vossiewulf

Anyone who has any ideas on the color scheme please let me know. To reiterate, currently thinking of cocobolo for stem/strenpost (keel painted white) and wales and rail tops, boxwood for the main planking (probably stained light brown to go with the cocobolo), holly for the deck, and maybe ebony for the yards. One of the points here is to make a minimal-paint version, it's likely to be the first and last I do this way, in general I prefer the historically-painted look. The one I'm worried about is the cocobolo because of its large figure, and have to think it's a pain to bend also.

Thanks Tony. As for approach, I've never built a kit of anything out of the box, I'm sure that will be the case here. Certainly I think I can do better on the masting and rigging looking at the plans and the kit photos. And otherwise do it as well as I possibly can, I will try my best to make a perfect Lady Nelson, but know I will never get there. I have looked at some finished ships and skimmed the build logs, but I'd rather figure out my solutions than follow someone else's steps. so I only look at what other people are doing in detail if I'm struggling to find a workable solution. A major part of the fun is figuring out whatever I need to do next from first principles. For example I have looked at a number of discussions of planking, enough to understand the concepts and the options, but I'm still not exactly sure of the process I'm going to follow, except that I've decided to start with a plank bender. I'll figure that out once the rabbet is in place and I'm ready to start. In the meantime I'm cogitating on shooting boards for taper and bevel and which of a number of small plane options to use. Probably a scraper plane to avoid any issues of tearout. As for this step, I thought about it but it didn't make much sense to me to bevel the builkheads prior to assembly, trying to guess what the final bevel contours should be considering the vagaries of kit manufacture and minor variances in assembly seemed unlikely to be fully accurate. And anyway it's such a small amount of material to remove. So right now it has the balsa in place and that's been brought down until I'm just starting to shape the builkheads. Tomorrow it won't take long to finalize, then I'll move on to the deck. To avoid a clamping circus, I'm just going to glue that on one bulkhead at a time with CA, gluing from underneath. I'll remember to take more pictures and explain more, my first thought is people have to have seen bulkhead setup eleventy trillion times and a cutter is not exactly scratchbuilding Le Soleil Royale at 1/24 scale level of interesting. I'll have more photos later when I start using the 18/0 fly-tying thread to serve and seize all the rigging correctly. Or at least trying to.

Seems to be a required rite of passage to publicly flail your way through a first build. For introductions, name is Jay and I'm director of production support for the MAP division at Visa that includes Cybersource and Authorize.net. That means I'm on call 24/7. So, no stress or anything. When it comes to the subject at hand I'm something of a ringer though, as I have extensive experience making small precise stuff in many materials, and I have two entire rooms dedicated to workshop. One is for medium-sized power tools and a small scale machine shop (mini-lathe, mini-mill, etc.), other is primarily a woodworking area for hand tool work (this is where ships will be set up). Well three rooms because the semi-finished "bonus room" has my full-sized table saw and I have plans for a Laguna bandsaw to go in there too. And I've already spent a couple years reading extensively on the ships and the building techniques while working on my game, which also needs to continue to make progress, called Line of Battle. Anyway, I have a crapton of tools and my home is arranged around my workshop areas, so you can assume I am divorced and have no constraints The plan for now, and I already have all the kits, is to go Lady Nelson -> brig Syren -> MS Constitution -> Victory HMS Revenge -> Caldercraft Victory. But I also want to do some very small scale also, we'll see. Since this part is uninteresting, only a couple photos - one of squaring up the transom bulkhead and the assembled frame. In case you're wondering, all my little brass flat sanders that are used with PSA paper were machined perfectly square so I don't need to fiddle with heavy machinist's squares except for outside 90s. In case you're wondering, it's being held in a GRS engraver's block. But anyway all clean and straight and square and ready to go to next steps. Planned next step is balsa filler blocks at bow and stern, and to make things super easy on myself I'm probably going to fill in the first three gaps on both ends, so everywhere significant bending is occurring I'll have a surface to work against. However, need some advice on wood. I bought the Crown Timber boxwood package for this, so I have a bunch of boxwood coming. However, I have my own wood and don't want to do it 100% in boxwood, whatever I don't use will get used later in something else. Right now what I'm thinking of is cocobolo for the keel, wales, and rails, lightly stained boxwood planking, and a holly deck. BTW these 1x1x12 American holly turning blanks are available at Woodcraft for $10, good deal if you can resaw to scale timber. However, I'm not sure about the cocobolo, the color of course is great but it has pretty strong grain and figure and may not look good in this small build. Also I'm not sure about the idea of having a keel/stem darker than the main planking. Anyway, advice appreciated, as I'll have this ready for the keel and planking soon. I know, I'll plank it in snakewood. Cut this into 4mm strips, cut in half (it's 5/16" thick) and then plank both sides with strips in the exact order we see here Just kidding of course. That's a $150 guitar fingerboard blank and will be used for that purpose in the future.

