vossiewulf

Artco Tools has a better selection, I should have known that as they seem oriented toward supplying the remaining real-life die makers. Most of the professional rotary tools, particularly the air-powered ones, seem primarily designed for polishing molds.

 

This is my other favorite one, again safe edges all around, very simple narrow rectangle shape with all upper surfaces beveled back to reduce interference, it's the perfect tight-corners file.

 

(Terrible low-res pics that were badly upscaled at some point on Artco)

 

Now with "In Action" screenshot!

Congrats Tor, glad you are very happy with it, that's the only thing that's important in the end.

11 hours ago, usedtosail said:

I hear you Jeremy. Every time he posts my wish list gets longer and my wallet gets thinner.

I think we agreed that riffler file sets are what you need next? Certainly if you don't have a good set, you're going to find tremendous use out of that as a purchase.

 

The annoying thing is the set I bought is no longer available anywhere. There is this Glardon-Vallorbe set at Otto Frei, but I don't think the choices in that set are the best for ship modeling.

 

I think the best choice at this point is to buy individual Grobet files, Contenti is a good supplier that I've bought from for years. In fact you should add them to your supplier list, they are jeweler/watchmaker supplies like Otto Frei but they have some things Otto Frei doesn't. I tend to use Otto Frei because I get next-day delivery on standard shipping as they're just across the bay from me.

 

Some things about rifflers - you want diesinkers' or diemakers' riffler files. Almost all suppliers call them diesinkers as a group now but sometimes you run into ones that know that there is a division there and will list them as two separate groups.

 

DO NOT get silver smiths' riffler files, they are much too big. Unless you want an 800 pound gorilla riffler to teach a 1/24 build what's what.

 

You want both cut 2 and cut 0. Those would be medium and coarse respectively when used on wood. If you can only get one... I'd probably get 2 as you can use it in precision cases, it's just not as good at removing large amounts of material.

 

Number 901 is the one I use most, it has safe edges all around and you can do fairly big areas laying it flat or very tiny areas with the pointy end.

Number 951 is generally useful but it also seems specifically designed to help make clean planking rabbets quickly. Click here to see it in action doing that (toward the end of the linked post).

My other favorite is missing... I'll have to look around to find another supplier who has ALL Grobet rifflers, you can see there are many numbers missing from Contenti's list. There are others they have that are useful, but each of you should decide from here which ones will help the way you work. I do strongly recommend you focus on the ones with safe edges, if you have cutting surfaces all around it makes them more flexible but also capable of causing as many problems as they're solving.

 

4 hours ago, mischief said:

I was introduced to the use of glass as a wood scraper by a master craftsman at Wurlitzer's music instrument repair shop in Buffalo New York over 50 years ago and still have all my fingers.

Yep, obsidian and flint were the first scrapers, and glass was very popular as scraper material throughout the 18th and 19th century as I recall, and still works fine today as mischief says, you just have to be careful handling it and the edge is not going to be regular.

 

Every edge tool you own can also act as a scraper, and I regularly use them as such in small areas. As long as you don't do it too much, using them this way doesn't significantly increase sharpening requirements, at least in my experience.

*Poster is not responsible for any resultant marital strife and/or budget destruction

 

You guys are just joining me. Because I do all this digging I've been living with years-long wish lists forever  Even now that I'm in a position to spend quite a bit more than I used to, it's STILL years long.

 

But at least if you know all the cool things out there, you can make better judgments about priority and get the ones that will benefit your processes most first.

 

Yeah, if you want good chisels or planes with blades that stay sharp near forever, most of Lee Valley/Veritas tools now have the PM-V11 powdered metal alloy as an option. You pay more but the reduction in sharpening time makes it very worth it. 

55 minutes ago, MEDDO said:

Lee Valley looks like a great site.  (repetition is always good for the memory)

See the list of suppliers you want to look at that I posted over in my tools thread. I didn't include Lie-Nielsen as they are out of most folks' price range.

