vossiewulf

Interesting, you're right but I have honestly never seen that, and I've used CA on maple before. I suggest trying a different CA glue if you can and see if it does the same thing before you totally rule it out for future use.

I also agree with Bob that while the miniature tools from Lee Valley are cool (and I have a few of them), they are NOT the best small scale tools for exactly the reason he cited: as they are, they're designed for tiny little doll hands and they don't work as well as other options designed to work at that scale with normal human hands. I keep the shoulder plane on my bench because it can get into places other tools can't, and I use the block plane occasionally, but for example I never bought the chisels because I don't know how you're supposed to use them with the tiny handles. Lee Valley does however sell my favorite mini-planes, because they are very ergonomic, you hold them with the handle in the palm, and your index finger down on the toe of the sole- they are very precise and controllable when held this way. Veritas Detail Palm Planes Mark F., you might want to take a look at my tools thread here, you may find some useful items. Also Mark, regardless of which plane(s) you get, on any straight plane remember to round the corners of the cutting edge, and even better is to relieve each corner about .001-3" (depending on width of the cutting edge, wider gets more relief) relative to the center of the cutting edge, so the entire edge is a very slight curve with rounded corners. Sharpened this way, you won't get corners digging into your work, and with overlapping passes you can plane a surface perfectly flat. Example of a wenge board planed with a larger plane (Veritas low-angle smoothing plane), but sharpened the same way:

That appears to be a Mujingfang plane, they have a huge range. I have that one plus a couple others. Steel is reasonably good, and the iron is relatively thick for a small plane, which cuts down on chatter. All in all a good plane, at least if that's not a bad copy, which I question at $10 - Mujingfang planes from Japan Woodworker are more like $40. If you want one slightly bigger, try the model maker's plane from Lie Nielsen. Everything LN makes is extremely high quality, I own this plane also and use it regularly.

High strength PVA glues designed for woodworking. Here the most common is Titebond. Are you sure the yellow shade from CA isn't a very thin layer of CA near the joint? I've seen that with several light woods, but only when there was an actual layer of CA on the surface.

You can also read it online for free via Google Books, it's a somewhat better copy than the PDF. We now fully return you to the creation of an awesome racing schooner by Keith

Thanks for sharing that Keith, I found a version on Google books and have continued reading

Agree. luthiers use epoxy resin all the time as their grain-filler, but they spread it squeegee-style with plastic spreaders, I've never heard of anyone trying to spray it. Also Bob is correct that you need to account for the relative flexibility of the glue, epoxy once fully cured is very rigid and replacement of the wood is a better idea. If it's not possible, use yellow glue as it remains flexible to a degree after curing. There are also some (apparently) good newer CA glues that remain flexible after curing, but they don't have much of a track record yet, and that's important in a model intended to last for decades at least.

With those skills Mark, you'll do very well. Even so, stick with a single mast for your first ship, there's plenty of complication in learning everything needed just for a simple cutter like mine.

Appears to be called Manilkara or Bulletwood. Here is one store in Canada offering it and it's not terribly expensive. Domex in the US claims to carry it but the photos looked very different.

Whenever I slash myself for the first time working on any project, I'll put some blood in an out of the way place that I remember, just for that reason Like all of my chip carvings have little blood stamps on the back. And Louie, the pumps look great.

Extremely spiffy yards.

You have to explain the roof/body damage. So the story needs to include the sentence "[a]t that point I was inverted at 180 miles per hour."

I saw that in I guess your build log for it? I can't look at those pictures, it's like a scene from a 1960s Driver's Ed movie. Not to mention that's a few dollars of holly unless you milled it yourself. In which case the time and machines cost a lot. Either way a seriously bad day.

Drazen, a very good rule of thumb when working with wood is whatever you do to one side of a table/board/wooden ship, you do exactly the same thing to the other side. If you want really stable furniture for example, when machining down from boards it's good practice to constantly flip board faces when you get to the planer stage so that the same amount of wood is removed from each side of each board. If you live in high or low humidity conditions and you don't do that, you'll come in the next day to find all sorts of sweeps and winding and checks in your boards. So yes sealing the inside to the same extent that the outside is sealed is a good idea. Once you establish a controlled humidity you should give the ship at least a few weeks to equilibrate to the new moisture baseline. Guitar makers will frequently leave guitar necks for months in the shop before using them in a guitar to ensure they're fully stable within their environment. Ship models that aren't solid hulls will become stable much faster because of greater relative surface area, but you still need to give it some time. And remember it's been under enough stress to break things. With respect to repairs, you seem to know what you're doing in building ship models, so let your own judgment be your guide. Only thing I will say is if you are in doubt about any piece, rip it off and replace it. That's likely to be the smart thing to do.

