vossiewulf

Yes, if you use a penetrating stain. Dyes sit mostly on the surface and are less prone to problems of uneven absorption. Wipe On Poly is a satin finish. You can get some matte polyurethanes, but I don't think they look very good, the way they do matte creates considerable obscuration of what's underneath- short version is they have poor clarity in my opinion. I haven't found good matte clear coats outside of real nitrocellulose lacquer. In my case I ended up using Tamiya flat lacquer, I decanted it from the spray cans and used my airbrush. It can be used straight from the can, but spray cans don't do light coats well, it tends to be heavy. Another good choice for small quantities is Testor's Dullcote lacquer, that comes in bottles of a few ounces. It's best sprayed with an airbrush, but it can be applied by brush. For larger supplies, I'd recommend Mohawk. Their primary market is musical instruments, they make extremely good lacquer finishes.

Except for the tongue and groove planking, the finger joints on the ends of planks, the fiberglass, and the massive amounts of green bondo

If you prefer not spraying, many people use Wipe On Poly by Minwax. The other thing about oil finishes is they DON'T seal the wood- they offer the least surface protection and unless applied in many coats, almost no slowing of moisture exchange and therefore it offers little mitigation of low/high humidity cycles- if you want your model to last, it's best to apply a real film finish. You can always stain first to get the color that you want, then finish with a clear topcoat. If you don't like pigment stains, look at alcohol-soluble aniline dyes.

Masking tape has limited flexibility and can't really handle what you were trying to do there. I use 3M Vinyl Tape for masking curves, it's extremely flexible. And then I use cheaper masking tape to fill in the masked areas.

Is that the logo for you new company Chris in your profile image? If so can we get a better view?

Don't forget bandaids and hydrogen peroxide, we all make blood donations to our models at some point during construction With all the help you have here Jo, you won't even have to look at the plans, you just have to post a pic of the parts and ask "what next"?

I'm a beginning ship modeler and even I know that one of the top five rules of kit work is throw away all the kit-supplied line or use it to make cat toys and replace it with Syren.

I'm pretty sure the meteorite metal handle doesn't make it cut any better Glad the Shapton stones are working for you Gaetan, I was sure you'd appreciate their efficiency, no need to soak them in water, and the much less mess. Not to mention that they also remove metal faster than anything I've seen. BTW, I only go for a mirror polish on the cutting edge itself. The main body of the blade I usually intentionally flatten down by sanding with 1200 grit or so - I find a large mirror surface like that causes distracting (and sometimes blinding) reflections. If that doesn't bother you, by all means mirror those surfaces.

Thanks Gregory! I'll order some.

Things continue to go over my head, some of the books might as well be in a foreign language with the sailing terminology being so dense. So until we get a lot more time with that terminology, we focus on pictures I still may not have the slightest idea what that thing is or what it does, but I can make it if I have a picture of what it looks like.

Yes, they can be confusing and intimidating if you haven't spent time at some point working with plans. As with other things building your ship, it looks scarier than it really is. First, one of the plans will be a rigging plan. Set that aside, you don't need it until your hull is completely done. There should also be a plan that has the kit parts laid out, that's so you can take a part and check it on the plan to make sure you have the right part. So that one is just a reference. The one you want to focus on is the one that has side/top/front/back views, that will be the one you use most often when assembling the hull. Yes there are more than a few parts and bits being shown, but you'll figure out what they are before you put them together, and again almost always even though there are quite a few steps, each of the steps really isn't that hard. As I mentioned earlier, really the only thing you need to do once you have your brackets is slide all the bulkheads onto the keel plate, and they fit with matching slots so it's not exactly rocket science. The only requirements are to make sure the bulkheads are square to the keel plate when you glue them, and don't use half a bottle of glue doing it. Keep in mind that when it comes to glue, less is more. It's a certainty that the less you use, the less glue you'll need to clean off your parts.

Chris I understand, but one of the (thankfully few) disappointing things concerning the ship modeling hobby is the lack of variety - go to the top 10 kit manufacturer web sites and you find the same ships over and over again as if manufacturers have talked themselves into a fear of doing anything else. It leaves huge numbers of important and interesting ships only available to scratchbuilders. Captain was a suggestion but I won't begin to say I really know which ships are best for you to do, the only point I'm making is that you're a creative designer and I at least would like to see that creativity expressed in interesting ships that don't yet have a model. I already have Vanguard in the closet, so I'm a hard sell for a RN 74 anyway. The one that would definitely get me to jump for another 74 is as I mentioned once, the USS Independence I'm not aware of any kits of the few US SOLs, and despite the lack of battle honors I still think it would sell well, everyone has seen 600 RN and French and Spanish SOLs. Talk to the Naval Academy and get them to judge a competition of Independence builds two years after release with the winner being displayed in the Rogers collection for a year and you won't be able to keep them on the shelves. Then again as noted it's always easy to imagine such things working flawlessly when you're not buying thousands of dollars worth of materials yourself.

Many of the fancy super-cool knives you see made are just 440 stainless steel which is only partially hardenable, at best you get a very marginal edge with them. If you want a fancy-looking blade that is also good cutting edge steel, look at Japanese knives. Also I'll second what Gaetan said, you can't do true precision work without an extremely sharp edge. Once you try one a lightbulb goes off and you say wow, this is MUCH easier. And from that point on you're obsessed with making your knife as sharp as possible

I would rather see ships that don't already have existing kits. There are many other RN 74s that played important roles in various battles like Captain, last I checked that was the ship Nelson commanded when he captured two larger ships at St. Vincent.

Conceptually I'd assume the best size was one that easily let a foot/leg go through but was much too small for a body. That way many of the boarders get tangled largely defenseless in the netting.

