vossiewulf

I'm wondering if anyone ever figured out how to do the green paint/orange paint switch
 
Ok one step forward, this was one of the screwdriver sharpeners I bought for experimentation, it's $8.95 on EBay and if nothing else, these will provide perfect sharpening for the straight chisels.
 
It is just a mild steel axle between two unsealed bearings with an outer size that doesn't make sense in any measurement system, 1.025"/26.05mm.
 
However, putting a straight chisel in up to the ferrule through the hole in the axle results in an angle just a little more than 25 degrees, I'm guessing 27 and the screw holds the chisel firmly. I think somewhere in the 22mm to 24mm range for the outer diameter of the bearings would give 25 degrees with the hole cut through the axis center.
 



I figured out that I needed to keep my finger even closer to the edge than that, because even at that distance the tool was bending and giving very slightly uneven results that got better once I had my finger literally on the cutting edge, so I was sharpening my fingertip too.
 
But once I understood that it went quickly, it works fine, just would be much nicer if we had a weight keeping consistent pressure instead of trying to do so with our hands. Bevel is straight and flat and it's sharp enough to pass the basswood end grain test, all cut cleanly.



 
 
 
 
 

Thank you Alexander, I think I followed that, and I will try it - I mean the making of eyes. I understand what you mean about no protrusion of the lower edge of the semicircle gouges.
 
Below are some photos of various jigs for sharpening gravers. These are what I have been looking at while thinking about making jigs for Mikhail's tools. As you see, a jig for the straight chisels should be very simple. With a little added complexity, it could handle the straight and skew chisels. This is what I intend to make first, I have some 1/4" ball bearings sitting around that are a good size.
 
For the semicircular gouges, I am still thinking. Basically the idea is that the jig axle and the piece that holds the gouge are geared together such that as the jig rolls forward, the piece that is holding the gouge turns along its long axis. I think that will work but I'm not completely sure.
 
This is the "Crocker Pattern" graver sharpener. They are made by many companies. I don't think they'll work without significant modification or making Mikhail's tools separate from the handles.

This is a Bergeon 2461, not expensive, I ordered one to try it. It's for sharpening screwdrivers.

 
This is a Bergeon 2462 graver sharpener, fairly expensive for what it is, not sure if I will try it.

All brass version.

 
This is a very cheap graver sharpener you can find all over EBay and any jewelry or watch making supply companies.

 
This is one guy's home-made jig. I like it.


 
Another home-made jig. More sturdy but only good for one sharpening angle.

 
And a seriously cheap and easy home-made jig

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.
 

 
 

To return to another point of yours, how thin the blade is definitely matters, but it also matters in how often it needs to be sharpened and how strong that edge is. If you're making straight cuts and don't mind sharpening often, I long since had reached the same conclusion as you where the sharpest blade is achieved when each side of the blade is a whole bevel. I've been sharpening my detail/chip carving knives that way for a long time now, and I carved 90% of the chip carving below with a Hock detail knife sharpened that way.
 
The disadvantages are weakness under any twisting load, they have to be sharpened often, and sharpening takes much longer because you're hitting so much metal. Most of the knives I use for ship work aren't sharpened that way, they still have a big bevel but not the whole side of the blade. For me the only time the performance vs. drawbacks is positive is when I'm chip carving where you need well more than scalpel sharpness.
 
 

I did the 3 inch Ordnance Rifle in this series a few years ago, I was very frustrated with the poor surface quality of the white metal castings and replaced the cheeks and axle with my parts, and sanded/filed down all the surfaces of the wheels and trail and then re-engraved the wood pattern. Thankfully yours appear to be considerably better than what I received, but I still am baffled as to why they don't use resin with its far, far better castings surfaces.
 
 

My recommendation is finish sand the piece of wood, and either use Indian ink directly, or an Indian ink marker (artist supply stores have them, most "black" markers are actually dark purple). Both will penetrate the wood and leave the wood texture totally exposed, so it looks like the wood is black and not painted.

One thing to consider with handles Gaetan is how well it locates the point of the blade and its rotation for you. A curved and fully rounded handle can be quite comfortable, but it's hard to know exactly where the point is just by the grip. That's why I always make the back edge of the handle straight, and perfectly in line with the point of the blade, and also with slight flats on the side, these help you intuitively feel where the edge is pointed. With a fully rounded handle, you can be holding the knife slightly twisted in your hand without noticing.
 
But in the end, handles are very personal things, make what feels right for you.

