Charles W Morgan by Landlubber Mike - Model Shipways - Scale 1:64 - New Bedford Whaling Bark

[Landlubber Mike]

Thanks BE!  The Morgan does have an an interesting history, and it's great that you can still visit her at Mystic Seaport.  The restoration was very well done.  

 

There's lots of little detail pieces on whalers which make for a fun time - a nice change from the typical warship kit that is out there, and a nice reprieve from rigging cannons with 2mm blocks

[jwvolz]

Great job Mike. 

[Martin W]

Mike, I just want to say that your work so far shows your fine skills.  This is an interesting ship -- I don't know anything about her history, but the shape of the bow is intriguing to say the least.  I had wanted to attend the MSW convention in Mystic (I believe that was '15), but just couldn't get away, so missed a golden opportunity to see the restoration.  It's exciting to visit those old vessels, you can really build an understanding of the ways elements work together.

 

I read your account of clearing the dust when you worked with the ebony.  That's important even when working with other woods.  I'll boast that I got a dust collector for Christmas, which has already made a difference in keeping my workbench clean.  You can check it out here:

 

http://www.woodcraft.com/product/143300/shopvac-portable-air-cleaner.aspx

 

The ebony against the holly does look really good.  Bravo!

 

I also agree with you that building up the bulwarks is good practice.  I did that with my Rattlesnake, and learned a lot.  With the Fly, it seems that a good number of details are simulated rather than actually built in.

 

Cheers,

 

Martin

[DocBlake]

Great job on your Morgan so far, Mike!

[alde]

She's looking real nice Mike. I love all the busy details on whalers and the history. I'm real drawn to them.

[Landlubber Mike]

I read your account of clearing the dust when you worked with the ebony.  That's important even when working with other woods.  I'll boast that I got a dust collector for Christmas, which has already made a difference in keeping my workbench clean.  You can check it out here:

 

http://www.woodcraft.com/product/143300/shopvac-portable-air-cleaner.aspx

 

The ebony against the holly does look really good.  Bravo!

 

Hey Martin, thanks very much for the recommendation.  In my workshop, along with a shop vac connected to my power tools, I also have a Jet air filter hanging from the ceiling (good thing the workshop is in the basement as I don't think my wife would be happy if I hung it in a finished room).  I think it's the model a step below this one:

 

https://www.amazon.com/708620B-AFS-1000B-Filtration-Electrostatic-Pre-Filter/dp/B00004R9LO/ref=sr_1_1?s=hi&ie=UTF8&qid=1484317848&sr=1-1&keywords=jet+air+cleaner

 

I also purchased a table-top unit, mostly for when I start carving.  The ebony dust is pretty heavy, so between the shop vac and the Jet unit I think I'm in pretty good shape.  I also make it a habit of immediately wiping down and vacuuming the area when working with ebony.  I found the unit below on eBay for significantly less than retail - I haven't tried it out yet, but it seems to have a pretty strong air pull which will be great for when/if I start carving, especially with power tools):

 

https://www.amazon.com/PSI-Woodworking-DC725-Portable-Collector/dp/B000REX1UU

 

 

After seeing Alexander's carvings, makes me want to get a good set of carving tools and start carving - wow!

 

http://modelshipworld.com/index.php/topic/5412-carving-from-belgorod/

Edited January 13, 2017 by Landlubber Mike

[donrobinson]

Nice work Mike, I like your wood selections. Does the yellowheart hold its colour or does it turn. I bought some dye I am going to try on some osage orange, I am hoping it will keep it yellow, for on the Pegasus.

[DocBlake]

Don:  Yellowheart will hold it's color, as will bloodwood.  Redheart fades to a brownish red after a few months.  The yellowheart I used to plank the bulwarks on my MS AVS is a yellow as the day the planks were lain!

[Martin W]

Mike -- That Jet unit is a good one.  I'm planning on putting one in my outdoor workshop, since my bandsaw and scrollsaw both put out a surprising amount of sawdust.  Even the Byrnes produces a good quantity, so it's wise to employ redundant systems, and to clean up.

 

Carving is pure pleasure -- sometimes I even think it might go beyond modelling!

 

Cheers,

 

Martin

[Elijah]

Looking nice Mike! I look forward to seeing how you do the planking! Are you going to switch the wood of a plank or strake when it hits a different colored area? It seems you would have to get a really nice joint to make it look like one plank in two colors. Good luck !