Welcome to my world, where I have to watch good people trying very hard to do good precise work with Xacto knives, it's like trying to mow your lawn after replacing the lawnmower blade with a butter knife. If you want an amusing experiment, take an Xacto blade to a strop. You'll see you can quickly remove large amounts of metal just with the ultra fine grit of a strop. I don't think they even qualify as high carbon tool steel, they're probably Rc52 or somewhere close. I try to lead as many as possible to a better solution but 1) most don't realize how much sharper a good knife is, and 2) think that sharpening is a long arduous task, whereas resharpening one of my knives takes me about 15 minutes once a month or so.

I don't have too much more to tell you, you understand all the factors now From here it's just refinements of the knives you have, and maybe purchasing or making some special purpose knives (like matched left/right single bevel knives). With the Shapton Glass stones, yes they are very expensive for very high grits, but really who needs a 30,000 grit stone anyway? That level of fine polishing is best handled with a strop. The other item WRT Shapton stones that is expensive is the special stone they make that is designed to flatten the Shapton Glass stones when necessary. Don't buy it. First, as I've said, they stay flat for a very long time. Second, even if you do need to flatten them, it can be done with a much less expensive diamond stone or even silicon carbide sandpaper taped to a flat surface. I wouldn't recommend buffing wheels, it's very easy to round the edge that way. Actually it's quite hard to use one without rounding the edge to some degree. If you do use one, you need a very firm felt wheel, you need to have it rotating away from the blade edge, and you need a very fine touch- if you press down at all into the wheel it will begin to round your nice V-shaped edge. Also, it looks to me like your test was accurate, that's pretty much the order I would have guessed for that knife collection. The thing you'll like about your PM-V11 blade is it will stay sharp for a comparatively long time, so besides performing best it will require resharpening the least.

Ok Pat, I will give it a spin

Yeah, that's why I haven't gotten one either. I don't want an extrusion machine as I think they're inherently limited in the scale of detail and quality of surface finish. But when you look at stereolithography machines, well if you're willing to spend $5k-$8k you can get an excellent reliable machine, but that's extremely expensive. And all of them under that price range seem to come with some gotcha or other and seem to need constant maintenance and adjustment to get what you want. In short, not really baked for hobbyist/prosumer use. And unfortunately I've seen little progress in the last couple years.

I got some 32 gauge copper wire and managed to make an eye hook roughly half the size of the previous ones, but it's still not good enough, as below. There just seems to be not enough room here, if I had known this I would have positioned the ringbolts for the train tackle inward at least one plank width. But at the same time I also have to wonder whether they really used train tackles for 3 pounders, they seem small enough that handspikes and muscle were enough. So I'm gluing in the guns finally and working on the anchors, and have made buoys. If I'm doing buoys I suppose I should put them well up in the shrouds as Chuck does for Cheerful, he says that's what they did. But it looks pretty odd, I have no idea why they would have done that other than maybe the goal was to throw the buoy as far as possible and the elevation of being up on the shrouds helped. Also I guess a line has to run from the buoy coil all the way to the anchors, will have to see how to do that. And I don't see a spot to belay the anchor-fishing line that comes from the blocks on the cathead, so I'll have to add a cleat on the cathead, or belay them to the timberheads next to the catheads, but that is where I was intending to put the stopper lines. I wish I know more about what I am doing. And I need to get back to mounting the rudder, all the parts are done. I just have been avoiding it because it will be tricky to get right and I haven't thought of a good clamping/jig arrangement to make it easier.

I don't see how you could make common parts across different ships unless it's deck/hull fittings and yards/masts and even then you'd have to offer a series of say 32/38 gun RN frigates from the 1780s for it to make sense. What I hope for in the long run is Chris and Chuck or people like them have reasonable cost access to excellent laser and zillion axis CNC milling machines and highly accurate stereolithography 3d printers. With a (reasonably significant) amount of CAD work, you could offer multiple decorations and figureheads for ships in a class, or offer POB and POF versions of the same model. Line and some fittings and strip wood is stocked, the rest of the parts are produced when an order comes in and the person has chosen this particular ship's decorations and the POF version and selected any other options like wood or quality of fittings. That way they wouldn't have to maintain large part inventories, and the flexibility for the customer leads to more orders. But since none of us are actually doing it for a living, we just have to see whether any of it makes sense to Chris and Chuck, who are the people putting out money to produce kits.

Looks good Mark, and that's the right way to do it- even if you don't have lots of time to work on it, even spending 15 minutes moving something along will help. You still have a reasonable distance to go with the fitting out of the hull and all the rigging.

Custom photo etch is not insanely expensive, I've had the linked company make me things a few times. There are others.

They will probably have to add new categories to the spark test for powdered metals. They are not real alloys in the sense that the component metals were never mixed while fully melted, so they can be made up of metal ratios that would never be used in traditional alloying, and that's going to lead to odd spark test results. In the case of PM-V11, it has a much more vanadium than is ever used in normal alloys, somehow that is yielding a spark test result that is similar to HSS. Also now that you are going to be fully in the knife sharpening business, I suggest you look at Shapton Glass Stones. I have a large drawer overflowing with all types of sharpening stones- water stones, ceramics, diamond, if someone has made it I've tried it. The best by far in terms of both metal removal rate and stone flatness is the Shapton Glass. Water stones work very well, but they are 1) very messy and 2) very soft, they have to be constantly flattened to avoid a curved stone surface that will never sharpen a perfectly flat bevel. I've been using my Shapton Glass stones for 6 or 7 years now and have yet to have to flatten them. They also remove metal faster than anything I've tried, including water stones. I use 1000/4000/8000 and finish with a strop, and I have a 220 grit stone for reshaping bevels.