Soleil Royal by Hubac's Historian - Heller - An Extensive Modification and Partial Scratch-Build

[druxey]

Nice to see you back at it, Marc!

[yancovitch]

yep!

[John Ott]

Are you being logical again, Marc? This has to stop...

Seriously, I've regretted not taking your path and not making and installing chain plates at the same time I attached the stropped deadeyes to the channels. Now I'm stuck retrofitting the chains—somehow without soldering, since soldering elements + styrene = tragedy. 

 

I think I'll put off my own wire-bending until your next few posts so I can see how my betters do it.

[Hubac's Historian]

I can’t escape the fact that I continue to fail at this chain-making exercise.  As the old maxim goes, though, every failure is one step closer to success.

 

I’ve now thrown away two whole batches of chain preventer plates.  While I was quite right to follow Andre Kudin’s example, for the process of their manufacture, I eventually discovered that that process is not entirely transferable from 1:48 to 1:96 scale.

 

After forming his basic links, Andre solders them closed at one end, and then places the closed link back onto the two pins so that he can crimp an eye on each end with his round pliers.

 

Well, the 28 gauge brass wire I’m using does not provide enough surface area for a strong enough bond to survive the crimping.  My success to failure ratio was pretty poor:

So, my lesson from that exercise was that I needed to do the crimping before soldering one end closed:

These soldered loops will be the lowest end of the chains, bolted into the wales.  That way, I could induce a series of bends into the upper half of each preventer plate, so that they could overlay the next small link:

Above I’m just using another preventer plate to check that the bends I’m making are sufficient.

 

So, I spent a good chunk of time cleaning up the solder and inducing bends into the remainder of the preventer plates.  The solder joint will be re-enforced with the CA glue that fixes the pin-bolt in place:

With that out of the way, I could make a new, slightly closer-spaced pin jig for the next small link, which is only crimped on one end, where it seats beneath the preventer plate.

 

Now that I have a process that I know will work, and now that I’ve had all of this practice, these next links should go fairly quickly:

I have a lot of these to make, solder and bend - about 70 to ensure I can use the best.  This has all been a colossal PITA, but it was really important to me that all of this look very clean and uniformly shaped.  In the process, I have acquired some very valuable metal skills that will only enhance this and future projects.

 

That said, I am going to experiment with using black nylon thread of an appropriate diameter to connect the deadeye strop loops to the small links.  This would essentially be a variation on the way that the stock kit represents these links, but I will do individual chain loops that draw tight with some form of slip-knot that I can pull up and hide behind the deadeye strop.

 

Andre had a great method for producing these variances, but it is all just that much more tedious in the smaller scale.

 

The advantages of doing this are several.  So long as there is not a jarring difference in appearance between the black thread and the blackened metal, it will save me tremendous amounts of time.  It also simplifies the difficulty of accurately measuring and keeping track of a series of increasingly longer links as the shroud angle increases from fore to aft.  Lastly, it greatly simplifies the placement of the deadeyes because I can add the retaining strip, in advance, and it also makes it much easier to locate and properly secure the bottom two links.  Hopefully, that will work out.  

 

Well, I keep saying that I’m going to get back in the swing of the project, and then I get sucked into coaching another basketball team - now my son’s Spring rec team.  Meanwhile, the Rangers and Knicks are just too compelling to ignore this post-season.  At least for now, I can see the end of the tunnel for these chains, which is tremendously motivating, and then I can return to the more immediately gratifying work of outfitting and arming the main deck.

 

Thank you all for taking the time to look back in on This Old Build.  More to come!

 

Edited April 25 by Hubac's Historian

[druxey]

Late to the party; the soldering should be on the straight part of the loop, not the end. Failure rate should be much lower.

[72Nova]

I tend to agree with druxey but your latest attempt looks solid Marc. I used thread to strop my dead eyes on the Vasa, I used thinned down PVA with paint and while still wet I rolled it out on a flat surface with a metal straight edge but a paint stick would work just as well, this seems to hold the fibers in check and the end result looks good.

 

Michael D.

[Bill97]

Marc I think they are looking fine. When I built my Victory I ordered Daniel’s (Dafi’s) chains. For my SR I decided to attempt to make my own as you are. I experienced the exact issues with finding the best spot to solder and when to attempt the crimp. It is frustrating. I think a fault I have in modeling that you don’t have, and I compliment you, is after a number of tries at perfection I give up and use my best attempt. Especially if it is an item I expect will not be that visible to others. Like chains under the channels. You however my friend, and again I compliment you, are an absolute perfectionist. You work truly shows it. 

