vossiewulf

Get some files, and you're going to need wood carving gouges to thin out the gunwales, generally that is done by cutting straight down with a shallow-curve gouge. Same gouges would be helpful carving down the hull also. If you want to be successful you'll need to invest in at least some of the tools you see people using here- ship modeling can be accessible or it can be extremely difficult depending on what tools you have.

You should also read the build log of an active Sultana build:

What tools are you using? Some aggressive files or rasps are good for removing most of the waste. You should also check out the new build log from Mr. Bluejacket himself of Red Jacket. He just started a few days ago and is busy carving down a much bigger hull than you have, and it would be a very good idea to ask him the exact process he follows while doing so.

Some progress on the margin planks. First, guess how wide the margin planks are. While I'm at it, I know it's quite expensive but the NSK Evolution micromotor with the 90 degree attachment is something you really want if you build ships- it's a handheld disk sander and you can chew through half an inch of endgrain wood on a plank or remove a few molecules to refine a fit. It lets you set two angles at once and the output is a perfectly straight edge. It's pretty much the perfect tool for fitting the ends of planks on ships, so if you can somehow get it on a Christmas list, do so. It will speed your work considerably. It makes getting a fit like this a lot easier than it looks. I decided on a 6mm margin plank as that leaves me exactly 36mm on each side, so I can make my planks 4mm-4.01mm with 9 a side. It might have been 5mm but I really didn't want to make 4.138932mm planks. Also decided on three planks for the margin with scarf joints. I blackened the edge with a 4B solid-graphite pencil. Test fitting the first scarf. The middle plank. I see no way to bend these planks for the bow so I'm spiling the bow plank. I started with a paper template. And transferred that to a piece of holly, some disk sander work and hand sanding, we have a pretty good fit. I knocked off there, tomorrow I scribe the other edge and cut the scarf and then move to the other side.

Good luck Andrea, you're in the right place to ask questions, there is tremendous knowledge in this community. As for your stern, I assume you need to work the hull down until your template fits. That will mean removing some material from the sternpost area.

Thanks!

Of course I would have, it should have the proper planking. But that wasn't going to stop me from looking for scapegoats when something went wrong! I put five holes in the stem, I think the first thing you told me a year and a half ago was that the stem needed five holes and that meant a five-hole deadeye and for some reason I haven't fathomed yet, you think making the deadeye is going to be super tricky. Generally small is not a problem for me. I remember making a 1/48 Albatros D.III, about six inches long, and I rigged it so the control column actually worked and moved the control surfaces. And then there were the 1/32 cockpits with every knob and switch and indicator light. I can't see that well anymore without help, but I have lots of experience with small and fiddly. In fact I'm very likely here to build some 1/200-1/600 ships, and if I scratchbuild a ship it's also likely to be small. I may get one of those engraver's microscopes with the 10" working distance to facilitate that work if I do go that direction.

Four months... are you sure you're not an alien with say three extra arms growing out of your back? Either that or you didn't sleep for four months? I'd love to see a video of you working on it, there would have been just a blur of arms and tools and flying wood chips It's beautiful, have never seen that quality achieved with such incredible speed.

Then the next steps forward and back are all Rick's fault, because he totally twisted my arm and forced me to put in the waterway and spirketting before going ahead with deck planking. My arm is barely attached to the socket from all the twisting. And it went basically fine, except my spirketting strip turned out to be thinner than I really wanted, but it still looks ok. The problem occurred when I masked everything to spray the red- it turns out this clear finish is adhering none too strongly to anything. It's not the black, it lifted from the raw cocobolo too. Not really sure what to do. Switching finishes won't help much at this point as it's still the bottom coat everywhere and may induce compatibility issues. All I can really do is remove all the lifted sections and spray more coats until it disappears, and then know this finish will fall off if you look at it sideways. Regardless it will be a lengthy process to fix the damage.

Thanks Rick, that is noted and will help me as I have no idea how to tell if a pin rail has the pins too close. I see several variations on pin rails also so I assume it's ok to have more than one. Thanks Popeye Two steps forward and at least two steps back. Starting with forward, I spent a couple evenings fixing some things I wasn't happy with. One was the cap rail, I thought the open grain of the walnut would be ok along with the open grain of the cocobolo, but under black it looked terrible, like the sailors wasted time by carving huge gouges out of the rail. So I sanded it down, squeegeed a couple coats of CA, sanded down, re-blacked and resprayed the top coat. The stern just got sanded down quite a bit before refinished.

