vossiewulf

In my 20s I did a 1/32 F-4J Phantom with every single knob and switch in both cockpits, my normal eye focal distance was about 3" and I could do that work without any magnifiers. Yeah I can't do that anymore I finished one rabbet, only minor annoyance is that this is one of the places they act like planking has zero thickness. You have the counter bulkhead aligned with rudder post, you plank that surface and now it isn't aligned with the rudder post and your final planking either is going to have a jag in length or you have to cut 1mm away of the rudder post, which I did. It's not easy to cut a perfectly square 1mm piece out of the edge of cocobolo, thank god for Mikhail's new chisels. Then working on inside planking, probably finish that tomorrow. Have been taking longer than was needed since these will be painted, providing good opportunity to experiment with boxwood and having butt joints and for no particular reason other than practice for the future I even cut a fancy scarf between two pieces. I can see why people like boxwood for this as it's hard but not too hard, and can have nice detail and crisp lines. Only downside I see so far is it blows out very easily, going to have to really pay attention to that. Will post some of the pics tomorrow probably.

Welcome Michael. However the one I have seems fully hardened and it would seem to need to be, so you'd need to be able to heat treat or have someone do it for you. Also if you want some special shapes, contact Ron Hock at Hock Tools, he will usually do things like this for what I consider very reasonable prices (like my knife blade was $20).

Make sure you look at existing tools - remember people have been making strips for inlay work for a few hundred years. Lie-Nielsen has a traditional inlay strip cutter and a thicknesser. Lie-Nielsen inlay tools Japan Woodworker has a traditional Japanese inlay strip cutter as well:

Now we just need 150 guys who are 3" tall and equipped with tiny adzes.

I forgot to reply to last message and congratulate you on getting the parts finally. The wings are looking great, Anthony himself would nod approval You're making great progress, hopefully you can continue with the fuselage, except for alignment issues it should be easier than the wings.

Welcome Achu! Being a hardened, grizzled, steely-eyed veteran ship constructor with like three months and one third of one ship under my belt, I can say do as much girding of thy modeling loins as possible, both in terms of tools and knowledge. And the single most important thing I think I've learned is that this is not a craft where one even considers leaping without looking. You look. Then you do it several more times. You walk across the valley to see what the leap looks like from that angle. And three or four more places around the area, including renting Mr. Henderson's hot air balloon for an aerial view. A bit of laser range-finding later, we know exactly how high cliff is and the angle of the leap, the effect of the updraft on final impact velocity, and exactly what bones you will be breaking and in what order. At that point you're sure you're ready for the leap. You're wrong :). You have to then make sure you'll get the best ambulance service and that the road into the quarry is clearly marked and level enough for a standard ambulance to navigate. And then because you'll be unconscious you tattoo on your chest to go to Mercy hospital and take 82 because 95 is down to two lanes near Simpsonville. Click on the link in my signature and you'll see me make a series of mistakes, every one of which can be traced to not following some part of the steps above- either not looking long and hard enough to see a problem that already exists or not walking through the next steps in enough detail to see that my cunning plan had not been thought through. Then go read some build logs from one of the master scratchbuilders and watch those things not happen because there are no ambushes or surprising events for which they weren't prepared. And that in the end they make progress faster even though they're spending five times as much time preparing and double checking than less experienced builders. The wonderful thing about this site and the community is that if you feel the slightest doubt or aren't sure if you're seeing all the woods that that need to be checked for hiding bears, just pause and ask a question. You'll get an answer from minutes to a few hours from people who've already built the kit and know three ways to handle whatever has you bothered. I have a friend who wants to do ship modeling and asked me what tools he needs; although I'm new to ships I've been building aircraft and other things for a quite long time and I'm pretty well equipped. Instead of trying to list many things I just put everything I had been using to build the hull on my workbench and took some pics. You don't need everything you see here, for example you can probably struggle by with less than four knives and only one rotary tool. But you will find everything here useful and they will make many tasks easier and faster. You'll soon figure out which ones you want/need most and can set a priority order for buying. You'll of course get good advice here on what exactly to get and who has the best prices. Only thing hard to see is overflowing clear stand top left, inside are like 8 kinds of scissors including tiny Castroviejo ophthalmic surgery scissors and lots of forceps and tweezers and splinter forceps and diamond files.

