Nirvana

Tom, those carving are so exquisite. Just amazing and beautiful.

Very nice carvings!

Beautiful work. 
 
I can't imagine they are quick to carve.

Really beautiful work Tom.   You are making some fantastic progress.

Fantastic.

Chuck , Thank you. I enjoy my work, especially these wood carvings, which are very challenging and have an artistic atmosphere.

Works are gradually being updated
Customized various bow puppets and reliefs
450449987@qq.com

A small test I did for my Heller Victory ages ago:
 

 
Same dimensions, same weights. Guess which one is the original plastic kit´s part and which the wooden replacement 😉
 
XXXDAn

Unfortunately, copying is subject to dimensional errors due to paper humidity content, ambient temperature, etc.
 
Nic

Thanks Rick and Per!
 
I haven't had a ton of time to work on this lately, or look into MSW for that matter. However, the basic hull shape is pretty much done. I put in the lower part of the stem and the false keel, sanded, primed, and sanded, and I think it is ready for the next steps. I also painted the inner bulwarks white, I prefer to paint as I go rather than doing a lot of complicated masking, so we'll see how that goes. Here is what she looks like now:
 

 
Anyway, next step is to cut out the gun and sally ports. I was looking for the best way to transfer the locations, and thought I would use the deck on the plans (and will) but I was slightly annoyed to see that the plans are slightly smaller than the actual deck piece. If you look at the photo below, I've aligned the stack, and as you move forward and aft, everything on the plans is closer to the center than the rastered markings. Bottom line is that I'm going to need to locate the cuts, correcting for the size difference, and be attuned to potential problems when I build out the hammock rail boxes. Reminding myself that this is an 'Admiral' level kit.
 

 
Thanks for looking in!
 
George
 

If you are an NRG member there is a video posted in the member's section on Airbrush Basics.  In addition there is a list of resources with the video that lists some informational videos on cleaning your airbrush.  Open the NRG website and look under Events then pick Workshops from the drop down.
 

Thank you Craig, the tumbler indeed helped a lot, specially for a kit like the Crocker, where many parts will be left without painting or even be polished later for a realistic chrome effect. 
You can toy a bit with the diameter of the steel pins, I bought some with 0,6mm and 0,3 mm diameter and used 200 gram of the latter. The tumbling process needs to be supervised. I tumbled about an hour, but you have to find a balance, between nice surfaces as a result and not losing sharpness in tiny details like boltheads on the other side.
I recommend wearing rubber gloves, while handling the parts after tumbling, you will be astonished, how black the water will be, and I guess, it´s not too healthy either.
I also got the magnetic tumbler suggestion through videos and build logs too.

Cheers Rob

The engine is on it´s way and it is a bit fiddly, but due to great engineering and tight tolerances manageable. Adding all the V-shaped cylinder parts proved tricky, when the rocker came into play and the connecting tube (carburetor) needed to be added at the same time. Unfortunately, I mis-orientated this part and had to pry it loose later, which was no fun at all and caused some spots for later touch ups.





Cheers Rob

Well, first building steps are prepared. Note to myself, test fit often and understand the manual, specially where parts need to be drilled. I don´t know about the MFH car kits, but with the Crocker engine parts there are dozens of holes to be drilled and some are hard to reach in later stages.

The foot pedal and drill stand for my Proxxon mini drill help a lot to make the job faster. The good thing with drilling white metal, there is nearly no burr to be removed.

The engine block, with one cylinder mostly mounted, showing the parts of the other:



Mock assembly for test fitting of one cylinder. The ribs and heads are actually removed and primed and will be sprayed semi matte black later.





Cheers Rob

Well, I´m not much into the chopper thing, Ken. Personally, I prefer European bikes for European roads, they just perform better. My last one was a KTM 950 SM, the last one with carburetors. This thing drove like a sharp blade, but with the handling of a bicycle. Perfect for ultra fast city commuting, alpine roads, just everything below 200 km/h, because there was no windshield. Even week trips were no problem with the furious KTM. I loved that beast, but left it in Berlin, when I went to my island and promised my wife not to drive motorcycles anymore. Well, now it´s mountainbiking .
 
Cheers Rob

Gorgeous Kit, MFH has been at the top of the kit engineering world for a couple of years now, the only problem for me is the price... Ordering even one tends to deplete the bank account for quite a while....
 
I'm down for this, we seldom see the classic american stuff even scratchbuilt, to have someone actually producing kits... This has to be modeling heaven....

