admittedly inexperienced eye, I assumed when looking at that Falconer drawing that he was showing an alternative arrangement for the gun tackles, and the breeching rope was hidden for clarity. It seems pretty straightforward, there is no way that light line is going to stop that big gun on recoil, so we have to be seeing an incomplete rig.

You'll learn something useful from every book you buy, or at least that is my experience, and it's why most modelers have a whole slew of books. Look on Amazon for ship modeling in books, anything with good reviews will be worth buying. This includes books specifically about rigging, which is a subject in and of itself. The easiest kits I'm aware of to build are the Master Korabel kits from Russia (you could even start with a small rowboat), every single part is laser cut so really it's mostly just assembling wooden parts. A normal ship kit will have a recognizable keel and bulkhead formers, but is otherwise a pile of sticks and you get to make most of the parts. Most modelers like that challenge but it can be an intimidating place to start.

The answer is... yes With ship modeling, everyone agrees that you should get the structure and the rigging as perfectly accurate as you can. However, when it comes to finish, including whether you paint it, paint parts of it, or none of it, and what glossiness clear coat you use, it's all up to the builder. Some contemporary models were all natural wood, others were elaborately painted as a line ship, even in the 1700s it was a matter of taste. That said, most people go with satin clear coats. I am going with matte, because I painted some of my ship and glossy paint on a scale object looks plastic to me. Poly is of course easy to work with, but I find its clarity poor with anything but pure gloss, so I went with old-fashioned nitrocellulose lacquer. Your mileage can and probably will vary. You can also get very good results with various oil finishes. WRT stain, many people use standard Minwax stains. I use alcohol-based aniline dyes from a luthier shop, dyes are molecular color whereas stains are suspending pigment in a medium and to one degree or another stains obscure the grain. You can go quite dark with dyes and still have perfect fidelity in the grain.

If you want a dissenting opinion, I found much of current planking methods complicated and tricky, more so than I felt it needed to be, so I came up with my own simplified method. The only requirement is a very sharp knife and the ability to cut following drawn lines with said knife. Short version is that I'd do all the bending/twisting required for each plank, but only vaguely taper them, just enough so I wouldn't be cutting away too much waste with my knife. I then fit the plank and once set, I used narrow vinyl pinstriping tape to lay out a fair line from the plank's widest to narrowest point, and used a .3mm mechanical pencil (that I sharpened to an extremely fine point with 800 grit sandpaper) to mark a clear but very fine and therefore accurate line along the tape. Remove the tape, cut away the waste with a knife, making sure to keep the knife exactly 90 degrees to the hull surface. I then used a piece of spring steel about .012"x.5"x6", covered on one side with PSA sandpaper to finish off that cut, again making sure to stay exactly 90 degrees to the surface. By doing that, the perfect 90 degree edge of the factory-sawn next plank already fits, no adjustment necessary- just vaguely taper it on the side you'll trim away and do the required bends and glue it on. Also, both for fit and wood movement reasons, I did not put any glue on the edges of my planks. I found it went quickly once I started doing it that way, and the fit was good enough that I have a hard time figuring out how many planks are there.

Expect bleeding The best way to think about planking is that there are a number of bulkhead stations you have to plank, the profiles of which are different from each other, and therefore the line following the profile of each bulkhead from deck to keel is different for each station. In short, you have a different width to plank at each bulkhead, so your planks must be the right width at each station for one plank to manage all. In cases where one plank can't manage the stretch or compression (planks should never be tapered to less than half their width), you either use drop planks (where you end a plank early) or stealer planks (where you add a short plank segment). If you need drop planks or stealers, look up how they were done first, practice varied among the builder nations. Other than tapering, the three other factors you need to control are 1) face bend, the basic bend required for the plank to say curve around the bow, 2) edge-curve, you can either edge bend your planks or spile them, and 3) twist. Both in the bow and the stern you'll have planks that will fit much more easily if twisted with steam/heat first. If you can accurately bend/spile/twist planks to hold the form you need, then your planking will go pretty smoothly.

If you want to do WWI, you need to visit Wingnut Wings. They are not cheap but IMO they make the finest plastic models available today, perfectly molded and engineered and designed by people who definitely know what they are talking about (my first love is WWI aviation), I have more than a few WW models sitting in a closet waiting for the right time.