vossiewulf

Between Alexander and Gaetan and his Le Fleuron, I need a new superlative dictionary. I'm running out Looks amazing as usual Alexander!

Tom if you don't mind me asking, how do you use the 1-2-3 blocks in ship building? And the latest looks great too.

I understand that now, but it's not a skill or interest shared by many ship modelers, so I wasn't expecting sophisticated camera work - I've spent 12.3 gillion hours in Photoshop but even I am only doing the most basic cropping and adjustment when I post pictures here. Well except for de-aging paintings, I like taking historic paintings that are hopelessly yellow and dark and dirty and restoring them to what they looked like when the painter put his brushes down. Speaking of the camera work, that was pretty cool, if someone asked me what wood that was as the closest color match is lignum vitae but anyone who built your ship out of that wood would be officially crazy, hence my confusion. Did I mention your ship is amazing again? If not I will repeat that It really is a no-kidding, being absolutely serious and as critical as I can get, a phenomenal piece of woodworking in general and the quality of the work makes a long-term placement in a major museum entirely justified. As I said in my earlier response, you have every right to feel extremely proud of what you've accomplished here. If I were you I'd have a very hard time not spending entire days just looking at it and grinning. So... next is Soleil Royale at 1:12? Fully sailing with operating cannons, so you can truck it to a lake on weekends and sink anything that challenges your ownership of said lake?

I only adjust it inverted, usually with the dremel in a vise so I have both hands, and lubed the main posts, and I really don't have much difficulty getting it to do what I want. I tried adjusting it while on its base with the weight of the dremel on it, but found that it was wracking more than I wanted. Try adjusting it as I do, see if that works better for you.

Thanks Rick, I'm sure you guys are at the GET ON WITH IT ALREADY phase, but with planking I'm doing every bit of prep I can think of, it's the only way to figure out which steps are really important and which aren't. Whatever my process ends up being, it will definitely be simpler and more streamlined than this extremely careful preparation.

Above somewhere I was talking about the need to slightly curve the edges of straight plane irons to feather the edges of the cuts and avoid those nasty hard lines made by sharp plane iron corners. I was sharpening my little Lie-Nielsen squirrel-tail plane, the flat-bottomed one that matches Julie's convex one, and remembered to take a pic to demonstrate. Some people try to make it a smooth curve all the way across, this is senseless to me as no matter what you do that will leave a scalloped surface. Instead I leave as much of the iron as possible straight, and then only smoothly relieve the corners, because unlike the continuous-curve iron, mine leaves a perfectly flat surface. As to how flat, go look at the piece of wenge I planed, pic on page 3 of this thread. Since this iron is only 1" wide it doesn't have as much of a flat in the center, but you can still see what I mean. By the way, I'm with Ron Hock and don't do secondary bevels despite what it looks like here. Somehow the last time I sharpened this it was more like 23.5 degrees instead of the desired 25 degrees, so I'm fixing that, another couple of sharpenings and it will be all one bevel again. And this was sharpened 1000-4000-8000 Shapton stones and finally on a strop. The dark spots on the right part of the cutting edge that look kind of like flaws aren't, they're reflections of things on my bench above, The best way to do this curved edge is with the Mk.II Veritas Honing Guide with the curved barrel-shaped roller that is designed to do exactly this process. It's technically feasible to do it by hand, but it certainly ain't easy.

Doris, another good one to start with is the one I'm working on, the Lady Nelson RN cutter from Victory models. It couldn't get more ahistoric in that no cutter of that name existed, but it's also extremely historic in that it accurately represents the RN cutter designs of ~1800 and they were extremely important as a class and the sailing Ferraris of their day. It has only one mast which simplifies the masting and rigging task even further than Syren, but the rigging that is required is exactly what you'd do with more complex ships - standing rigging, shrouds and ratlines and deadeyes, braces and lifts and halliards, so you'll practice what your next project will require. Here's the thing - I'm very familiar with woodworking and carving but even so ship modeling is a big leap requiring lots of tools you probably don't have and learning very tricky skills like bending wood and getting two pieces of wood that are curving in multiple axes to fit together perfectly - this is planking, It makes much, much more sense to have a very simple first project during which you'll be buying things you need and learning how to use them and no matter how good you are naturally with making things, you won't be real good at some of the tasks the first time. You'll also be figuring out processes and workflows that fit the way you like to work/the tools you have (there are many ways to build a ship model), and then you'll be making jigs and things that will help in future projects. In short, the learning curve is steep and there is a tooling up/basic learning phase you need to go through and both to make that process go smoothly and so you don't have hundreds of dollars at stake, it makes the best sense to do it while working on a smaller and relatively inexpensive kit. I came very close to doing the English Longboat from Model Shipways for the first project, and although I'm doing fine with Lady Nelson I can still make an argument for that being the better choice. So anyway, this is one of those start slow, finish fast things. Start with easy, small project and go slow and learn the options for every step and experiment with different ways to skin various cats, and you'll still make reasonable progress because the kit is small and simple. And then you'll have an order of magnitude more confidence when you start Syren, which to me is an excellent second build and I have that kit sitting in a closet for when I finish Lady Nelson. And also sitting in the closet under Syren is the MS Constitution So basically I'm on the same path as you, but I think I might be working on Old Ironsides before you are if you start with Syren Link below takes you to my Lady Nelson build log if you want to see how I'm doing. Since I am apparently psychologically incapable of building something out of the box, the extra complication I am adding is replacing the kit wood with better woods, and I'm going to try to do more realistic rigging, mostly because I have 30 pages of a book showing exactly what it should be for an 1800 RN cutter in perfect detail. You can still do a few things like that on your first build if you must as long as you know your own skills well and are sure you can handle them.