Trying to do an inventory of my stuff, coming up with a few more. First anyone serious should spend some time here, jewelers have a phenomenal assortment of abrasive solutions, particularly for small/hard to reach places. I haven't yet tried the ceramic polishing tools listed on this page yet, but those look really promising: One type I use regularly are these, the flexacrylic rods mounted in my rotary tool. They are easily shaped into points and rounded tips by running them against a piece of sandpaper. I also have several types of silicon polishing wheels and points, they are like hard pencil erasers with grit embedded. These are really excellent for cleaning up carvings, those of you doing serious stern decoration and figurehead carving should have these in your arsenal. Several manufacturers listed on this page. The ones I like best for small areas are the Italian 3mm points.

Saw Frame I have this saw frame, and to say it's an improvement over standard frames is like saying wagyu beef burgers are an improvement over 1960s school cafeteria burgers. It's much, much lighter. With the cam saw tensioner, it's way faster to change blades and tensioning them doesn't require jamming some pointy steel corner on a normal saw frame into your hand. Knew Concepts Cam Tension Jewelers Precision Sawframes Also if you don't buy real jeweler's saw frame blades, do so immediately. They're not expensive (~$20 for 144) and are an order of magnitude better than ones you get in hobby stores. Nakanishi Brushless Micromotors Like the flex shaft was a step up over standard Dremel, these are a major step up from any Dremel or Foredom rotary tool. I have the previous model, and it is so smooth and quiet that it has to be turning >10k before I can even hear it or feel it while holding the tool. They're just outstanding tools, making any rotary task easy and fun. They're hiding pricing for some reason, the basic kit of control unit and standard handset should be around $600. Nut Files These are unfortunately only available in a few fixed sizes, but if the sizes work for you, they're the perfect tool for creating ad-hoc precies grooves, they are specifically designed to create exact size, perfectly smooth grooves with no further processing - the grooves they are intended for are at the top of the neck of stringed instruments, and if they're not perfect bad things happen. You can find them at Stew-Mac, LMI, or other luthier supply places. Hackle Pliers (clamps) These are used by fly-tiers to hold onto rooster neck feathers (hackle feathers) to wrap them around dry flies, they simulate legs. From a ship modeling standpoint, they are excellent little clamps that come in a number of styles with clamping strength from medium to pretty serious squishing. The style of the ones to the top left are quite strong, and generally I use some sort of clamping pad to protect the work. The ones lower right are not so strong, and with the wider contact area are really excellent for clamping small bits of wood together. JS Stockard unfortunately doesn't make it possible to isolate them, you have to start here at the list of companies and check out each one. That's not necessarily a bad thing through, because while you're there you should also check out the precision scissors, the thread bobbins, tweezers, and pliers. They're all excellent quality, there is no such thing as crappy fly-tying tools, at least not from any mainstream manufacturer. And also my understanding is that fly-tying thread is the #1 choice of some of the better very small scale builders (bottle ships and the like).

