vossiewulf

And you want these or these. At least buy one and see whether you think how much better it works from the start and how much longer it lasts than cheaper files make them a lot less expensive than they seem.

Options for dull file: 1. Make it into something else 2. Toss it in an old file drawer for those jobs you need to do where you really don't want to use your nice new files 3. Recycle bin

It's like a perfect ship-building machine.

Yeah I bought a Dietz set some years ago that had a rough case and didn't look terribly good for $40. I don't care about the case and all it took was some 1500 grit sandpaper and it looks great and could be used another 100 years.

When you're done with the model building, you should look at Substance Painter 2 for the texturing, a model that good deserves a good texturing job and CAD programs simply aren't designed to do that. I've used Substance Painter quite a bit and nothing out there can compete with how easy it is to generate outstanding results. There's a pretty significant learning curve coming from a CAD world as to how high end rendering works today, with low and high poly models with normal maps and ambient occlusion maps and ID maps and curvature maps and how physics-based rendering (PBR) works with the now-standard metal/roughness shaders. And with a model that complex you'd definitely want an automated tool for generating the UVW maps for all the textures like Unwrella or Flatiron (that's the one I use). But the results are well worth it.

I find the decision process easier than that, I long ago decided that if I think "hmm maybe I should fix that, it's really not as good as I want" then I should just stop and fix it. If it's bubbled up to that point in my mind it's something that will annoy me every time I look at it and disappoint me when I show the result to others so it seems to me the decision is pretty obvious. It may involve a considerable number of profane invectives of course and possibly throwing some of the offending bits around the room once you have them off, but no point in delaying or waffling about it - if you think you maybe should fix it, you should.

Go the other direction! I have a couple of his 1/300 frigates, very nice little kits. 1/300 Langton HMS Victory

I'm planning just to do the bottom 6 planks on both sides as that was one band, and then switch and work from the bulwarks down. Everything is carefully marked, so as long as I pay attention to those marks it should work fine. But just as with the first planking I didn't want the garboard to be the last one I was trying to fit. Also I prefer to keep it the way it's oriented now, if I flip it up I have to hold it by the keel and I don't care how much glue and how many CF pins there are in there, torquing around on that joint is not something I want to do. My Keelalator thingy is grabbing the ship's central keel plate so I can put quite a bit of force on it, something that's important when I am mostly using CA and hand-clamping.

You should check with the guys working in 1/32 or 1/24, chances are they will have some heavy rigging wire that would be the right size for 1/16. You should definitely look at what Uschi has available, look at the leather decals and the metal powders at least. Also here's some good general rigging info on WWI aircraft/models. Remember that rigging wire of the time was solid steel, not braided, so best material at your scale might be fine piano/hard wire, and you should be using a fine enough wire that bending and twisting shouldn't be a major issue. I don't think they have any British aircraft so you don't need to worry about British streamlined wire.

I'm not sure, but this appears to be a plank. Well two planks of one strake, you can see my dots for treenails. I got everything back in place and functional and family members back home and ready to push ahead on this again. Had to trim bottom edge of bow plank pretty severely post this shot to get it back on its lines, seems like the garboard line rises toward the bow more than I thought. But it's straight now and I'll be doing more tomorrow.

Torbogdan, use lighter wire than that shown for the internal bracing, that is much too heavy and will annoy you over time. Trying to find a good Dr.I pic but here is a repro D.VII, same wire and turbuckles and steel tube and little quarter circle gusset/connectors used on both. Adding this one, this was the one displayed in some agricultural museum in England during the war. You can just barely see the control cables and the bracing is there but almost invisible at this distance.

Hey Alexander, these appear to be very expensive but also potentially VERY nice for roughing out. There's a video on this product page showing the use of an NSK ultrasonic cutter on thick leather, and I don't see any reason it wouldn't work just as well on wood. I haven't done any real research but it appears to be basically an X-Acto knife that they are vibrating along its length like a saw with a very short cutting stroke at 20,000 rpm. Logically, that should work to make any cut easier. I am not sure how good it would be at precision cuts, but it looks like it might be very useful in removing the excess wood before you start the real carving.