^ What he said. That's an exceptional piece of work Gaetan, and you have every right to be very proud of it. I hope you find a home for it where many can enjoy seeing it. I was about to ask, the previous image with the wood showing as green-brown didn't look much like the cherry wood I'm familiar with My favorite thing about cherry is just giving it a clear finish and leaving it to do its own color change, it turns such a wonderful shade of light brown over time.

So anyway, have managed to do lots more work, still without putting on a plank, But it's mostly one-time setup time as I make myself stuff that will work for future projects as well. In this case a shooting board for tapering planks and something just a tad more sophisticated than Chuck's end of a clamp on the edge of the bench. First was putting on the stern fascia and putting the nightmare hopefully behind us, starting with removing the paint from the glue areas of the fascia piece. And glue it on. First step was yellow glue on the back of the center fashion pieces because it had to sit there for a minute, and then CA along the bottom line of the fascia. Here the sides haven't been glued. Sides were then glued but then I noticed a poor glue line at the bottom of one of the center fashion pieces so I drilled a hole in the back (it's getting planked over) and beveled the edge and worked some CA glue in from behind and hand clamped it into position. Yet another way to fix a problem joint. Then flushed the sides. I decided that I wanted a shooting board for tapering the planks and a little male bending jig like Chuck uses to go along with the female one that comes with the plank bender. Lots of steps in here getting 1" x 1 1/2" rock maple ready. I then cut two pieces about 28" long, and added telescoping brass tube/rod registration pins, one side drilled for a glued-in tube, other for a fitting rod. Once that was done I could true the shooting edge, I have just done that here with my jack plane. Then more drilling and screwing and countersinking and things to get it mounted where I wanted it. This shows how it works, you can see the registration pins that keep the pieces perfectly even. Next the male bending jig thing. French curve to draw the curve I want. Of you mean I need to use my Byrnes disc sander now? Oh no twist my arm. This pic is also an advertisement for the Excalibur 16 scroll saw, I'm not aware of too many that can easily work through 1" rock male. It's an advertisement for this disc sander that it chewed easily through rock maple and making this entire curve smooth and what I wanted was quite easy. Clamped to desktop, ready to go. Then was just need to sharpen the LN squirrel-handled plane and test. I think these modeling loins are about as girded as they get.

Before I became a Silicon Valley geek, spent most of my life in NC, so it has to be a pig. Slow cooked for 18 hours using one of a few good hardwoods for smoke, with just a little apple cider vinegar injection. Served with Worcestershire sauce and oniony cornbread deep-fried hushpuppies with enough butter to kill a moose. None of that heatheny vinegar-red sauce those heatheny heathens west in Lexington eat, or the even worse mustard sauce the complete freaks out east eat. And we won't even mention cow.

I once was on the trapeze of a Hobbie 18 doing about 18kts on one hull in a beam reach in a 25-30kt wind when I got my weight just a tad too far forward and the one hull in the water pitchpoled. I hadn't worn my sailing gloves but I still grabbed for the side stay as I went flying forward, and held on while I slid most of the way up the side stay, but at least it stopped me from trying to do a human maypole on the mast. However you can assume the result of totally removing a thin stripe of skin on your palm felt every bit as spiffy as you might imagine. That is absolutely what made me think about what would happen when a boomsprit as long as the ship buried itself in the face of a wave. And it's also always interesting to see what history has preserved and what hasn't been, obviously we have phenomenally detailed information about many aspects of this subject but apparently one of them isn't the sailing and sail handling of a Royal Navy cutter. Even though there were lots of them, they were highly engineered specialists designed for speed, and performed an important naval role pretty well.