This is made for watchmakers, so it's quite sticky but leaves nothing of itself behind. People figured out that would make it also useful for cleaning rotary burs and files, and now also sells for that purpose. It doesn't replace a file card for big files or a fine brass brush for needle files, but used together they will make your files and burs look brand new. I use it whenever I stop to do a deep cleaning on a file, you can squash a needle file into it and pull it out without a speck of the sticky stuff remaining on the file. It's kind of creepy that it's as sticky as it is and yet leaves a total clean surface. Probably lots of other uses for it too. (Link to its listing on Otto Frei) (Link to StewMac listing. They're not cheap, this one is about $30, but they have a mini one at $24 that might be a better ship use option) This is another scraper, one favored by luthiers. It comes from the "heavy" school of scrapers and hence requires a very different and light touch, with these you mostly let its own weight put on the required pressure. And it's got a good selection of straight sections and curves which would make it a one-stop-shop for scraping hull planks level. I couldn't find mine when I was scraping down first layer of planking on my LN, but I will be using it on the final boxwood planking- very good quick way to level planking without the risks associated with planes.

I also had been looking for a new magnifier light, I'm using my woodworking bench for ship model building and it wasn't equipped in some way for modeling like this, and I wanted to leave my other magnifier light over my metal lathe as it's very helpful there. I looked at ones up to $350, and although I'm sure the $350 one was superb, this one seems to have very nearly as much bang for 1/3 price. It just arrived today, will report back on it.

What John said. https://www.amazon.com/Carson-MagniVisor-Head-Worn-Magnifier-CP-60/dp/B007CDJKM2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1488332305&sr=8-1&keywords=Carson+Optical+Magnivisor

Awesome, thanks Rick Now I have this here for reference, and once we get closer I'll start matching what I have against the needs, and I think Chuck's "natural" hemp color is pretty good, at least the new one that's less green than the original. I also wanted to get a serving machine, I'm aware of Chuck's plus the Russian guy (I think) who also makes some tools. Are there reviews of these on MSW or elsewhere?

More important factors than choice of wood finish (there are many that will work fine) is preparation of surface prior to finishing and correct leveling of the surface during finishing. This is speaking as a long time furniture maker rather than ship modeler, I am new to the latter. However as I look through finished models and build logs, I see many severely marred by lack of a few simple steps during finishing. First of.course is sanding, you can get away with 220 but when I want good wood to look really nice under a clear coat, I will take the wood sanding out to 600 grit. If you are using an open-grained wood like walnut or oak where the pores are way out of scale, you should use a fill coat(s) to fill the pores, either a colored filler or clear sanding sealer or really good are the two-part epoxy clear fillers used by guitar makers a lot these days, system 3 is a good example. When it comes to the final finish, even if you wet the wood to raise the grain before final sanding, you're never going to get all of the fuzz. So it's very important to run over your surfaces lightly with 1500 grit or so after the first coats, doing so will improve the final result quite a bit. After a second coat I usually work it a little harder but with 2000 grit, this will help remove lots of high and low spots in the finish. And I'll always hit the final coat with 2000 or 2500 one last time. Following these steps should ensure you get a nice finish with ripples no larger than should be at scale. All of that applies to paint just as much as clear, except for a painted surface there is no reason to sand past 220.

BTW Rick did you use the kit rigging line? I've picked up lots of lines, like one of everything Chuck sells plus a bunch from a guy in England and I have a good supply of fly-tying thread as I intend to do some very small subjects too. The thing I like about your rigging is that (besides overall looking very clean and well done) it looks much more in scale than most ships, all but the best seem to have excessively heavy rigging everywhere. So at a minimum I'd like to know the sizes you used for the various applications, but that can come later after we've going through the many steps of external planking and wales and decks and things.

That's another good point, looking at all the lines belaying up there including sheets that run forward to avoid the huge gaff boom. But also at the same time, exactly what type of ship is going to more often need bow chase fire than a cutter? Seems odd to me that good clear bow chase firing positions wouldn't be a primary requirement for the design.