Then you'll definitely fall in love with aniline dyes, it's what guitar companies use to dye their guitars because it doesn't obscure the pretty grain of their quilted tops at all. Another thing I like is that although it looks like it penetrates, it doesn't- the color is right there on the surface. So if you dye something and you don't like the output, a couple of minutes with sandpaper and it's all gone and you can try again. If nothing else it saves on test pieces. I generally apply with a rag, wait for 30 seconds or so (with alcohol solvent things move quickly), and then wipe excess, I find you can get some weird surface effects if you just spread and leave it on. Repeat until you get the tone you want. You can even generally go back lighter by wetting the surface again and rubbing it immediately and if you do get some undesired effect it's also solved by rewetting and wiping. Below is a neck radius sander on which I used aniline dye.

If you're using stains to avoid the grain obscuration of paint, you might want to try aniline dyes for their much improved clarity over pigment-based stains, and with a kit of the basic primary colors you can make any shade you need. I use alcohol-based so grain isn't raised. And by the way, your ship is stunning

Ditto, but the other comments here are all requirements for good sawing too.

Polar bears on the icebergs!

I have an NSK but I looked at the Artco page and it says 1/8" standard with a 3/32" reducing sleeve. Usually 3/32" is standard as most burs are 3/32", 1/8" is considered heavy duty for serious wood removal. It looks like it has some kind of keyless collet. That's one thing I like about the NSK's lever collet- flip a lever one way and the bur drops out, drop in new one and flip lever and it's good to go.

Honing is just refining an already-sharp edge, and generally speaking you use a strop or a high-grit polishing stone. The idea is sharpen once, keep it sharp many times with the strop until the edge starts to get dubbed over, then you go back and sharpen again and reestablish the bevel. So if I started from a dull edge I would use my 1000/4000/8000 stones to resharpen and then a strop for the final polish. I'd then just use the strop on the edge for several weeks until the edge starts to get rounded over, at which point I sharpen again. Strops are made from many materials, one is leather. My favorite is an artificial pad that uses aluminum oxide powder, but most people use leather strops with chromium green stropping paste. Just go to Lee Valley or Woodcraft (or a good similar retailer on that side of the pond) and search on strops, you'll find both the strops themselves and the recommended paste. Also not sure whether you're talking small planes and small blades or full-sized ones. Full-sized plane irons generally are sharpened with a slight curve across the edge, so the corners are maybe .003" curved back from the center of the cutting edge. This feathers the edge of the cut of the plane and prevents marks made by sharp plane iron corners. The best way to do that correctly is to use the Veritas Mk.II sharpening system from Lee Valley with the barrel-shaped roller, that makes it easy to rock the iron slightly as you're sharpening, relieving the corners.

The thing is, sharpening my knife up there takes me a good solid 15 minutes, and I only have to do it about once a month because it's a Ron Hock blade that holds an edge forever. Only steel I know that holds an edge longer is the PM-V11 steel from Lee Valley. Sharpening small plane irons takes no time at all, either. I would recommend people get Shapton Glass Stones in 1000 and 4000 grit plus a strop of their choice and they're set for life sharpening everything from full-sized plane irons down to little carving knives. I've been using some Shapton stones regularly for over 5 years and I see no meaningful change in flatness and they still remove steel faster than anything I've ever seen, including diamond, so I'm thinking they're going to be still working fine 20 years from now. Anyone here who can build a ship can make a pretty knife. All you need is: a drill press that can drill a 3/16" hole accurately some 3/16 brass rod Epoxy Knife and sandpaper Large bottle of thin CA glue Blade with pre-drilled holes Check link below, scroll down to Violin Knife Blades. Buy the middle one. Take a piece of nice-looking wood and machine it down to handle-size and then rip it in half. Mortise each side of the handle to 1/2 the depth of the knife blade, with the back of the knife edge lining up with one edge of the handle. Basically you want the knife's "back" to be one straight line from handle to point. http://www.hocktools.com/products/knives.html The tip angle is a bit less than typical X-Acto, if you want to refine that, just use a bench grinder, regularly dipping the blade in ice water. You don't want any part of the blade to get warmer than warm to the touch or the temper will be ruined. Cut brass rod pieces that are just a tad too long, drill the holes, and test the fit. Epoxy everything, tap the rods through the holes in handle and blade, and clamp the hell out of it. After however long, declamp and start shaping the handle. If you have an oscillating spindle sander, that works well here. I don't, and what I do is take out one of my other knives and I just start carving the handle down. Round it fully with files and rotary tools and sandpaper, and then sand the handle out to 1500 grit or so so it's very, very clear and clean. This controls how pretty the grain looks under the crystal-clear CA glue, so it's worth it to spend a few more minutes and take it out to 2000 grit so the wood looks polished before the finish goes on. Take a tube of some kind that's a bit bigger than the knife handle and attach it to a base, then mostly fill it with thin super glue. Most of this glue can be recovered if you're worried about using that much glue. Tape a crosspiece on the blade so the handle will be suspended in the thin super glue tube, and dunk it in there, ensuring all the wood is under glue. After 10 minutes or so, take it out and let it dry, but do NOT set it aside- you have to work the finish right now before the CA glue fully hardens. If you do it now, you can work down the super glue to a smooth finish in little time, working from 320 grit up to 2000. If you let it fully harden, it will take quite a while and you'll go through lots of sandpaper getting there. If you want super-bright gloss finish, take some Novus Plastic Polish Fine Scratch Remover and buff the handle. Once the glue fully hardens, the handle and its finish are almost indestructible. Mine have been rolling around on my bench for years and hardly show a scratch, the biggest "dings" come from accidentally spilling CA on them, I then have to sand them down again. The brass end-pieces I add are there not just for looks, but to move the knife's balance point back to just ahead of center, and to increase its mass a bit. This improves control and feel. If you want something similar, you'll need a lathe and some 3/8 or so brass rod. I just Mark One Eyeball them, face the end and use files to taper them. Once tapered, I use a parting tool to add the little reveals. Feel free to be creative, all you need is about the right weight in brass, the shape can be whatever you like. All in all, several orders of magnitude less tricky than planking a hull