Welcome to you and everyone else I'm a guitarist also, I started doing my own work when a so-called luthier ruined the neck on my 40th anniversary Strat by stripping the truss rod. Luthier supply houses are an excellent place to find ship modeling tools. I'm going to post another thread with a few other things I have that people might find of use. You know those $20k custom guitars with inlay up and down the neck? Chances are it was done with this tool. It really does work extremely well for minute adjustments, and with a little time invested in designing and building a table for it, you should have a very flexible precision tool. I need to do the same, I've had it for a while but except for some pretty thorough tests, I haven't used it in a project yet. I have all the supplies and materials and hardware for a really sweet Strat-type guitar with my own body design, it just hasn't made it to the top of the queue yet. Mostly because ship models are interfering. More places you should spend some time checking out what they have: LMI Philadelphia Luthier Also, if you have the Byrnes table saw or another capable of small scale work, you can get some good prices on wood of most domestic and exotic species by buying fingerboard blanks. They're typically 5/16" x 2.5" - 3" x 21"-25". LMI has good ebony fingerboards in this size for $20-$25, a single one could be resawn (with a nice .03 slittling blade) into quite a lot of ship scale timber.

Here's the carbon-coated precision tweezers that are my favorites for gluing little tiny bits. The coating provides a noticeably better grip than uncoated ones.

The place I start for tweezers is electronics manufacture supply. They have more options for quality tweezers than anyone, plus probes (rigging tools) and cutters - I use my little full-flush end cutter constantly. Here's the tweezer section. Just about every metal and other material is available in a myriad of styles. Unfortunately their new site design has made it really hard to filter on some of the important factors - the ones I use most are smooth with carbon-coated tips, which provides massively better grip. But I don't see a way to filter on that, and all I'm seeing at the moment are the diamond-coated ones that are the same idea but more expensive. That said, I like some of the options I'm seeing on the bonsai site, thanks for posting that.

I don't see you mention files. You need both a set of medium sized files, single cut not double cut. You can get these for not much at any hardware store. The other is a set of needle files. If budget is a factor, just get standard hobby store needle files, also pretty much any online hobby store carry them. They should be $10-$15 for a set of 6 or 8. Actually that's an important question - are you trying to go with the cheapest options available, or do you want to buy good quality basic tools that will last? I definitely recommend the latter, mostly because in my opinion the cheapest tools generally work so poorly that they cause lots of frustration, the kind of frustration that makes people give up. Good tools used correctly make whatever they're supposed to do easy and efficient. If you're willing to spend some money, you'll get an order of magnitude better performance by getting real jeweler's needle files. On the other hand, some good tools aren't expensive - I use a ring holder regularly for holding small parts. If you haven't noticed a trend, most of the hand tools I have now are professional jeweler's tools from Otto Frei or Contenti. They work so much better than hardware store tools that they make previously difficult jobs very easy.

Being new, not sure this has been mentioned before, I searched and didn't see it. This is a luthier's tool for doing inlay, which ship modelers don't do much. However, any router base that precisely controls depth can be flipped over and turned into a router table. I haven't gone so far as to make a real table, but I have used it on small pieces while clamped upside down in a vise, and it works great. It operates very smoothly and the depth can be adjusted with really minute accuracy. Precision router base for Dremel

I too have bought several of the miniature tools and also use them... but in my opinion, cool as they are, the better option for basic small scale planing is their detail palm planes. They are planing an area around the size of their miniature bench plane, have an adjustable-length palm rest that should fit hands big and small, and I find I have more control and can go faster than I can with the straight miniaturized bench and block plane. And they have scrubbing irons for cases of difficult grain. I have the flat and the double-concave, don't see enough of a use for other two.

The buzz in the 3d world over the last several years has been about the development of PBR (Physically-Based Rendering) and metal/roughness shaders, because artists finally have access to rendering models that closely match reality. Metal vs. non-metal controls the reflectance model, and roughness takes the place of many unrealistic settings in previous rendering systems for "glosiness" and "specularity" etc. So much simpler and more realistic. If you want to see this really in action, check out Substance Painter 2, which is a super-spiffy texture creation and editing application that allows you to paint in real time on the 3d model. I've used it quite a bit on a battletech game I was working on:

To be somewhat technical, borrowing from my 3d modeling/animation experience, the categorization of how things reflect light starts with non-dialectric vs. dialectric materials, basically conductive vs. insulator. All metals reflect light one way, everything that isn't conductive has a different refelective appearance, specifically conductors have specular reflections in the color of the conductor, while dialectric materials reflect the colors of the light that strikes them. Simple explanation of conductive vs. dialectric reflectance More detailed explanation (click on Dialectric and Metal Materials in the list on the left) So if you are going to simulate a metal finish properly and have it look correct, the material you're using to simulate that surface also needs to be conductive. That's why these really good powder finishes look so accurate- they're made of metal powders. No plain non-conductive paint will ever really look like metal.