Geez just realized that last post was pretty much of a repeat like three messages upward. Sorry for the repetition.

 

The Kell is an excellent chisel sharpening jig. I don't however think it's a good plane iron sharpening jig. Plane irons should be sharpened not with a straight edge and hard corners, but with a .005" to maybe .01" radius. A square-edged plane is not very good for the task of actually planing down stock, every cut leaves a deep hard edge or two deep hard edges. However, if the iron is sharpened with a gentle radius, the cut feathers out to nothing on both sides and you can easily produce a completely flat planed surface by overlapping strokes right to left or vice versa.

 

The Veritas Mk.II is designed to make it easy to sharpen in that radius, and every plane I own is sharpened that way.

 

Here's an example, I had just bought a Veritas low-angle jack plane, and had just sharpened it for the first time with the proper radius and used it to flatten this wenge board. If you can make a wood surface flatter and shinier than this, please let me know how

And here is my little Lie-Nielsen plane that I use most on ships, showing a good but slightly lopsided radius on the edge, I straightened it out the next time I sharpened.

And speaking of which, if you want to buy good tools now, you need to spend time at both Lee Valley and Lie-Nielsen.

 

 

See Ron Hock's book on sharpening that I linked in my tools topic, it really is the best and most straightforward I've read.

 

I strongly recommend Shapton Glass Stones. I have an entire drawer filled with sharpening stones of every variety; Japanese water stones work as well as Shapton Glass stones but are much more messy. Diamond is 1) expensive for the rate at which they wear out and 2) always leaves a really aggressive scratch pattern. Ceramics almost always rapidly glaze over.

 

Shapton glass stones stay reasonably flat for a long time, only require a few drops of water so very little mess, and remove steel at a faster rate than any stones I've ever used. I have a 220 for reshaping bevels, then 1000/4000/8000 for sharpening plus a strop for final finishing.

 

I also strongly recommend the Mk.II Veritas Sharpening Guide if you have chisels and plane irons you want to sharpen. That jig makes plane iron sharpening very easy, including being able to gently radius the edge (never sharpen a plane iron square).

That's more or less my state also Michael, and all of my hand saws and about a third of my hand tools are Japanese, most of which came from JW. I very much like the design philosophy of Japanese tools and I very much appreciate Rc64 edges in very good steel, you can get incredibly sharp edges.

Yeah wow, order it while you can if you have any intention of ever building a Dr.I model. The book has 70 or so pages of nothing but various angles of a very highly detailed and mostly correct Fokker Dr. I 3d model and leaves almost nothing to doubt.

For anyone wanting good small ship-modeling planes at a reasonable cost, the Mujingfang planes are a good choice. I have a couple, the iron is plenty thick for this scale and is reasonably good steel. Only drawback for some is they are traditional wood planes that are adjusted by tapping, but that really isn't as hard as you might think once you learn how not to overshoot - that's when they can be irritating.

 

Anyway, almost all are $26 and considering mine work really well after some tweaking and sharpening, that seems to me to be a pretty good deal. One that I have that I find myself using frequently is the bullnose plane, its ability to get into corners is handy.

            

For anyone who's just really into collecting mini tools, Japan Woodworker carries several miniature Japanese tools, tool sets, and planes.

 

Thanks folks. I'm sure there's nothing new here, just a synthesis of various other methods and ideas, but it does feel like "my" method now. And important thing there is that means I feel comfortable with what I'm doing. 

 

Also, it seems reasonably quick, my slow progress is my job not letting me spend time on it rather than the planking itself going slowly. For anyone who thinks the edges must be glued, the method of letting thin CA run down into the joints works, and it will leave a very fine glue line- I tested. I still have it in my head that it will be more stable in the long run with each plank allowed move a bit, but I'm not sure of that.

 

I'm also going to be sure the treenails are real treenails, probably going all the way through the first planking, to back up the CA with a mechanical hold.