She should be very pretty with the radical French hull form. Wasn't this one of the non-Sané designs? I seem to remember there was one guy who particularly favored the angular hull forms. I have Boudriot's book on French frigates, I should go look it up.

The way to avoid that problem is to build the wings and tails over the plans, that is what I have always done. Tape plans or a copy of them to your building board taut and flat, repeat with some plastic wrap over top to prevent any problems with glue sticking to plans, pin or clamp spars in the correct place and off you go. No way to have a problem unless the plans themselves are wrong.
 
Andrew, I recommend you contact Model Expo, they have a free replacement for broken/missing parts policy. I cannot see any reasonable way to fix what you have or use it in the finished model as is - explain to them what happened and see if you can get replacement parts for the wooden parts of the top wing.

Plastic small scale:
 
http://www.arcforums.com/forums/air/index.php?/forum/59-aircraft-modeling-forums/
 
http://cs.finescale.com/f/
 
RC aircraft:
 
https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/index.php
 
http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/rc-airplanes-226/

Just make sure you have some of the thin sanding film that can be creased really sharply, best thing I've found for hitting both sides of the eleventy thousand cooling fin seams to make them as invisible as possible. The fit should be good but if you get lots of squeezeout or empty seams... think of an old salt squinting and shaking his pipe at you while saying "give up on perfection now boy, for that way lies death. Death... and MADNESS!"

There were several Camel engines, from Le Rhone and Clerget and Bentley, and they all flew a bit differently. Josef Jacobs, the German ace who flew the Dr.I longer than anyone preferred the Clerget, and provided rewards to front-line troops who let him know about downed Clerget Camels with undamaged engines. Most of the other information I have says the Bentley Br.I versions were the best, with a nominal 150hp, with Clerget having a nominal 130hp, but only the RNAS used Bentley-powered Camels.
 
Also your Dr.I book should provide lots of detail reference pics. I need to find someone who knows the whole story, but I'm a bit confused by it; one the one hand Oberursel signed a license agreement with Gnome/Le Rhone in 1914 (who thought that was a good idea in France also?) that included the "lambda" 9 cylinder engine, Oberursel didn't begin design and development on it until 1917 and Le Rhone maybe in 1916? So I'm confused by the fact that I can't find any reference to any differences between the 9J and the UR.II, everything I can find says they're identical engines, and that makes no sense as no engine ever survived the transition from design drawings to working engines without changes. And I also can't find any information saying Oberursel copied captured 9Js, what I do have says their design engineers started building prototypes in 1917 and they went through an independent development and testing process before Idflieg certified it for production.

Ok I had to look that up and yes in fact "semester" in Swedish means "holiday". Swedish students going to college in the US must have an amusing time scheduling brutal classes for their first and second "holidays" each year
 

Worse than the pushrods- those could be fixed without too much pain- are the exhausts. In the 9J they go to the back half of the crankcase, and I think the 9j has a larger-diameter crankcase too that provides a bit more room for the exhaust, and to make those you need to make a blank with baking clay and then carve it down into a master for casting. Much better plan to wait and get a real 110.

That's all standard 3d printing stuff, there are multiple packages designed specifically to set up a model for 3d printing with the appropriate supports and orientation and they check minimum feature size. The latter you have to check and know before you begin modeling, you can't just model whatever and expect it to 3d print at any scale. You have to plan for and create different versions of your models at various scales as the minimum feature size shrinks relative to the size of the model as you go up in scale.
 
None of them are insurmountable, but it's also something unlikely to be navigated by someone who is not a very experienced modeler. Once I get my desktop up and running again I plan to work on printing some of my work through Shapeways and maybe offering some models useful to people here and in other (physical) modeling areas, I'll let folks know what I learn.

I think I may have made you aware of it and that it's THE book to have for building Dr.I models, but it was Ron Thibault who saw that they were in stock again and pointed that out. Thank him for continuing to check
 

I understand Tor, I got halfway through an Alb. D.V before it got killed in a move and I decided not to re-try as they are just not that great kits and even someone just trying to build something reasonably good out of the box has problems, as you have had.
 
The up side (which is pretty big) is no one offers anything like it. But they've always looked like airplane models designed by ship modelers who don't know much about flying and they would do themselves a big favor by hiring an experienced RC aircraft designer to redo them for higher accuracy. Then there is the inexplicable obsession with white metal, it's inexplicable as you can see the masters were reasonably good, so if they'd just taken that master and cast the part in resin it would have looked nice and been easy to work with if you want to add detail. Instead they use white metal and it's pitted and bumps are everywhere and they take a ton of effort just to get in basically usable state.
 