Thanks Frankie but I'm not sure I understand why taking the boom in was required to set shorter sail, I'm wondering why the smaller sail couldn't be bent to wherever they wanted on the length of the boom. If it's not fair weather it's assumed we also have running seas, was it because the long boom would also start burying itself in waves if seas are high?

This is only correct for people who don't calibrate their monitor. Think about it, every company that has a zillion artists would be up a creek without a paddle if there was no way to get consistency of output on multiple monitor types and models. Since I've also been a long-time artist, at various times professional, I always calibrate my monitors. The Datacolor Spyder series monitor calibration tools has been the most popular for years. It has extremely sensitive light/frequency detectors and you place it in the center of your monitor with the lights in the room darkened, and it sends a large number of color values to the screen and records the screen's actual output. It then creates a color correction profile that is saved and loaded every time you start your machine, you can see it happen as all the color on screen will suddenly shift a bit on startup. Not sure if you or anyone wants to go to those lengths, but it is certainly possible to work as a distributed group and still all see identical images on screen.

I'm doing Lady Nelson, one thing I haven't figured out is why instead of a bowsprit we have something called a boom, and I also read one of the advantages was they could bring it partially on board when necessary. But it didn't explain why they would want to bring it partially on board in the first place. Can anyone explain those two?

BTW finished the layout of the stern planking... I think. And spent time fitting the stern fascia piece so it's ready to glue on. So tomorrow there is nothing else to do but start fitting planks. Rick I'm going to pull the deck stanchions but only after putting on the first plank, the bulkhead strips cover just the false deck, no lower, so they only have about a 1/32" glue contact area right now. Glued to the plank below they will be much sturdier when I go pulling on them removing the stanchions. Also the fascia will get glued and then I have a voodoo priest coming in to cleanse the stern of bad modeling spirits. Note: need more goats.

(Fingers in ears) LALALALALALALA

Ah there we go, that saves the day. I'll go ahead with the pattern as I have it now and then make that change for the second planking. That way I don't have to redo what I have now but I'll also shift the joints slightly so they don't coincide as Pat suggests. And that's a small enough change that this still works as a dry run of the final. Thanks Pat and Rick!

Well that rains on the parade, You're correct. I won't do that in the future, but for this the advantages of the dry run outweigh the risks of popping. Particularly as I intend to do treenails on the planking since this will be unpainted, and that will help. Does the pattern look ok? That's what I'm concerned about now. If that looks ok, I'll go start work on it.

Also remember Abe Books, which pulls together the stock of a zillion smaller booksellers. I bought my copy of Boudriot's French frigates book there at a reasonable price, and they had about 25 listed in several different printings and covers. I got the limited edition leather bound with nice paper because for some reason it wasn't more expensive than the non-special ones, and very happy I did so, paper and printing quality is as good as it gets.