Ok one more long detailed one on planking. After this anybody who's interested in doing it this way certainly should be able to. So after this I'll just have updates showing progress.

 

First my pencil marks on the port side were going so I inkified them. Also I drew in the lines for the next two planks. Doing so gives me a good reference when doing my planking trimming, and also helps make sure we're not drifting in one of the 12,000 ways planking can go bad. With the additive nature it's the sneakiest of any modeling process I've ever seen and until you've done it 20 times you better be checking it from every angle on every plank.

 

The plank lines are really handy when knife-trimming planks because at that point you can't really go far wrong by making the edge of the plank you're trimming exactly halfway between its glued edge and the line of the next plank. I may in the end entirely give up marking planks in favor of that method, since I can get real close by eyeballing that.

 

I am doing all these curving plank lines using flexible plastic lining tape. I burnish that down with the same burnisher I use fixing planks, and then take my .3mm lead pencil and sharpen it on 1200 grit sandpaper  What? .3mm is a big fat line!

Especially because I never completely like those lines and end up tweaking them by hand into big fat lines. Sigh.

Now we'll pick up from the last post, I had just put on the starboard stern plank of the fifth strake. At this point I had to switch to the starboard side to trim and finalize the fifth strake lines, because that establishes the lines I'm going to mirror on the port side. Notice the port side doesn't have all the markings of the starboard side. I finished that, and then did the knife trimming on the stern end of the starboard plank before I remembered to take pics again. So here we are, again I'm getting very close with just my knife.

 

Switching to the bow, I fist mark the end of the plank even with the same plank on the starboard side.

I eyeballed down the line to see where the trim should end and marked it- our planks are exactly the right width out of the bag for the middle stations of the ship, so we only need to trim away areas in the bow and stern. Then back to my tape to get the right curve.

And pencil mark.

And then trim down to that with knife.

As nice as it is in terms of increasing speed, I wouldn't recommend cutting as close to the lines as I am unless you're as comfortable as I am with a knife and you know how to make it very sharp. Boxwood in particular is tricky as it splits very easily and you have to feel that happening very quickly to prevent a serious problem. With a good little sanding stick with 120 grit you should be able to remove 1/64" outside the line quickly.

 

This is after knife-trimming.

 

Slight break here to talk about holding knives. Being able to cut really straight lines is much more a matter of technique and less of talent than people think. First, there is the not-rocket science concept that to do something with precision, you need to eliminate ALL unnecessary motion.

 

Here is basically how I hold this knife. All fingers but pinky on the handle. Fingers are not just gripping the knife tightly, they are being pressed against each other tightly. Between the two, that blade is not going to wiggle at all and you can use your arm to pull your hand in a straight line and you're going to cut a very straight line.

 

The reason we do this is because our muscles are FAR more stable under a medium continuous load than they are relaxed. By putting all of the important ones except the one that HAS to move under load, you quiet your knife point massively.

 

This is what is looks like from on top...

But you can't see the important part, which is this - I am pressing my pinky down very firmly and usually it's locked. My third finger presses down into pinky and other fingers pressing blade down against ring finger. This is what I mean, you need your hand and the knife to be one solid locked unit.

I'll try to remember to demonstrate this with an even more extreme case where I had to hand-paint silver into the word Fender on a Strat neck decal and it had to be completely perfect. The way I did it, it wasn't even particularly hard.

 

Said paint job in progress. Only bummer was paint was thicker than it should have been so it didn't level well.

 

We now return you to your regularly scheduled build log...

 

Now that both the stern and bow are trimmed, I sand the whole length and test with upcoming planks until the fit is good for the whole length. And as we said, the trick is always sanding perpendicular to the surface:

And as we mentioned, we have to be totally batshit paranoid about keeping everything aligned. Here I am doing a reality check on both sides at the same station and there's maybe a couple thousanths variation. I repeated it up and down the length, found the stern still needed some work.