And the sig graphics look fine on home machine, so must be something with work laptop, probably something about cross-domain files or something, our laptops are pretty highly secure.

Anyone ever tried an ultrasonic cutter? I see no reason why this wouldn't work as well on wood as it does on thick leather in the video on this product page. It's quite expensive but may be something I put on my long-term queue, I own the NSK Emax Evolution micromotor and know that the expense is very much reflected in the quality and sturdiness of the end product.

Thanks Welfack, some good finds! I'm going to go look at those also. BTW, I'm seeing your sig graphics as broken images. This is my work laptop, but using same Chrome I use at home, will check from there.

This is a supplier some people already know about, but it's one everyone should know about: RB Productions, home of micro-tool mad scientist Radu Brinzan. He's the guy who was first to realize you could make actual tools with photo-etching, he started with his scribe-R, then moved on to saws and other tools. Other companies including the inevitable Chinese but also large model companies have started copying his tools, make sure you give those bastards the finger by buying from Radu directly. I have quite a few of his tools and use them daily in the shop and I've never been disappointed. The scribers can be useful for very fine cut marks, but its primary use is for plastic modelers, they are extremely good panel line scribers. He has a new take on his scriber though with the Scribe-R-File, which has tools lined with teeth so fine that I have a hard time seeing them under a 10x loupe. They're basically .003" files and can draw very fine and clean lines in anything but hardened steel. But the most useful tools are the saws, .003" thick so tiny amounts of material are being removed and in combination with very sharp teeth, means they cut through wood strip with extreme ease and (especially the pico saws) leave a surface that looks polished. The "coarse" blades are 40tpi. The Micros are 56tpi. Nanos are 76tpi. And the Picos, my favorites, are 120tpi. Probably the coolest though is the bucksaw. I had my doubts when I ordered it but as long as you use it as intended (let the blade do the work) and don't go all caveman on it, it works extremely well and can obviously handle much thicker material than the saws above. Three blade heights, all 56tpi. Last saw is like a razor blade with a little folded holder, and it comes with the same tpi options as above including 120tpi. Although it works well also, I've found this one to be the most fragile. With any of the saws, not just these, all it takes is jamming them in a cut once and they'll get bent and it's nearly impossible to remove said bends. This one is most prone as the edge, especially offset, is the least supported. These are what I use for glue in tight places. They get pretty gnarly looking but will last a long time and stand up to having dried glue stripped off them repeatedly, and if you have someplace you want to put glue and a .003" piece of steel shim can't fit, you need to stop what you're doing because you're doing it wrong These sanders for PSA paper are a fundamentally good idea but in my opinion this is a case where he needs to go with thicker material. If these were made of say .015" full hard shim steel they'd be genius. However on the plus side, these are easily bendable so I have some anyway because careful bending can allow you to sand in some crazy inaccessible places. If you're not restoring something and have to do that kind of sanding it's a good guess you didn't think a plan through very well, but still nice to have these to save the day when we decide to do something stupid. As it is I keep trying to remember to order some shim steel in various thicknesses and making my own, perfect for finish sanding of gunports and the like if they had the right springiness. Or you can buy some cut 8 needle files, that works too. In fact I'm going to order some now. Six inches by 100", gosh I wonder if that's enough. I like VME, have used them for years, they have some good deals and are honest. I just bought a 0-1" NSK micrometer that was labeled Draper and as such was about 50% of an NSK branded one. After having it in my hands I'm sure it's NSK, and I've saved considerable money over the years with deals like that and have never felt I didn't receive the item I purchased. Also, their own branded tools are inexpensive but really hard to complain about, you could do much worse than buying a VME-branded 0-1" .0001" accuracy outside micrometer, and it's all of $11.