How about this? It's balsa wood glider I made Setting being a smartass aside for the moment , you're correct in most cases. But if you haven't seen what can be done with metal powders these days, you may need to reassess that idea. Mercedes D.IIIa WWI aircraft engine:

Actually I might have to ask some advice sooner rather than later. After thinking about it, I went and purchased the boxwood replacement package from Crown Timber for the Lady Nelson kit that I have, and I certainly won't want to paint over that. I have quite a lot of wood of all sorts of species floating around my workshop already for other reasons, probably won't have to buy anything else. And I'm pretty good with aniline dye stains. I intend to start it after I wrap up what I'm working on now, which hopefully won't be too long. When I do I'll try some color combinations in Photoshop and bounce them off you.

FYI folks, I've been going back and forth in mail with Mikhail, the maker of those tools Alexander has that we all want to steal from him, and I have some more info for those interested. He's making these tools from high quality taps made with R6M5 steel and although he didn't say, that should put the Rc hardness at 63 or maybe 64, so these will be like Japanese tools, very sharp but you definitely don't want to twist the tool in the wood as the cutting edges will be fragile. R6M5 is a high speed steel with the normal chrome/moly of HSS, but also high in tungsten and vanadium, the edges should hold for a really long time. On the down side, not at all an easy steel to sharpen with hand methods, but that shouldn't be a problem with these small tools - you really don't need to remove much metal. I'm not sure I would like a 1" straight chisel made out of this steel, but seems to me a very good choice for a micro carving tool. Also many say HSS simply can't take and edge as sharp as A1/O1 simple steels, but the difference is going to be really minimal with these tiny cutting edges, offset by the high quality and consistency of steel from a well made tap, and he says the supply he has is very good. And remember Alexander is all excited about them and that's good enough for me.

Bluenose or Bluenose II are traditional starting places, with relatively easy hulls to plank, little fancy deck furniture, and simple fore and aft sails with much less rigging than you get with square sails. So yes, that's a very good place to start.

Agree with all of this, just didn't want to make it sound too complicated ;-) I've used a series of leather pieces and cloths also in specific cases, but the fact is the Mk.I Index Finger seems to handle about 80% of the cases. I do not know of another paint you can do this with besides Tamiya, all the other paints I've tested are rock hard both gloss and flat, only Tamiya has this oddly soft flat finish that can be easily manipulated to whatever gloss you want, and fairly easily. And you're right that it's never one solution fits all, you walk around an aircraft or ship and you see a thousand different textures, each with its own base sheen that has been modified over time by exposure to sun and wind and rain, a truly real finish would have everything from straight flat to straight gloss surfaces and everything in between, frequently on the same item. Anyway, I recommend folks give the Tamiya flats a spin and see what you can do, I will be willing to bet that this technique finds a spot in your modeling deck.

Thanks Mark.

...figuring out how to do the same thing in styrene and carbon fiber I have to agree on your assessment of the planking job, it appears to be flawless, except for that one spot only Mark can see that still irritates him. But it has to be extremely close to the ideal curves in both axes with a finish that's just as good. Mark, one question since unfortunately I don't have the time Martin needed to read >119< pages of build log, but what are you doing the black finish with? I'm new of course, and knowledgeable in woodworking and wood finishes but not ship modeling. Are you doing the black with a thinned paint, a pigment-based stain, or dye? This might be too big a question, but when it comes to the semi-natural wood finish category like this, how do you decide what is painted, what isn't, and what you want to do with different species of wood, and how do you choose which species and what bits are dark and what are light? In short, are there some basic rules about designing this kind of finish you could quickly explain? If there aren't some simple rules that would be a really lengthy answer and I'll do some reading. I am still much more likely to do full painted finishes, but I'd like to know how to approach the problem if I decide to do a finish like this. I think these finishes are gorgeous when well done and also makes the result cross over much more as a pure objet d/art, but I will have a hard time spending all that time on making the physical object as realistic as humanly possible only to not continue with the finish in the same mode. Which is more or less saying "my disorder is more severe than yours, pray for me" but hey ;-)