As mentioned, before we could do that process on the port side plank we had to do it first on the starboard side. And that means as soon as we're done on the port side, we can put on the next plank on the starboard side.

 

And here we see my glue thingy with all its battle scars compared to the brand-new ones. Look up RB Productions.

And here is why it's important, as I add glue to the second segment of the next starboard strake.

Skipping ahead slightly, here's that plank all glued in and cleaned up.

Marking the stern plank before gluing it in.

I haven't mentioned bending because I'm not doing any, there's nothing I can't handle with my hands at glue time. However, I AM twisting. Boxwood is some odd wood, this is first time I've worked with it. It's really pretty hard but it's also extremely plastic and bendy. I'm doing this twisting with just my hands with no heat, twist it past desired point and hold it for a minute.

I saw it before I glued in the first bit, but still, blech. Piece of cocobolo I trimmed to fix it is already sitting there.

First step was to widen the whole a bit. This is one of the dental scalers again, have found myself using them quite a bit. They're very sharp and work fine on wood as detail scrapers, at least these are, they're Osung and about $25 each.

Gluing it in.

We'll leave it for the moment, need to glue in the rest of that plank first. Here I am clamping a segment again with one hand.

Most of it glued now.

And once it was completely glued down, here's another perfectly good tool for leveling the planks, at least on convex surfaces.

Any number of small planes can be used for this, from this Veritas one to violin maker's planes and other decent small planes. Japan Woodworker carries a nice line of small planes that are really pretty good and not too expensive ($25-$30).

 

Now back to our sternpost fix, first have to level the planks.

A bit more scraping and sanding and all better now.

And now that starboard strake is on, next step is to trim and sand it down completely as remember that's required to establish the lines for the port side. So out comes the tape again! And this is how you accurately adjust said taped lines. For god's sake don't keep peeling it up and putting it down over and over. If you have a small section that's not right, just use something sharp to get under and lift that section. Then let it go. It will fall into a catenary and that probably fixes your problem. If not, after you let it go you can tweak it up or down a bit before burnishing back down.

And now trimmed down by knife. You can see that it's very easy to eyeball problems because the final line should pretty much be the halfway point between the glue edge and the drawn line of your next plank.

I mentioned this in the previous post, but here's a pic - a nice sharp small scraper with a perfectly square edge is also a very good tool for trimming down planks and should be considered by anyone not comfortable using a knife. It can remove material much quicker than sanding with much more control than a knife.

And skipping ahead to done, after sanding the whole thing and test fitting the next plank.

Here is the only preparation I do to planks about to be glued on - slightly relieve the inner edge where the next joint will be.

And here is where we say we're done - when a plank can be held up to every segment with one hand and we see no line at all between planks.

Actually I'll leave off here. If folks want yet more I have pics of doing the next port strake, I was on a roll.

 

But here is where we are now.

 

Amalio. MAKE A MISTAKE. Just one, it can be ANY kind. It doesn't have to be big, it can be quite small, just a tiny variation in a line or a corner that is not quite square.

 

Otherwise I will request the Spanish government test you for alien DNA.

 

-------------

 

Amalio. COMETER UN ERROR. Sólo uno, puede ser de cualquier tipo. No tiene que ser grande, puede ser muy pequeño, sólo una pequeña variación en una línea o una esquina que no es bastante cuadrada.

 

De lo contrario, pediré al gobierno español que te pruebe el ADN extraño.

3 hours ago, Gaetan Bordeleau said:

 Vossiewulf,

 

I do not agree with you. To make it simple an exacto blade is a a dull blade in comparison of a scalpel blade.

I work a lot  with scalpel blade  because it easier to cut and  less strength is required because it is sharper.

I will agree to disagree with you Gaetan  But unless you're using scalpels different than those I'm aware of, I think the metallurgy is on my side. 