On the bulkhead strips, sigh, more things to fix, What confused me and kept me from doing something sooner is that if you look, you'll see that despite the unevenness that the bulkhead stanchions all have almost identical overhang on the strip so it looked purposeful. This material is thick enough to add pieces on top if needed, I can even reinforce with CF pins if necessary, so one way or another we can fix them. So next step is laying out planking and first, John/Landlocked thanks for the links to Chuck's videos, that is indeed a pretty simple method. I think I'm still going to use one or more planes to at least do the tapering step he does with his xacto knife, I think I can do that faster and more accurately with a plane. I'm guessing Chuck started with building ships and hasn't done much furniture work and just isn't that experienced with planes so he defaults to a perfectly workable and familiar to him method that isn't much slower. And if I find I have squirrely stock with unpredictable grain I'll put down the planes and pick up the knife for that step too. I'm surprised he doesn't bother with soaking at all, and I'm wondering how he handles bends more severe than what he needs to do here, since anything more than what he did and that stock is breaking. Since he seems against soaking I have to assume he does it in more than one step, progressively increasing the bend. Since I don't have more severe bends I'll give that a try, but I may soak also - there is no time wasted in putting stock into water a couple hours ahead of time and if anything raising the grain, at least on the final planking, is a benefit for sanding to a final surface. Long time ago I used to make very expensive corporate conference tables and one of the steps of preparing the tops was wetting down the surface to raise the grain before final sanding. But as noted I'll try it without soaking and if it's really not needed, it's not needed. Other difference is for the sake of peace and quiet I'm going to forego the screaming hair dryer in favor of my plank bender, at least if that works. The key point there is to raise the piece to bending temp and then let it cool again, doesn't matter how you heat it. The taper and bevel technique is pretty much what I was intending to do. With the bevel I actually don't think he explained it well, he only explains the convex curve where the inside of the plank needs to be smaller than the face - he left out concave (or maybe I couldn't hear it) where the converse is true and the plank face will need to be smaller. I think of planks this way from the front view, with the divisions between planks being radii of curves extending from the curve's centerpoint, which is what they need to be if they're going to fit side by side correctly, and that means wherever planking is covering a curved surface the plank edges need to be beveled. Those videos don't show how he decided how much the planks have to taper, so I went ahead with how I intended to do it, and need some feedback as to whether this looks correct. Since this hull is very simple until we get to the stern, on the bow I decided to just let the planks terminate naturally into the stem and keep tapering the rest. I started with figuring out how many are needed at midships by making a piece of paper the correct length, and then dividing it by the 3/16" width of the planking, turned out to be exactly 14. So then I made a set of parallel lines on paper into 14 divisions at 3/32" (less than the smallest anticipated taper) to use to draw the divisions on the following paper strips. Here is the first strip being marked. And then transferring to builkheads. Long term this is overkill, but I'm also sketching in the lines as I go as it's a totally unambiguous reality check as to whether my cunning plan is working out or not. Here we're at the forward bulkhead where planks start terminating into the stem. Note that if you're going to do ad-hoc divisions like I am that they need to be straight and perfectly parallel to the bulkheads from the side view like we see here. The first vertical line is the point at which the first plank ends. The second is after two more end and I'm just tapering 11 from there. Marking the paper strip for the second line, with just 11 divisions. And transferred marks to hull. From there I used Mk.I Eyeball to draw them the rest of the way. It's logical and simple, but it looks kind of straight from the side view, not exactly the most graceful lines. However, anything I do to make the lines more graceful is going to also be more complicated with drop planks in the middle required. Please let me know what you folks think, if I need to do it differently we'll erase all this and start over. Yes I know this detail isn't necessarily required for inner planking, but it's also an exact dry run of what I will need to do for the final planking where high quality is required, so I can't think of cases where I won't do it this way and work out everything I need to know for the final planking at this point.

Stopping for the moment to catch up with where I am and show the Nightmare on Fashion Piece Street. So anyway, back a couple days ago we had left the starboard bulkhead strip to dry in situ prior to gluing to the ship, here he is ready to be glued on. Not showing that process as it was the same as the other side. Here checking symmetry, looks reasonable and the overhang at the stern was different on the two strips by only about 1/64" which means the two sides are pretty close to identical. And I did do better this time on ripples, basically none worth mentioning. The one hard turn as we go to the stern should disappear on its own when I remove the stanchion thing. BTW Rick what is up with these uneven and different on each side curves on the tops of the bulkhead strips? So here is where I made the fateful decision that the perfectly-painted fashion pieces were unacceptable for being too orange. We don't see pics, but the first effort of course was just overpainting, both are acrylics right? Nope, Tamiya didn't react well at all over Admiralty and really the only choice was to strip them down. Here we are blithely sliding down into the pits of modeling hell. The fact that afterward the pieces looked exactly like compressed cat vomit should also have been some kind of indicator that we were traveling through the valley of model death. And here they are ready to go. One way I try to make going backward less painful is improve it in the process. Even when I want to paint the first time the pieces felt too heavy to me, so I narrowed them all down until I was happy and then rounded them over. Considering their position leaving them with hard edges didn't make sense to me. So now that everything is super ready to go we start painting and... Holy crap how is that still happening with them sanded down like that??? I'm already removing this disaster. This time around I removed the paint with an abrasive acrylic rod held in a collet thingy held in my rotary tool. This is a pretty rough grit so it went pretty quick and they can get down into corners. This is after that operation. I then removed the rest and cleaned thoroughly with rubbing alcohol to ensure nothing was left on the pieces. We don't have pics here because this is where total madness set it. I painted one stroke of the Tamiya red and waited, and watched it do the same exact thing as before. First I had to walk away for a while because all I could thing about was ripping off the fashion pieces and making a very small bonfire with them in my driveway. Once I got over that I came back, but I was totally in "ok I've had just about enough of this crap" zone, so to solve this once and for all I coated all of them in thin super glue. Once dried I had to resand all of them for like the 14th time. Eventually they were ready and when painted the Tamiya red worked fine and here we are. Only difference between this and a previous similar pic is they're somewhat redder. Well that and many hours and steps and an urge to burn fashion pieces. What is weirder about the fashion pieces was I'd first noticed the Admiraly-Tamiya problem on the stern fascia, and I had stripped that down and sanded it a bit and the Tamiya went over it no problem. I have no idea why the fashion pieces were still able to screw up the Tamiya paint until I sealed them in super glue prison. Here it is with Tamiya color, it needs to dry overnight then it will get sanded lightly with 2000 grit and then a few more coats, surface still too uneven. Next comes planking, but before I could do that I needed to finish my Mk.I Advanced Rope-Powered Keelalator, which I did. If you can figure out how it works at this point you should be tested for wizardy. I needed something very strong and dependable to grip the keel plate through the deck grate holes, but still be detachable later even though that area was going to become inaccessible after planking. This was the result, a U-shaped piece where each arm goes in a grate hole grabs each side of the hull plate firmly and the bottom of the U bottoms out on the deck, so we have a pretty good mechanical hold. We just need to make sure it stays there. Here it is in place, I've just drilled the four holes it needs and beveled the edges with a countersink. And this is what will hold it in place: black bowstring. The reason for using bowstring is that one strand is about strong enough to hang your car off of, it's very supple and flexible, and most importantly, it does.not.stretch. At all. Negative on that stretch attempt, Ghostrider. That makes it very good for jig applications like this and is why I have four types of bowstring in my closet even though I don't own any bows. Here is in in top view, and indeed parts of the boat itself will fail well before the Mk.I ARPK lets go. And all of that was for this reason- so I could now flip it upside down and hold it correctly in my engraver's block. And here is how it will be in planking, rotated toward me. Since the engraver's block's top half rotates when you allow it to, I can put on one plank on this side and then just spin it around and be in the same basic position for the other side. I now am going outside to sacrifice a goat to the Ship Modeling Gods and ask that planking go somewhat better than this last phase did. Um... hmm.... anyone have a goat handy?