[Landlubber Mike]

Hey Don, like Doc said, yellowheart does seem to keep its color which is nice.  I did put tung oil on a test piece, and it turned a nice vibrant yellow.  If it changes, I blame Doc who recommended yellowheart to me    All kidding aside, this is a good resource for thinking about what woods change colors and how much.  Interestingly, Bloodwood is listed as a wood that experiences pretty strong color changes:

 

http://www.wood-database.com/wood-articles/preventing-color-changes-in-exotic-woods/

 

 

From my limited understanding, applying a finish isn't a foolproof method of avoiding these changes.  I even asked the guy at Woodcraft whether their UV-resistant finishes would help, but he said that the UV-resistance of those finishes breaks down over time, so you end up just delaying the inevitable.

[DocBlake]

Mike:  Bloodwood does seem to darken with age, but overall it stays a deep red.  I've not seen it turn "black"  I think it's a nice choice for inner bulwarks, but pear or cherry are good also (and MUCH easier to work!).

[Landlubber Mike]

Elijah, thanks for looking in.  Thankfully the Morgan has pretty distinct areas where there are color changes, so for the most part you don't need to change colors mid-strake or mid-piece.  The trickiest part will be on the bowsprit I think, which changes from black to white so that will require two separate dowels attached together.

 

One tricky area I'm working through at the moment is the main rail.  The main rail is ochre inboard, black outboard, with a white stripe at the outer edge for one of the Morgan's pinstripes.  So, what I am attempting to do is laminate three pieces of wood - yellowheart, ebony, and holly - to form the main rail.  So far so good - I was worried about bending a thin strip of ebony around the yellowheart, but after a few failed attempts at bending ebony, I finally came upon a way to do it.  The best success I had was to soak the piece, put it against a former with the curve I wanted, then use a hot iron plank bender that I got from Model Expo against piece to get the bend I wanted.  After a few rounds of this, I was able to rubber band the piece along the former to help keep the bend.  One thing to bear in mind is that the hot iron can burn the wood and even cause tiny divots, so it's best to use the iron against the opposite side of the visible piece of the wood - essentially, if the curve is concave, you use a former that is convex, and vice versa.

 

Here are some pictures of the main rail after laminating a 1.5mm x 1.5mm ebony strip to the earlier installed yellowheart:

 

 

 

[DocBlake]

That turned out really well, Mike!

[alde]

Mike, I know you are a ways away from building the whaleboats. The Morgan is on my bucket list and my goal (or dream) is to build framed whaleboats on a form. I plan to learn small boat building before I get to the Morgan. My point is that I just got a copy of The Greenwich Hospital Barge and methods of building open boats by David Antscherl from Seawatch Books. It looks to me that this book makes it very doable to build the whaleboats. I have not used the information to build a boat yet as I just got the book but it's well written and layer out with good illustrations. I hope to start a build log for a small boat based on the information in the book in the next couple of months.

[Landlubber Mike]

Thanks Doc!  This framing thing is taking a while to get done right, but it looks like it might work out nicely after all.  Holly seems much easier to bend, but I think I'm going to wait until I add the cheeks to the stem as the white strip extends from the main rail onto the cheeks.

 

The nice thing about painting with wood in this way is that you avoid having to paint straight lines on things like the pinstripes.  You can use your trusty table saw to essentially cut out the lines you need.

[Landlubber Mike]

Thanks very much for the suggestion Al.  The kit has you build the whaleboats in a bread and butter fashion.  That approach seems to work very nicely and easily, but I don't know if I can use that method and "paint with wood."  Seems like I would have to do the framing approach like you are thinking about.  I've barely started thinking about it, but have looked at logs with much interest where people are scratch building small boats around plugs or temporary bulkheads.

[Landlubber Mike]

I completed the transom side of the main rail with respect to the yellowheart and ebony sections.  It's a tricky piece to fit in that it there is not only a curve fore to aft, but also longitudinally (not sure if that's a word, but the main rail has a slow curve going up from the bulwarks to an apex at the midline of the stern and back down to the other side).  This took a little planning, but what I did was to cut a wider piece of yellowheart and sand it to get the fore to aft curve.  Then, I soaked it and put this plank forming jig I bought a while back from Micromark:

 

http://www.micromark.com/plank-forming-jig,7164.html

 

 

Once that was all done, it was a few hours of work to fit it against the main rail sections running along the sides of the ship.  Lots of measurements to make sure that the curve at the transom worked and was uniform (thankfully, somehow the transom framing pieces were pretty spot on).  Then it was on to gluing it to the hull - not easy with the various curves and lack of anchor points!  Eventually after some pins and clamping, I glued it and let it sit overnight.  Then this morning I laminated the ebony strip to it which wasn't too bad, and squared everything up.