Sounds neat. Is it just me, or the angle, or are the masts on that ship not straight? It looks like they rake well aft on the mast and topmast but the topgallants and royals look like they're almost vertical.

A piece of wood acts with respect to humidity like a balloon with a skin that doesn't stretch well. As humidity goes higher, internal compressive pressures build because every cell in the wood structure is trying to get bigger, with the vast majority of these stresses oriented in the radial direction of the tree rings. When humidity drops, the process reverses and internal tension stresses build until humidity stops changing and the wood reaches a steady state again. Now wood doesn't handle that well in the long run even if it's totally free to move. However if you add glue someplace that is constraining the wood from moving in the direction it wants to go, the failure process is much faster and usually much worse. With your ship, I see what looks like both compression and tension failures, like it sat in place in the cellar for most of a year and went through both cycles.

Sounds like you're on the road to recovery Drazen, congrats. Unfortunately although after a couple weeks of more humidity chances are the cracking will stop, it won't fix the damage that has been done.

Robert, wood doesn't get brittle with age, the timber of Khufu's boat at the Great Pyramid was just about fully sound after 4000 years. To the extent wood brittleness varies in human time scales, it's a function of the moisture content of the wood, which is a function of the relative humidity of its environment. Any wood stored in a dry place without either radical swings in humidity or constant very high humidity will decay very, very slowly. Wood is amazingly tough stuff. However, I don't have the years of experience with little bits of strip wood, I'm more familiar with furniture scales, but I see no reason that wood only a few decades old would decay unless maintained in poor conditions. Anyone with more experience correct me if I'm wrong on this for some reason with planking wood.

Every experience I've had with teak, it ate edge tools alive. It has a nice natural slipperiness that helps but the plane iron edges are like you're planing sandpaper.

Also, where is the wood lock on this rudder? And I assume cutters had rudder pendants, right? The contemporary models don't show them but it's basically crazy to go to sea without some secondary rudder attachment.

Short update, I finished the cap rails and cleaned up everything and painted a satin clear coat over everything, especially the deck. I really don't like how that polyurethane looked, so proving you can paint anything over anything if you let it dry enough, I switched to real nitrocellulose lacquer, the Mohawk brand used by luthiers. It's dried a week now, I need to hit it with 1500 and then shoot a final coat. The satin is still a tad glossy for my tastes, I may mix it down a little bit with matte. Otherwise, when I've had time, I've been figuring out numerous creative ways for how not to make pintles and gudgeons. But I'm making progress now. Also I am still waiting for my boxwood square stock for the yards from Crown, and trying to figure out what I'm going to do with the guns. I thought I had measured everything but I forgot to measure the very important height above deck, and the 6 pounders from Chuck are just too big, I'll use them one something else later. But the 3 pounders in the kit are only 17mm and look tiny for the carriages. I've ordered some 20mm "swivel guns" and will see if they look better. And I got likes from Chris Watton! Woohoo! (runs around the room high-fiving everyone)

Sorry for your loss, Pat.

I'd suggest alcohol-based aniline dye rather than water-based like Ritt, it would dry much faster and not effect the line in any way except coloring it. I don't like pigment-based stains, they always obscure what they're staining to some degree, most staining I do now is with dye.

Does the Minwax not affect your ability to glue the rigging as required? I would think it would.

I would add a small Zona hand saw to the list Amateur provided. Also fingernail files in various grits are cheap and reasonably effective replacements for lots of files. Planking is obviously something doable from all the models you see here, but it's not easy the first time. Look in the forums for the section on planking and framing models and read up there and look for the planking tutorial videos you can find there. Don't cheat and go quick on the first planking layer, go slowly and try to plank it exactly as you would do the second layer. That way the first layer acts as a practice run for the second planking layer, which will go much better as a result. You need patience for ship modeling. Planking can take a while, as will rigging- you just have to plug ahead and keep making progress. Spend lots of time reading other build logs. You will learn immense amounts from doing so. Look in the gallery of completed models here for Le Hussard, people usually upload quite a few pics that show the finished ship from many directions and that can very much help figure out what you need to do and what certain parts are and what they should look like when finished.