[Kevin-the-lubber]

This one can probably be filed under “teachings about the sucking of eggs”, but as a one-time metalworker can I add a little bit of info. The wire you’re using looks like cold-drawn brass stock, meaning it’s pulled through a former to get its diameter. This causes the grain crystals to get elongated (oh look at me, showing off that I paid attention at college!) which makes it springy and harder to shape. If you heat it to about “ouch, that hurt”, and let it cool it’ll be annealed and hold its form, but my memory is that brass work hardens very easily, so keep that in mind. Or you can fish out the little bundle of mild steel 0.5mm gunport lid wires in the Heller victory kit (so I assume also in the SR), which seemed to be already annealed. Either that or the quality was so poor that it worked in our favour.
 

[Hubac's Historian]

As always, Kevin, your knowledge bank is astounding.  I think you are right about this wire’s manufacture, but given the relatively light gauge, it has been pretty easy to pull taught around the pin-formers.  What is essential to this process is a pair of parallel pliers.  I’m indebted to Druxey for that tooling tip!

 

As always, Bill and David and Michael, and everyone who is looking-in - I appreciate the support!

[wefalck]

Indeed, making the split at the long part and soldering there, as druxey said, would have been my first thought too. Also silver-soldering with some paste might have been easier and stronger.

[Siggi52]

Hello Marc,

what I use to cut brass wires is a cutter for finger or toe nails. I grind one side thin, so that I could cut also small diameters. For soldering I use almost a soldering fluid. Then you needs only a small amount of tin on your soldering iron and it would flow evenly. If brass is to stubborn to bend, I would use copper wire. 

[Bill97]

Where I struggled when soldering my links was trying to trying to solder the the wire loop end to end. Eventually I had to overlap the wires just a bit then solder. 

[dvm27]

I struggled with silver soldering for some time until I found a system that works for me virtually every time. First off, the mini torch I was using did not generate enough heat for silver soldering. I have since had excellent success with the Blazer Torch https://www.amazon.com/dp/B017Z8KD3S?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_dt_b_product_details. More importantly I switched to silver solder paste from Euro Tools. It comes as soft, medium and hard so you can solder adjacent pieces. Otherwise I use the medium https://beaducation.com/products/silver-solder-paste-medium. I also use Battens Flux on the joint prior to soldering but I'm not sure if you need it with the paste. You only need a speck of the solder on the joint and you have to move the torch the second it flashes. At any rate if you're having unsuccessful solder joints more than 10% of the time maybe give this a try. Also, as Druxey has pointed out, it's best to place the joint on a linear plane.

[Hubac's Historian]

I considered buying a torch like that when I first picked up soldering supplies.  I decided, though, to see how easily a conventional soldering iron would work with the Solder-It, silver solder paste that I purchased.  There is a generous ratio of flux to colloidal silver solder, with this product, so I found that the smallest amounts make nice joins with a quick touch to the iron tip.  Like anything else, it was a process of course-correction to figure out how to use these products correctly.

 

I do know that the technically correct place to make the joints is along the straight parts, however, at this scale I was having a ton of difficulty getting my wire ends to meet nicely; I was either too long, resulting in a bowed straight, or too short, necessitating an excess solder-fill.  I also made the first batch of preventer plates too long, and I wasn't using enough solder paste on the back side to bolster the join enough for bending/shaping.

 

Dan Pariser suggested that he likes to cut meeting ends on a long bias so that they overlap like a scarf joint; more surface area produces a stronger joint.  As usually happens with this kind of thing, doing something like snipping wire ends hundreds and hundreds of times has a way of sharpening your skills and discernment for where precisely to make a cut.  At this point, I could fairly easily make those wire ends meet exactly where they need to.

 

I do appreciate the correctness of what you guys are suggesting, but the method I have arrived at is working for me in this scale, and producing the clean results that are a higher priority to me than rigorous accuracy of manufacture.  In larger scales, I absolutely would give the "correct" way a go again.

Edited April 30 by Hubac's Historian

[druxey]

The diagonal joint is great when there will be a lot of stress on the finished item. In your case I suspect the load will be minimal!