 

Some artifacts from the camera, but the lines are very smooth and continuous.  A ton of time, planning and stress, but the main rail came together pretty nicely.  Eventually I'll finish it by laminating holly to it to represent the white pinstripe that runs the hull, but I think next I'm going to start planking the bulwarks and preparing the deck area by adding support pieces for the various deck items.  It's a relief to, for the most part, get the basic framing done so that now I can start adding things that will be seen on the model!

 

 

 

 

Edited January 15, 2017 by Landlubber Mike

[Martin W]

Well done, Mike.  Setting those rails in, keeping them steady and even has to be great for developing skills in measuring and setting in.  Plus, it's surely just plain gratifying to see what a a great job you've done!

 

Cheers,

 

Martin

[Landlubber Mike]

Thanks so much for the kind words Martin.  This has been an interesting new way for me to build a kit.  The Badger and the Pegasus, as you know, use the European approach of adding gunport patterns.  We all complain about them, but in the end, they do make things very easy once installed.  I think the Model Shipway kits tend to use this bulwark framing approach, at least I saw that the Constitution seems to do so.

 

One thing I think I might do for future builds is put together a framing jig which keeps the keel straight and perpendicular to the building surface, so that measurements are much easier to make.  It's been a real pain to try and line up the hull square to measure heights and the like.

[skifflake]

 Hi Mike:  Just getting on board. I to will be watching. thank you from Skiff Lake, New Brunswick...Pat

[donrobinson]

Very nice work Mike, a "building board" is very handy to have does not need to be anything fancy just needs to hold things firm and square

[Landlubber Mike]

Hey Pat, thanks for stopping by, happy to have you join us!

 

Thanks Don.  Have you done one before?  I said I was going to put one together for my Pegasus and Morgan, and even had pre-sourced some nice flat MDF boards, but got lazy or wanted to work on the models and never got around to it.  I would think they are pretty easy to put together too.  Flattest place I can find in the house is my kitchen island of all things.  Still, it's a pain to prop the model up with blocks and all that to get things square.  Was a real pain this weekend in trying to see how the stern was shaping up, especially making sure that the corners where the main rail lines met were symmetrical.  

[homer]

Nice work Mike!!! 

[Landlubber Mike]

Thanks Homer, really appreciate the kind words.  I've made a little progress, planking the bulwarks with yellowheart.  So far so good.  I'm about to start planking the exterior hull with ebony, which should be interesting.  Things have just been a little busy, and with the warm weather, I've been working on the yard and with other things.  Will try to post an update soon

[Eddie]

Hey howya goin Mike mate, love the selection of timber you are using, shes coming along nicely.    

[Beef Wellington]

Hi Mike, really nice progress on the bulwarks, you've captured the shape very nicely.  Looking forward to seeing the rest of the yellowheart and ebony go on.

[Tigersteve]

Me too!

Steve

[Landlubber Mike]

Hey guys, I haven't been on much lately with a family vacation, setting up a fish tank for my kids, the warmer weather coming on which means my other hobby (bonsai) starts up and gets very busy, etc.  With this model being a heavy kit bash for me, it takes a lot of time just to plan out how I'm going to approach certain things.  This makes me lean towards starting up the La Renommee and build it straight from the box.  I don't know, we'll see.  Anyway, I'm at the point where I have free time again, so I've been trying to remember where I was with this build and my other builds.  

 

Last I worked on the ship, I had planked the bulwarks with yellowheart.  Interestingly on this kit, the inside of the planking serves as the inner bulwark planking, so you have to take your time and get it right as there is no other planking for the inner bulwarks.  It ended up coming out pretty nicely I think.  I've already pre-cut and curved the pieces for the log rail and topgallant rail, but I think I might wait to install those until the hull planking is completed as those two rails might be a bit fragile on the build (and I tend to be a lap modeler).  So, next up I have to start thinking about the outer hull ebony planking, which should be interesting.  There's a section of the outer hull near the stem where the run of planks goes from 6 to 10 strakes.  So, the planks will be very narrow, and hopefully bend ok.  

 

Here are a few pictures of where I am at the moment.  Thanks again for looking in.

[Martin W]

Hi Mike -- that is an interesting detail with the planking appearing on the inboard bulwark.  It looks handsome.  That's also curious that the number of planks drops so drastically.  l couldn't make out in your detail of the bow where those planks end -- what strategy did you follow?

 

Stay cool!

 

Martin