vossiewulf

Chris, I sometimes wonder why there isn't a good USS Independence of 1814 kit, if you're looking for ideas. Otherwise I look forward to the Alert and any other kit you produce.

It's a rusted electrified power egg, obviously.

Extremely good work. You make that joinery sequence look easy.

No glue yet, but Trial has them lined up all the way across. Or at least the outboard one on the port side lines up with the inboard section on the starboard side, which are the only two I can see on Tony's pics. I knew about the nail trick, but wanted to play with Mikhail's chisels It wasn't that hard, one of the chisels was exactly the right size and I matched a drill bit to it so the squaring required very little removal of wood.

Progress has been a bit slow since work is being busy, but I've made everything at this point except the pumps and a small windlass I'm going to add below the spanker boom as seen in the model of Trial. Actually almost all of them have more than one small windlass on deck, but there isn't room between the anchor windlass and the forward grate on LN to fit the one typically seen forward. The anchor windlass started with an octagonal section of boxwood. I just marked an octagon on each end and did it by hand with one of my small planes, it wasn't hard. I then drilled holes for the windlass bars, and squared them off using one of Mikhail's small chisels. To prevent tearout, I "crosscut" the piece into the various required sections on the lathe, and also made a couple round slices from another piece of boxwood to go on each side of the ratchet gear. The ratchet gear itself is just a slice from the starting octagonal piece that I carved with a knife. Test fitting, it's missing its starboard end piece here. Also, the cross piece on boom support of Trial is much lower than that on LN, and the pawl for the windlass ratchet attaches to that cross piece. So in my case, no pic but I've added a small piece to the centerline boom support and the pawl will attach to that. I also stuck with a single ratchet, whereas Trial has two. And I also took a couple evenings and made and soldered rings for all of the eyebolts on deck.

Fixed that for you.

Very spiffy jig!

Beautiful work Kortes. These are very odd boats- hull turned almost into a circle, everything on the hull is sweeping curves whether it makes sense or not, but then we come to a bowsprit that is stark square-sectioned black iron with solid iron bar stays, it's like a section of prison wall bolted to the bow

Doris, we have future wedding plans! You HAVE to take care of yourself, please be careful! (You'll get tired of that old boring husband at some point, I know it) Seriously, protect those hands, they do things very few people in the world can do.

If you look at the real deck planking patterns of the Vasa or the Mary Rose, you'll stop worrying about it It seems the driving concept of the period was to use whatever they had at hand, including 2 foot planks and wide planks and really narrow planks, fit together like the decks were done on All You Can Drink Free Beer day.

Apparently I am not a scientician.

Grobet and Glardon-Vallorbe Corradi US, France, and Italy respectively. Don't spend $200, get their medium-range needle/riffler file sets in the $30-$60 range, their value line products are much better than the hobby store sets and are good enough for what you need unless you intend to do lots of metal work. Cuts 0 and 2 are best for wood, the higher the number the finer the cut. For metal it's good to finish with cut 4. Waterstones will keep anything made of steel sharp. The downside is they're messy and soft, so it's difficult to keep them flat, and you have to keep them flat for good sharpening. I don't like the cut of diamond as it cuts deep scratches, I find you have to remove lots of metal to get out the scratches of a 1000 grit diamond cut. The best option are the good ceramic stones, but they are expensive and only worth it if you intend to use lots of edge tools that you sharpen regularly.

The waterstone files are intended for sharpening gouges/V-gouges, I thought you were saying you purchased their micro carving tools, not just the tiny chisels. You can sharpen those chisels with a watchmaker's screwdriver sharpener and the waterstones you already have. You should return the Veritas jig unless you're going to get full-sized chisels and planes, which are of limited use in ship modeling. With the turning tools, yes you can use your waterstones on those as well. WRT more tools, invest in good needle files and riffler files, don't buy the $9.99 set at the hobby store. Good files work much, much better and working mostly on wood, will last forever so they're a good investment. The other major one is a micromotor, they are much handier with much more torque compared to Dremels.

You're basically running a mass spectroscopy test of the paints with that "palette" arrangement. I'd be more surprised at an acrylic hobby paint that didn't separate. That said, I've seen Vallejo paints act weird with any solvent other than their "high compatibility" solvent, that only really works with their paints.