 

I did this about 80% with a Hock knife and the other 20% with a Japanese knife - no scalpel I've ever seen could do this, particularly the cross-grain cuts with this cleanness. This sharpness is at the hairy edge of what an Rc62 edge can do, so demanding in terms of sharpness that even with a Hock knife I have to re-strop every 15 minutes or so.

2 hours ago, CDW said:

Excellent thread. Have made note of a number of items I want/need. Thanks!

Thanks, very glad to hear you say that - the entire reason I started this, as mentioned, was to bring the results of my (and anyone else's) endless searching for better tools to the attention of as many modelers as possible, so they get the benefits of those long searches also.

2 hours ago, Jaager said:

Vossie,

 

For ready tool storage I use brick size blocks of 2 inches of  Styrofoam

insulation.   PVA glue it to a bit larger wood base.  Here I had to glue

two 1 inch pieces - Home Depot sells 2 x 2 project sheets.

It does not take well to hot glue and I think contact cement melts it too.

That's a very good inexpensive idea, although I like stiff regular foam more than styrofoam- the latter collapses and doesn't spring back. What I have used is that stiff gray foam used for packing electronics. I have one for a bunch of those (bad) harbor freight micro carving tools where I made a quick little open-topped box out of 1/4" plywood with a piece of steel as a base, and then cut out a thick piece of that gray foam to fit inside. I can pull those little carving tools out and stab them back in repeatedly and they always hold well.

3 hours ago, Gaetan Bordeleau said:

   Vossiewulf,

 

« A replacement Xacto knife with changeable blades from Ron Hock that are Rc62 and can be made much sharper than Xacto blades »

 

As sharp as scalpel blades? And there is no need to sharpen.

Please tell me you have a decent knife or two and don't just use scalpel blades? Because in woodworking terms scalpel blades aren't particularly sharp at all, and worse whatever edge they do have disappears almost immediately because they are made of comparatively very soft steel. Scalpels are meant to cut human flesh and to last doing that only for one surgery, are designed to use with a slicing motion, and are therefore sharpened so the actual edge has a micro-tooth pattern. Used on skin in a slicing motion this works extremely well. Pushed through wood it doesn't.

 

Minimum woodcarver sharpness is the ability to cut basswood end grain at a 90 degree angle perfectly - every fiber cut, no tears or even bending visible. Go try that with a Xacto blade or a scalpel.

 

And as mentioned, that's not even their worst characteristic for woodworking, it's the fact that the steel hovers around Rc 54 which is extremely soft for a blade that is intended to be sharp, so their edge wears away very quickly. Xacto blades are so soft that you can make their bevels mirror-smooth in just a couple of minutes using a STROP and nothing else, I've done it. There's no point however, it will cut a bit sharper for only a couple cuts before the edge fails.

 

A good knife, either Japanese or made of western-standard quality O1 or A2 tool steels can be made to any hardness. As mentioned above because western knives are made of one homogenous steel and receive the same heat treatment throughout, they can't be made much harder than Rc61-62, but that is plenty hard enough to be able to easily pass the basswood engrain-cutting test. Ron Hock's knives are this hardness and are also cryogenically treated to increase edge wear resistance, and an edge on that type of blade will last several orders of magnitude longer than an edge on an Xacto or scalpel.

 

Good Japanese knives will have Rc63-64 edges and therefore can be sharpened to an even finer edge than Hock knives (assuming same steel quality, lack of inclusions etc.), but the tradeoff is increased fragility- you're unlikely to ever snap off a piece of a Hock edge but it's pretty easy with a Japanese knife.

 

Either type, properly sharpened, is much much sharper than brand-new Xacto and scalpel blades and can be kept that sharp for a couple of weeks of regular use with just a couple touch-ups with a strop. As such they're also orders of magnitude cheaper in the long run when you look at how many Xacto/scalpel blades you buy.

 

And finally, knives that sharp produce much superior results to disposable blades and do so with much less effort. I always feel badly for modelers who have never used something better than a disposable blade and have not yet realized how much their work quality will improve through simply using really sharp tools.