One more on the flat Tamiya "dry rubbing" technique in terms of the range of possible resulting surfaces - the cowling of the aircraft below was painted Tamiya flat black, and I rubbed it down with bare finger to this level of gloss - no additional processing, no clear gloss coat, just flat black rubbed down for about five minutes. And you can see cery clearly the seam of where the center flat section is riveted to the outer curved section, because it's still dead flat. This is a detail of Dr.I cowlings you don't often see in kits, I used a small scraper to create it in this case. So - you don't need to buy semi-gloss or gloss Tamiya paints, you get a better finish this way. And it does what was my original intent, which is making details clearly visible in the same way they are in the real-life versions. In case you're wondering, yes the Axial prop is seven layers of elm and walnut like the original and hand carved. The Axial logo decals I made in Photoshop and printed on clear decal film with my printer.

Thanks Alexander. Since I use basswood, if nothing else it teaches you to sharpen an edge. A couple of those very thin parts in the middle are cross grain, so the edge has to be seriously sharp to do that and leave a good surface with all fibers cleanly cut. When I'm doing this I strop the knife every 5-10 minutes and resharpen it every 45 minutes at most. And that's using a knife with excellent steel at Rc62, I don't suggest trying it with anything less. In case anyone wondered about Ron Hock's tools, 95% of the carving above was done with the detail carver knife at the top of this page (I don't use a big fat knife like most chip carvers do). Except that I modified the handle and the shape of the blade a bit. I sharpen it for basswood at a very fine angle so there's basically no separate bevel, the two sides of the blade converge on the edge. That fine an edge won't hold for long no matter the steel, hence the requirement for constant resharpening. Geometrical carving is a good phrase for it, another would be "stupid tricks you can do with a compass" The outer decoration in that carving is divided into 14 sections of exactly 25.7183 degrees, and I most surely didn't do that with a protractor.

Alexander, yet another thanks for the clear explanation of how you work. I'm hitting myself in the forehead, I have many diamond points for rotary tools, but I never thought of using them in a pin vise. Also, now I have to get a set of those carving tools too. Sigh. I'm just starting with ships, haven't yet carved a figurehead, but I have considerable experience with chip carving. I also have made some of my own tools, this is my general-use knife, it has a blade Ron Hock of Hock Tools made for me, wenge wood handle, and a brass balance piece that I turned on my little lathe. And this is my X-acto replacement. I have a clear design in my head for a v2 that I want to try to talk Ron Hock into making and selling, basically a quick-change knife like an X-acto but with much heavier blades in various shapes made by Ron Hock, intended to be sharpened and should last for years.

Make it totally clear, here's the top view of the same piece, in some ways you can see the effect better in this image. And here's one of the Model Expo 3 inch Ordnance Rifles, except that I basically scratchbuilt the carriage since I didn't like theirs. Why they use horrible-surface white metal on a complex shape like a field gun carriage wheel is anyone's guess. Anyway, this was painted flat Tamiya black, left for a week or so to dry, then rubbed down to this appearance, again I'm please with it.

Tamiya flat black is very different from most flats in that it leaves a very soft (comparatively speaking) surface. But that's ok, we can use that - this is a technique I call dry rubbing, as opposed to dry brushing. Anyway, once it's dry, take your Mk.1 Index Finger and start rubbing, you can rub it up near a high gloss. This is perfect for surfaces like cannons with the various reinforces and muzzle swell and cascabel, because all of those high points will get glossier and reflective while the recessed areas stay flat. Which is exactly how things work in real life. Below is a 1:12 scratchbuilt Spandau I made (additional cocking mechanism goes where you see the white T), and used this technique and was extremely pleased with the results, edges and high points get specular reflections like they should, making all the detail very visible the correct way, rather than from the fake hammer of dry brushing.