But I doubt they have much impetus to do a redesign when no one else is competing, so there's room for someone to step in and do better.

For future reference, Micro Krystal Clear is made to do glass for instruments (on larger scales) and windows (smaller scales), and works pretty well.

Congrats Tor, glad you are very happy with it, that's the only thing that's important in the end.

Yeah wow, order it while you can if you have any intention of ever building a Dr.I model. The book has 70 or so pages of nothing but various angles of a very highly detailed and mostly correct Fokker Dr. I 3d model and leaves almost nothing to doubt.

"Let he/she who hath never assembleth a model pieceth wrongly casteth the first CA bomb." Book of Vossie 
 
You know what's worse than assembling a piece incorrectly? It's thinking your piece is incorrect, tearing it off, and then realizing that the piece was fine and it's your brain with the problem, and now the piece (that you have only one of and/or took four hours to make) is destroyed. A... friend told me about that happening to him. Yes, a friend who... lives far away and has no email address. Yep, that's it. Yes indeedy.
 
Speaking of the gear, are you going to do the bracing? There should be an X-brace crossing from forward gear/fuselage joint down to the lower forward gear struts.
 

Ditto, I'm surprised you got it looking that good, still at a loss to understand why they use the worst casting material possible for such important castings.
 
Anyway, that should look pretty good and I don't think anyone else is going to do better than that. I hope you have enough patience to order some of Uschi's metal powders, they really work well and you have three different metals at least there between the casing, the cylinders, and the exhausts that were copper.
 
It's an Oberursel UR.II which is a license-built copy of the Le Rhone 9J, so pics of either will do fine for detail reference. 

You should check with the guys working in 1/32 or 1/24, chances are they will have some heavy rigging wire that would be the right size for 1/16. You should definitely look at what Uschi has available, look at the leather decals and the metal powders at least.
 
Also here's some good general rigging info on WWI aircraft/models. Remember that rigging wire of the time was solid steel, not braided, so best material at your scale might be fine piano/hard wire, and you should be using a fine enough wire that bending and twisting shouldn't be a major issue. I don't think they have any British aircraft so you don't need to worry about British streamlined wire.

Work yes, "well" is a relative term. For Le Rhone cylinders like mine, you'd need 56 disks in 6 diameters (one the inner diameter, other five outer diameter including the tapered width section at the bottom of each cylinder). Times 9 cylinders is 496 disks.
 
So let's say you just focus on the two main diameters, you'd need to turn two cylinders of the appropriate diameter. Then you drill and ream out the center, because you need an exact fit and also to minimize the amount of material to be cut to part off each disk. And the parting off process has to create disks of equal thickness down to a couple ten thousandths of an inch. That's harder than what I did.
 
So a better route would be to part off perfect thickness pieces of each diameter, and then create a fully enclosed RTV mold and then make say 12 of each, and then make new molds that will cast 12 of each at a time. And then you'd need to cast 41 sets of 12 each.
 
Then you'd need to glue 496 pieces. I think you're getting the point <g>, I thought about this too and decided although in some ways it wasn't as hard to do it that way, doing it that way would actually require far more time and effort than just turning them on the lathe.
 
The one thing I didn't try that may have promise is to get RTV that's as flexible as possible, and then instead of making a two-part mold that results in a mold seam on the cooling fins requiring many many hours to remove, cast them in a one-piece mold and hope it's flexible enough to demold each part without tearing the mold or breaking the resin fins. If that would work, you'd need to machine only one good example of the cylinder and then cast the rest, with almost no clean up processing required.
 
If someone wants to try that, let me know and I'll send one of my cylinders to try, but you also have to promise not to damage my parts as I really really really don't want to have to make replacements that match.
 
Thanks Ken, it's on the schedule now
 
BTW name is Jay and that obviously works, but if you use my handle it's Vossie, not Wulf. I answer fine to Vossie, I've had this handle since 1991 on CIS and GEnie and even (ex) wives have frequently called me that.

Where the hell were you when I was making these?  OTOH then you lose the excitement of cutting one of those grooves in one pass when you can feel the piece pulsing, with each pulse just infinitesimally short of the point at which the cutter grabs and then there are loud noises and lathes bouncing around a workbench and mass hysteria, gets the blood flowing. Sometimes literally.
 
I'm familiar with the Makers Faire, not sure if that's what you mean.
 
I considered that and decided yeah I think I'll go with an internal steel dowel pin for alignment ;-)