3 hours ago, John Allen said:

I have a great contact for a therapist

Why?  I'm enjoying the hell out of being an out-of-control tool collector. Besides kitchen, bedroom, and living room, all others are being or are fully converted into building facilities  My woodworking area workbench you see above is in what was allegedly my dining room. The built-in cabinets were perfect for main storage for a woodworking and luthier-work area.

 

Ex-wife #2 visits and stays for a month or two each year (complicated) and of course rolls her eyes and frowns but I just remind her that she's the one who left in the first place and as such abdicated the rights to input on this matter

 

9 hours ago, ctclock said:

Many thanks for the links vossiewulf - certainly some cool pieces on those links.

 

Much appreciated - now to start the budget towards an order

 

I can attest to "out-of-control tool collection" - I have the same problem 

Welcome. Obviously I am somebody who trolls the intertubes trying to find some new professional or industrial supply house that has cool tools that either fill gaps or do something better than the tools I have, and I count finding those things as victories at the end of trudging through dozens of useless sites selling crap. 

 

So I also really want to help people who have less time than me to search endlessly for new tools due to family responsibilities, cutting out all the legwork and fruitless searching by pointing them to the things I know they'd find useful. OTOH it can also be a frustrating thing of leading the horses to cool super-delicious vitamin-infused perfect water and they still won't drink. And then you have to watch them being disappointed with results when god himself couldn't do any better with the tools they're using.

 

I actually am seriously considering producing a line of tools just for higher-end modelers, not just ship modelers but for all the people who are serious about their hobby. I have good designs that could be brought in at reasonable price points (considering they're intended for serious modelers, reasonable means $25 for a replacement Xacto knife with changeable blades from Ron Hock that are Rc62 and can be made much sharper than Xacto blades, and are fully intended to be resharpenable. And another design for combo small pliers/tweezers with changeable tips borrowing heavily from my experience with surgical tools, and several other hybrid tools. I think they're sell reasonably well but how I'm supposed to find time I don't know. We had another work crisis starting Thursday where something went seriously wrong for 24 days post-April release before anyone noticed and my team has been working 24 hours since, tag-teaming between the North America teams and the Bangalore group, I had four meetings yesterday with the SVPs to brief them on the latest status, I'm not only responsible for coordinating incident response and driving mitigation/resolution, but I'm also on point to translate the technical details and the response options into something the senior business execs can understand so they can make informed decisions.

 

And I got paged at midnight for a different issue. So, it's a somewhat intense job (cough) and as such completely screws my ability to plan and execute something like getting a cottage manufacturing company off the ground. Even so I might still give it a run, I'd like to see people have good tool options WITHOUT having to peruse the entire catalogs of supply houses from 6 different industries.

1 hour ago, ctclock said:

Thanks all - I have found them

 

Will have to order though - South Africa is a tad far from the States  - some days I wish I could take some lotto earnings and visit all these nice shops and suppliers in the States

 

You guys are spoilt for choice

Jeremy:

 

Otto Frei

Lee Valley

Stewart McDonald

Woodcraft

Artco Tools (professional rotary tools)

DA Medical (where I've bought most surgical tools, EBay store- buy used German tools you'll be very happy)

 

You want to look through pretty much everything each of them have, and as far as I know they all ship global. Probably 90% of my out-of-control tool collection comes from one of those.

 

Here was my benchtop when I laid everything out to reorganize because my acquisitions had completely overwhelmed my existing tool holders. This is what happens when a tool nut is twice divorced and is left totally unmonitored: shrink-tube color-coded needle file arrays. And this is just the stuff ON my bench you're not seeing the 22 other drawers and the built-in cabinets etc.

Little better now. Try not to notice there is yet ANOTHER needle file set in the holder.

9 hours ago, thibaultron said:

Ebay has the Horico dental sanding strips

Thanks Ron, another good source.