Ladies and Gentlemen, lets start our engines and begin a new adventure.

Some month ago, I received my first MFH kit, after I saw some pictures of the finished model and fell in love with the bike immediately. There she was, all the great ingredients of an American bike classic minus the to my eye ugly mid section, the classic Harley Davidson models have. 

I will not tell a lot about the history of the bike, as I´m not an expert here, but it´s a pretty exclusive one. Hand built, the numbers of production bikes range between 60 and 300. The few surviving beauties are among the highest priced motorcycles of today.
The Crocker was fast, so fast, that the company complied, to give back the full price of the bike, should the driver be overtaken by a Harley or Indian on a strait road.

The kit was bought from MFH in Japan directly for a decent price and the fastest and trouble free shipping, I ever had and reached after six days on my doorstep.



Since then, I bought some more MFH kits, as simply browsing through the boxes, the absolute top quality of the kits has an addictive spell over me. The kits are multi-media, most parts are from cast white metal, some photo etch, rubber parts, different hoses and wires, some chrome plated metal parts, nice decals, ...

I preparation for the build, I read a lot about MFH kits, to get a hold onto the many new adventures, I was expecting with the build and as one result, I invested into a magnetic tumbler polisher for cleaning the white metal parts. It took my month to finally obtain one to my remote place in the world, but finally, it arrived.



After some successful testing, all white metal parts were dumped into the tumbler´s bowl, then, I added water with a drop of detergent and 200 gram of 0,3 mm steel polishing needles. The strong magnet in the base swirls the needles around the non magnetic parts and `hammers´ the surfaces very gingerly. After about an hour of tumbling the water was dark black and the parts looked like this.

 

It was not so easy to remove the tinier parts from the needles and I keep all the bowls with needles and the blackened water until, I made sure, I picked all the parts out.
For now, I rinsed the parts with water again and layed them out onto kitchen paper to dry.







The finish of the tumbled parts is fantastic, but of course, further cleanup will be needed down the road. Some parts will get polished, as the white metal looks perfectly, like steel or even chrome when polished carefully.

Next step will be checking against a copy of the manual, if all parts are there. MFH manuals include only a rudimentary parts list, but on their homepage, they have pictures of the kits parts, which will be helpful for the task.

I will add a few detail pictures from some of the parts, to show the fantastic casting quality. The tumble polishing of the parts effect surface detail only minimal, details remained sharp.

 







Stay tuned for more.

Cheers Rob

Wonderful!

Wonderful!

Wonderful!

Well I need to continue on with the process... We are working on Version II of the thrust collar.... This is a part I designed a few months ago using the only info I had at that time...
This is what it looked like and the pic it was derived from....
 


Yeah one single view, from one angle.... A little hard to get a correct shape... Since then a few more images have come into my possession which show what it looks like from the rear....

We have seen these images before but in these I've enlarged a section of each side and have started lining it out for measuring...
 
One of the things we look for is matching points in each pic, The truss rod slot in the collar is one of those points but even more important is the stud/nut positions..  We have three in one pic and two in the other but there is one that shows in both pics so they have to be in the same position on the part, the lower center stud... Now given the information in the top view we see that there is an upper and lower stud in the middle there is a upper and lower corner stud on the left and a single center stud on the right... Also that the studs are mounted to standoff tabs on the casing of the collar housing.... This is the start of the pattern we will make... All the tabs are the same relative size to one another, they all carry the same size stud and are secured by the same size nut.... Now the one stud we don't see in the end view pics is the upper middle one, we see it in the top view.....
 
This is where the artsy part comes in, none of the pics have the same frame of reference, all we can do is extract patterns and points from the images and make them fit the 3D model... This is the time of draw, adjust, draw some more, adjust some more until you get something that actually looks like the pics... It's hard to describe the process as nothing is concrete...
 
Basically your trying to make a 3D model that looks like what your seeing in the pics....
 
So at this point I'll be figuring out how to model this part I will first try to adjust the previous one and failing that design a new one...
 
Anyway this is the process I go thru for every part I make in SW...
 
Now back to designing the part...
 
Onwards..
 
 
 
 
 
 

CAUTION: esoteric camera nerd stuff!
 
We sometimes obsess about how many pixels our camera sensors have (mine is bigger than yours ...). But are more pixels ever worse than fewer?
 
I have two principal camera bodies, the Nikon D850 and the Nikon D5600. The D850 camera body sensor has almost twice as many pixels as the D5600 sensor. It would seem the D850 should create higher quality images. But I was curious about the difference in actual image sizes for subjects photographed with the D850 FX camera body and the D5600 DX camera body, using the same Nikon Micro Nikkor 105 mm macro FX lens (a "prime" or non-zoom lens).
 