The Mk.II honing guide is brilliant for sharpening full-sized plane irons, it's not much good for your small chisels. A preferred option is waterstone files, these are only about 1.5" long and can be easily shaped to fit inside and outside profiles, just use an old metal file you don't care about to shape them. https://www.japanwoodworker.com/products/set-of-four-1000-file-stones-king (you need at least 1000 + 4000). And for straight chisels you use a watchmaker's screwdriver sharpener. https://www.google.com/search?q=screwdriver+sharpener&rlz=1C1CHZL_enUS736US736&source=univ&tbm=shop&tbo=u&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjOmpOshuLfAhXWHTQIHdxPCAoQsxgIKw&biw=1414&bih=746&dpr=1.25

My suggestion is to as much as possible not need to sand into tight corners by pre-sanding and pre-finishing anything that's going to go into a tight corner. If I need to sand into a tight corner I feel like I didn't think something through correctly.

Danny, very nice job once again. But if you're a stickler for accuracy, the winterketten track extensions on your track should bend inward toward the bogies a bit. See pic below for an example.

Per the contemporary model I'm most closely following, I spent some time soldering rings for the eyebolts, do they have a specific name? And what is the purpose, only thing I can see is they might let a rope twist freely a little bit as compared to going straight to the eyebolt.

Metal, except for a couple weird alloys, will always bounce back after being bent. So if you want to bend it to closely follow a curve, you have to bend it farther than that either by hand or by using a form with a smaller radius than the intended final curve.

Thanks, that is a good view.

That sounds like a good guess, but one wonders why they couldn't just say StuG III ausf G and use its proper name. With the tracks, the cover art shows Winterketten. Don't tell me you're trying to do Winterketten with paper also, that would qualify as cruel and unusual punishment of customers by a publisher.

Very nice job, Danny. BTW I don't know where the 40 comes from, since this is a standard SturmGeschutz (StuG) III. It took its designation from the fact that it was built on the Panzer III hull, and eventually Panzer III production stopped entirely in favor of the StuG- as the war turned against Germany they needed more and more AT assets to deal with the Soviet T-34 hordes, and the StuG III G and later were quite effective tank killers with a good 75mm/L48 gun. Without turrets they were also cheaper and faster to build, and the StuG III was the most-produced armored vehicle built by Germany in WWII, with somewhere around 10,000 being built. The StuGs were Von Manstein's idea, the early versions had a short-barreled 75MM gun intended to fire primarily HE in support of infantry attacks, hence its name which literally means assault gun. They often operated as single platoons parcelled out across an infantry battalion to support the infantry assaults, and were quite successful in this role. However, as noted their role changed during the war to basically exactly the same as a Pz-IV or -V, primarily a tank hunter and only secondarily supporting infantry. Interestingly, the crews of StuGs were not part of the Panzerwaffe, they were artillery soldiers since their first role supporting infantry envisaged considerable use of the short-barrel 75mm in the indirect role. With respect to the numbers you see on the side of German StuGs/tanks, they are usually company/platoon/vehicle, so if you see 321 that's the command tank of the second platoon of third company. Two-digit numbers were not at all typical, so not sure what the 40 is meant to be.

Between that and Tony's pics, I get the idea, thanks. It would be easy enough to turn the center section of the windlass with the holes into a ratchet mechanism, but I'm not sure where the holes go to operate it. I guess I could put them outboard like this one, but in fact the best plan is probably just to throw away the kit windlass and make one like the windlass on that model as it looks like the kit designer took the whole boom and its rig straight from this model, and the kit-supplied windlass doesn't match the style.

Any recommendations for a supplier with a better windlass? I looked on Ages of Sail and the only one that would be appropriate is the exact same one that is in the kit. If not, is there somewhere with good photos? The only contemporary model with photos close enough is one of Tony's, but I still can't get a good view of what the mechanism looked like.

Rick, I don't understand the windlass at all. What exactly operates it? We have nothing but a little flap of wood that's just pointed at holes in the center of the big windlass, only way to operate it that I see is with some lever going in those holes and something that goes in the holes to catch that flimsy piece of wood? It's not making much sense to me.