I heard they keelhauled you.

Work yes, "well" is a relative term. For Le Rhone cylinders like mine, you'd need 56 disks in 6 diameters (one the inner diameter, other five outer diameter including the tapered width section at the bottom of each cylinder). Times 9 cylinders is 496 disks. So let's say you just focus on the two main diameters, you'd need to turn two cylinders of the appropriate diameter. Then you drill and ream out the center, because you need an exact fit and also to minimize the amount of material to be cut to part off each disk. And the parting off process has to create disks of equal thickness down to a couple ten thousandths of an inch. That's harder than what I did. So a better route would be to part off perfect thickness pieces of each diameter, and then create a fully enclosed RTV mold and then make say 12 of each, and then make new molds that will cast 12 of each at a time. And then you'd need to cast 41 sets of 12 each. Then you'd need to glue 496 pieces. I think you're getting the point <g>, I thought about this too and decided although in some ways it wasn't as hard to do it that way, doing it that way would actually require far more time and effort than just turning them on the lathe. The one thing I didn't try that may have promise is to get RTV that's as flexible as possible, and then instead of making a two-part mold that results in a mold seam on the cooling fins requiring many many hours to remove, cast them in a one-piece mold and hope it's flexible enough to demold each part without tearing the mold or breaking the resin fins. If that would work, you'd need to machine only one good example of the cylinder and then cast the rest, with almost no clean up processing required. If someone wants to try that, let me know and I'll send one of my cylinders to try, but you also have to promise not to damage my parts as I really really really don't want to have to make replacements that match. Thanks Ken, it's on the schedule now BTW name is Jay and that obviously works, but if you use my handle it's Vossie, not Wulf. I answer fine to Vossie, I've had this handle since 1991 on CIS and GEnie and even (ex) wives have frequently called me that.

Where the hell were you when I was making these? OTOH then you lose the excitement of cutting one of those grooves in one pass when you can feel the piece pulsing, with each pulse just infinitesimally short of the point at which the cutter grabs and then there are loud noises and lathes bouncing around a workbench and mass hysteria, gets the blood flowing. Sometimes literally. I'm familiar with the Makers Faire, not sure if that's what you mean. I considered that and decided yeah I think I'll go with an internal steel dowel pin for alignment ;-)

Tom passed away like 20 years ago now isn't it? If they're still carrying 1/16th Spandau jackets, those are based on the ones he made for me, I had him make 1/16th jackets back in 1992 or 1993 when the largest he made was 1/32 and I was the first person to request 1/16th from him. VERY nice guy, spent considerable time on the phone with me working through a couple prototypes before we got it right. I was very saddened to hear when he passed away, he was a very cool guy with big ideas, he would have remained a real presence in several hobbies. As I was saying, spinning out an accurate Le Rhone 9b/Oberursel UR.II is not exactly child's play, and if done in the standard manner of casting the cylinders split along the long axis, it can lead to the loss of will to live as you try to level and sand out the glue joints from eleventy hundred cooling fin joints. That plus the challenge led me to machine them, these are for a 1/16 Camel that is currently on hold, I need to swing back to my WWI stuff at some point. The cooling fins are .006" and I had to make a custom cutting tool similar to a parting tool and you can assume there were a couple of spectacularly exploded prototypes before I got one that would hold together. I used a DRO for depth and a dial indicator stuck with a magnet onto my lathe bed for the fin spacing. It was slow careful fiddly work where I pretty much held my breath the whole time as I was operating beyond the hairy edge of what the mini-lathe, and 2024 aluminum as a whole for that matter, could handle and had several explode or jam the machine, will train you to be fast on the emergency stop if nothing else. Engine block/casing/prop shaft/rear prop mount were machined out of a single piece of aluminum on the lathe first, then taken to milling machine where I used a rotary table to machine the 9 flats, drill the cylinder mountings, and the holes around the ring on the front of the casing and the prop mounting holes. If you know how to cast resin reasonably well or know someone who does, I could send the engine and one of the cylinders to you, let me know.