I wish I could get more people to convert over to using real knives with Rc62 blades and learning how to sharpen them instead of using X-Acto X-Acto blades aren't very sharp by knife sharpening standards, their steel isn't very good and probably Rc55 or so (so they lose an edge very quickly), and they're very thin and weak and as such can only handle very low-stress cuts. A real knife is so much more capable. There are many makers of carving knives, just buy one that is in the $25-$35 range and you'll stop using Xacto. Well that's not quite accurate, I still use an X-Acto knife (a replacement I made), but it's only there for cleaning out glue and scraping things, the tasks I would rather not use my good knives for. Below is my X-Acto and my main knife.

Much narrower kerf than Zona saws, hold an edge much longer.

Oh and a gratuitous stern shot, haven't showed that. I think this cutter was owned by a smuggler, who blinged-out the stern. And then named it White Tail.

Rudder machined out, deck furniture manufactured. You know the only parts from this kit I've used so far are the bulkheads, keel, sub-deck and now the grates. Do I get credit for a scratchbuild? Maybe I should request a new semi-scratchbuilt category. The grate frames are boxwood in the right size as far as I can tell, with lap joints at the corner which I understand is the correct joinery. The companion was planked vertically with boxwood and then given hinges out of bits of styrene and door knobs made from squishing the melted end of a piece of stretched sprue. I would have turned them out of wood but my dowel stock seems MIA (I had to move out and back into my house over the summer). As you can see in the pics, I used alcohol-based aniline dye. You can mix any color, there's no pigment to obscure grain, and even though it looks like it penetrates deeply, it doesn't; don't like this color, get out 400 grit and in five minutes your piece has no color and you're ready to try again. They're also very efficient, as you see a very little goes a long way- get a set of dye powders and you have stain for ships for forever. The downside is that they'll stain anything, I treat them like nitro glycerine in terms of safe handling. I also sat staring at the rudder for about two hours before I came up with what I think is a good way to make something that looks realistic while also having some strength. But I will probably set it aside for the time being to focus on deck planking.

You know I was thinking of doing Cruizer next but how am I supposed to beat this? Very nice work Joe.

Depending on the angle at which the plank is intersecting the stem/stern/keel the bulkheads can stop anywhere from on the bearding line for planks coming in at almost 90 degrees (e.g. center of garboard) to well short of the bearding line for planks coming in at an acute angle (like those going into the sternpost).

Yeah, you can't go wrong with pretty much anything sold by Little Machine Shop. At least I haven't received anything but quality tools and equipment buying from them. Their suped-up versions of the Sieg mini lathe and mini mill definitely own the top end corner of the market, I'm jealous

The standard Sieg 7x14 Mini-Lathe has been around for many years now and is a very accurate machine with which you can do very fine work. I bought mine from Micro-Mark under their brand, same machine. But Little Machine Shop is the best place for you to spend time if you're considering getting a small lathe or milling machine. You can give them a call and they'll talk you through all the options. https://littlemachineshop.com/products/product_view.php?ProductID=4959&category=1271799306 Attached are 1/16th Le Rhone 9J cylinders that I turned on my standard Sieg lathe. The cooling fins are .006".