Ok I'm trying not to think about how much fun that must have been. Thanks John! I'll watch those before starting the planking. I did buy some brass thimbles at Modeling Timbers, but I'd prefer to make them long run.

Another good option is Grobet, they're an American company with files of very nearly the quality of GV. I own and use lots of Grobet files too. Search for riffler files or file sets in their storefront on Amazon.

Thanks, good to know someone else likes that color. I still thin it a bit but I agree it's pretty close to brush consistency out of the bottle. I try for zero brush marks, I find going a tad thinner than that, making them glaze coats, gets me the flattest surface. Downside is 5-10 coats instead of two, but they also dry extremely quickly. Hey Tom, thanks for the kind words. I keep forgetting the sig thing I'll see if I can add it when I post the latest pics. WRT files, I remember thinking I was being really excessive buying a set that expensive, and then 30 minutes into first use it became "I'm a complete jerk for not buying these sooner". The quality difference is at its greatest on metal, these are just wonderful for shaping brass. Do not forget that GV has a complete line of files, all of which are better than you get at the hardware store, and their second-quality files are pretty reasonable and will still make you very happy. Check out needle file sets here. You want cut 2 to start with, it's a good general purpose cut. You can get a set of 6 of their best-quality needle files in cut 2 for $42. Down at the bottom they have sets of 12 second-quality files in two sizes for $80 and $60 respectively. And even their economy set of 6 at $19 is better than what the hobby stores sell, there really is no reason NOT to buy a set of those, you use them for nastier work and save your nice files for precision work. Also look at the larger riffler file size, the Habilis files, and the machinist's files, all have tools extremely applicable to this hobby and are not too expensive.

Yes, I am. Unfortunately I have not gotten started though because I decided I couldn't accept the Admiralty color on the stern, even the bright red was actually orange. So I stripped it off, which itself took a while and was very messy, and then got on one of the runs where nothing works and hours were spent just getting back to square zero. Well not quite, I did finally get the new color on the pieces, I'm using straight up Tamiya red about same value and saturation as the Admiralty color but several notches toward red. Too annoyed to post pics now but I did take them, will post them tomorrow so everyone can follow along while I repeatedly punch myself in the face. It's basically example # 18 quintillion or something to know exactly WTF you are doing before you do it. I went ahead not being 100% sure of a color, and as a direct result found myself in a position with paint on and pieces less accessible than they were and needing to remove that color and paint over. Which itself went badly requiring two tries. Gigantic time sink. If you're wondering, having to strip the first was one because Tamiya and Admiralty acrylics don't like each other. And that should have been a giant waving flag that I was descending into the valley of modeling madness. BTW, only issue with the Admiralty paints was the color, otherwise they're excellent paints for ships and brush paint extremely well properly thinned. They come extremely thick, almost like a concentrate so the small bottle is going to cover a quite large area.