The full frame (FX) D850 image sensor produces images with 8256x5504 pixels, or 45.44 megapixels. The crop frame (DX) D5600 produces images with 6000x4000 pixels, or 24.00 megapixels. So the D850 images have 1.89 times as many pixels as the D5600 images. This seems like an obvious advantage for the D850, producing images that can be cropped smaller to get the same number of pixels as a similar D5600 image that is cropped much less. But this isn’t the end of the story!


 
 
Full frame (FX) lenses can be used on crop frame (DX) camera bodies. Because the DX sensor is smaller, if used with a FX lens only the center 75% of the image produced by the lens is used (for Nikon cameras - other manufacturers have different full/crop fame ratios). This narrows the view angle, and  increases the effective focal length of the FX lens on the DX camera body by about 1.5.
 
 
 
 

 
This means you can take a picture of an object to fill the DX picture area from about 1.5 times the distance as needed to fill the FX picture area. So from the same distance the image of an object will be much smaller in the FX camera picture than in the DX camera picture (using the same FX lens on both camera bodies). Which camera and lens combination actually gives more pixels for the object being photographed? A simple 1.5:1.0 comparison doesn’t work. The calculations are complicated by the fact that the pixel density on the FX and DX image sensors is different (the D5600 sensor has about 1.2 times as many pixels per mm2 as the D850 sensor).
 
To answer this question I took some pictures of a test pattern with the D850 and D5600 camera bodies mounted on a tripod. I used the Nikon Micro Nikkor 105 mm macro FX lens on both camera bodies. On the DX D5600 body the lens is equivalent to a 157 mm lens.


 
 
First I positioned the tripod so the test pattern image filled the D5600/105 mm picture vertically (left). Then I cropped the picture to include only the test pattern image (the outside of the outer black rectangle). The resulting test pattern picture was 5180x3904 pixels, or 20,222,720 pixels (20.22 megapixels).
 
 
 
 
 

 
Then I shot the test pattern with the D850/105 mm setup on the tripod at the same position as for the D5600 shot. As you can see (left), the test pattern image does not fill the picture. After cropping the image to include only the test pattern, the resulting picture was 4632x3496 pixels, or 16,193,472 pixels (16.19 megapixels). This is 0nly 80% (0.800756) as many pixels in the test pattern image as the D5600/105 mm body and lens combination.
 
 
 
 
From the same position, with the same lens on the two different camera bodies, the DX/FX D5600/105 mm setup produced 1.25 times as many pixels for the same object as the FX/FX D850/105 mm combination! So for more distant objects the DX body and FX lens gives greater magnification and more pixels for the objects being photographed.
 
****
 
But what about close-up and macro photography? This is normally of more interest for model photography. For these situations you can position the camera close to the subject and fill the picture area with the subject. How much closer does the D850/105 mm combination need to be to fill the entire picture area with the test pattern?
 
For this test I measured the distance from the initial tripod position where the test pattern filled the D5600/105 mm image picture. The distance from the test pattern to the focal plane was 146 cm (57.5 inches). Then I moved the tripod closer until the test pattern filled the frame on the D850/105 mm setup. The distance was 108 cm (42.5 inches). The DX body/FX lens combination fills the image with the subject at 1.35 times the distance for the FX body/FX lens combination.
 
To fill the picture with the subject the FX/FX body/lens has to be only 0.74 times as far from the subject as the DX/FX combination. The D850/105 mm cropped test pattern had 7344x5499 pixels, or 40,384,656 pixels (40.38 megapixels).
 
At this closer distance the 40.38 megapixel test pattern image in the D850/105 mm has twice (1.99699) as many pixels as the 20.22 megapixel picture on the D5600/105 mm at the longer distance when photographing the same object. So the D850 and 105 mm lens combination is much better for macro photography than the D5600 and 105 mm lens setup.
 
****
 
I normally carry the MUCH lighter D5600 camera body (and FX telephoto lenses) when I am hiking and photographing distant subjects like birds and animals. The D850 is used in the "studio" (my kitchen) when I am doing macro photography of ship models, wildflowers and such. However, on special wildflower expeditions I will carry the D850 and the 105 mm macro lens into the field.
 
Hope this is of interest to someone.

Wonderful!

Wonderful!

That looks  Superb  Gary.
 
OC.