Thanks Mark. I was also wondering if it was only used when they needed bow chase fire, seems to me some of the frigates I've seen have had part-time chase ports that looked a bit elevated from other ports on that deck.

Mark you really don't have to go to that extreme to make us new guys who go one step back for every one forward feel better And I'm sorry, I know that must have been a serious ouch of a decision. But like others have said you'll feel much better once you know you have it 100% right.

Good luck Gaetan we have faith in you

And after THAT long scenic tour through the outback of gunwale construction I'm back to the original point but I think I've clarified it, the inboard planking should follow the external planking and the rail sheer so we get the top of strakes as gunport sills. And since this is just being painted I shouldn't stress about how many planks I use to do it.

Ditto, thanks Chuck. I'll also go see if I can find more, now that I know they're called planking expansions

Ok, will look there, and glad I can contribute to your overall health I will go look at Chuck's post. I mean I assume Chuck is totally accurate about what he's doing, I'd just like to know what the rules and constraints were. The tools are phenomenal. I have many fairly expensive edge tools from traditions all over, US of course and Swedish and German and Japanese, lots of Japanese tools. These are as good as any made anywhere. And he's selling them for about 1/3 what they're worth, you could make a reasonable living buying tools from Mikhail and selling them on Ebay with a 200% markup.

Ok i don't know what I did to merit a personal ship construction research service but I'm rating the results at *****, a solid five stars :). The Swift's gunwales are basically exactly what I have including the rises of the gunport sills forward and aft. Problem totally resolved while I was working on rabbets with my new carving tools from Mikhail. So I'll have to add this to the pile of ones I owe you

Thanks Rick, unfortunately that's where I am too. I just dropped a note to Amati requesting contact with the designer or someone equally familiar. Will see if they respond.

Thanks for the pics, and it looks very good BTW The only thing is that even looking carefully at your pics I can't see where the difference is. Please look at my pics, maybe you will have better luck. For now I guess I'm going to cut the second rabbets until we figure out what is going on here. And for what it's worth, I'm just using my cell camera even though I have a fancy Olympus, and it's not even particularly new, it's a Samsung S4 since none of the newer ones do anything I need much better. Except for the new Google phone, I read a review on a camera site that said its camera was superior even to the latest Apple cameras, very near full DSLR quality. So I was thinking about getting one. I do know that my cell cam only works well with very bright light, you should be able to tell my task light is never very far out of frame just above the model when shooting. In normal light autofocus is spotty and the pics are noisy, but I can fix the noise pretty easily with a fancy noise-reduction add-on for Photoshop that I have. All I do in Photoshop with these though is crop and save as a lower-quality jpg to retain the high resolution but get under the 2mb barrier. But I am also a fully-qualified graphics guy who long ago worked in the games industry as an artist, I've done 100% of the graphics for my Line of Battle game. So if you need pics fixed I can fix 'em

And here's a pic from the bow - it looks like the gunwales very intentionally rise toward the bow, and it doesn't look wrong it looks pretty logical. So at the moment it looks like I've done what the kit intended - we know the deck line was also dead on the bulkhead tops so that line is what they intended. But I have gunports that vary in height from the deck, the gunwale sheer line is more pronounced than the deck line, and the gunports follow that line instead of the deck.

Ok here's mine now from the inside. Height of gunwales at the bow is 14.72mm, midships is 12.8mm. You can see the bow gunport is higher off the deck than the midships ports and they begin to rise again on the stern. The gunwale/bulkhead sheer is more pronounced than that of the deck. The thing is I can't see where it's wrong, once the top line was straightened you see it makes a continuous smooth curve with the gunports following it exactly. Also the tops of the gunwales are now closely matching the tops of the bulkhead tabs, which also makes it look as intended. And another is you saw I made my bow stem piece as a dead copy of the original, and these gunwale strips fit perfectly, that was how I established how much the lower edge was supposed to overhang on the bulkheads for gluing. Can you see where the problem is?

I only have one pic at the moment, will go take a couple more. If what you're saying is how it's supposed to be, I have major problems, because the curve followed by the gunports is significantly different than the curve of the deck. This is what I ended up with after straightening the bulkhead top line, all the ports are an equal height from the top of the rail. The ripples looked like deviations from this line.