Scratchbuilding the engine is considerably more difficult than the guns. I of course when the very hard road because some reason I don't know, and did it in aluminum. Even doing it in simpler materials is not easy and you'll need to be reasonably good at casting. I'll post some more info later.

If you don't want to total scratchbuild, you HAVE to replace the cooling jackets, they are iconic with respect to German aircraft of WWI and anyone who knows the subject at all knows what they should look like. Here's a mid-road to take - these are the people I use to do custom photoetch as their costs are extremely reasonable and they'll work with you to get it right. In fact I used them for the exact purpose of creating Spandau cooling jackets, unfortunately in 1/12 which doesn't sound like much but it'd be obviously too big for your plane, or I'd send some that I still have. However I think I still have the artwork and if so it's a trivial matter to rescale it. They need vector artwork, one can do it in Photoshop where they are called paths, or Illustrator, which is designed from the get-go to do vector artwork but I find Photoshop easier to learn if you're not familiar with the process. But in this case you wouldn't need to learn that bit if I can find the artwork. They have a minimum size so you won't get just two, I think I had 10 or 12 in the sheet they made for me. If you went with the smallest sheet size you'd be around 50 pounds shipped... maybe 60, or about the cost of one of the Gas Patch guns. That said, unless you prefer to make the Spandau bodies with their exposed gizmology yourself, it would be a much better idea to use the Gas Patch guns if you can afford it.

For small blades like this you have lots of options for sharpening, including diamond and ceramic and water stones. Of those I prefer water stones even though they're the most messy, they cut fast and leave an excellent surface. Diamond cuts fast but tends to be much more coarse in terms of grit, their supposed 1200 grit is more like 300 in water stones, plus they wear out. I've tried several ceramics and they all got tossed as useless, they cut slow and glaze easily. Probably best option if you don't want water stones is sanding films, they come in appropriate grits for sharpening and work well, but I find them to be expensive as like any sandpaper, these wear out rapidly and you can spend $3 or $4 just sharpening one knife. My favorites are the Shapton Glass stones, not cheap but cut faster than anything else I've used but unlike water stones they stay reasonably flat. I have those in 220/1000/4000/8000 with a strop to finish and haven't used anything else since I got them

Yeah, I wouldn't use those, this is where I have a problem with Model Expo aircraft and cannon kits - their insistence on using white metal where it's totally inappropriate. I took forever to do one of the cannon kits because it took many hours to file, sand, fill, and rescribe detail. I recommend either buying the Gas Patch versions or making your own, but as you see they had lots of complicated bits sticking out the right hand side and you either need to simplify those bits or be prepared to spend a few hours scratchbuilding accurate versions, if you do the latter use styrene sheet/plasticard.

Having scratchbuilt quite a few Spandaus including this scale, the accuracy of the Gas Patch version is quite good, only part that looks a little heavy and simplified is the ammo feed. Otherwise looks quite good for a mid-late production LMG08/15 version. Like all Maxims, it ejected the rounds forward from the lower receiver under the barrel. The long box on the left side is the fusee spring that controlled recoil, the little gauge in the middle is where you set it; back then it helped to have an easily adjustable spring to handle the greater variability of ammo. Can't remember what the top and min values where but it's set in the typical place, about 250 rpm. They were called Spandaus btw as many were made at the national Spandau arsenal and those have the city/arsenal name stamped on the top of the receiver. Also the cone on the end of the barrel isn't a flash suppressor, it's a muzzle booster to provide a bit more backward recoil energy, the WWII MG34 and MG42 had something almost identical. The Parabellum machine gun that observers used was also a Spandau/Maxim variant, just further lightened for ease of gunner handling and the internal mechanisms were lightened to provide the higher ROF a gunner needs compared to the fixed forward-firing Spandaus.