28 foot American cutter by druxey - FINISHED - 1:48 scale

[shipman]

The boat in 'Neptune' is emphatically 26'. Yours is 28'.

So not a copy of the boat in Venice, but one in the style of?

Sorry to be so pedantic.

[druxey]

I know, shipman, but when I scaled out the drawings with frames at 12" intervals, the length came to 28' 3" overall and the width was the spec'd 6' 10".  

You are just the person to lean on for proofreading my next book!

[shipman]

Whatever the dimensions; for a 1:48 boat model yours is spectangular!

The craftsmanship is astonishing.....sometimes it's hard to realise how small this thing is.

Often, when finding a build here, the first item I look for are the ships boats; if they aren't near your standard, then the rest is a disappointment.

Are you intending to mast and rig it?

Where would forums like this be without the miracle of digital photography and the internet.

[Bob Cleek]

On 5/13/2021 at 8:33 PM, Roger Pellett said:

Why Sherline used wire nuts on what is supposed to be a high quality tool Is beyond me.

Just a guess, but it may be that adding a soldering process to the manufacturing process may have required a large investment in OSHA-mandated air quality protection equipment or something like that. The safety and environmental regulations have added large costs to many manufacturing processes that were taken for granted. For example, commercial spray painting requires a spray booth and "VOC scrubbing" exhaust systems these days and that has added a lot to the cost of a spray paint job. Given what are probably Sherline's profit margins and limited production, the wire nuts were a much less costly option.

 

And to avoid any accusation of thread drift here, I'll mention that one of the advantages of a pure pulling boat is that one avoids registration fees, high "oil spill" insurance costs, and the like.

Edited May 19, 2021 by Bob Cleek

[shipman]

''one of the advantages of a pure pulling boat is that one avoids registration fees, high "oil spill" insurance costs, and the like''.

 

NOT if you live in the UK!

Everything from a paddle board upwards is regulated, requires registration, licencing, insurance...lalala...

[druxey]

Moving aft, there is a transom knee springing from the inwale on each side. I glue them in slightly over-size and then carefully trim them down along the curve which has a rolling bevel. The starboard side is complete and the port side knee has just been glued in.

 

[druxey]

Next is a major challenge; a small and complex grating aft. I first cut a pattern in card and it fit the inside of the model perfectly. Whew!  Next was pondering how to construct the grating. Using rubber cement on such small pieces was not an option; rubber cement is poor in resisting shear forces. I decided to PVA glue pieces to the pattern which was rubber cemented to a piece of illustration board. The first stage is shown with the longitudinal battens in place. I'm still thinking about the best way to cut the scores for the athwartships battens. More soon!

 

[BANYAN]

Some really stunning detail there Druxey, a credit to your skills.  

 

cheers

 

Pat

Edited May 22, 2021 by BANYAN

[wefalck]

These boat-gratings were indeed some interesting pieces of joinery, even at full-scale.

 

Wouldn't you have to notch the battens somehow into the frame ? I could myself see glueing the chevron-battens to some paper that has been glued to a piece of metal to then cut the notches on my horizontal mill or putting the block upright into the vice. The half-through notches in the outside would be a case for your Russian micro-chisels then probably.

[druxey]

Thank you, Pat, and all who have dropped by.

 

Eberhard: Yes, notching the chevroned battens is the next step. However, how to best do this is the question. I have a .020" slitting saw blade, but would need to do this with the assembly inverted and hence blind. This I'm not keen to do. I don't have a suitable tiny milling cutter to do this on my small mill - the other obvious solution. So I'm pondering other methods around this problem. One possibility is using a narrow slotting file (I have one that is .020" wide) with a jig for the correct spacing and depth.

[gjdale]

Could you use the slitting saw blade in the mill, with the head rotated 90-degrees? I have used this type of set-up before, albeit for an entirely different purpose.

[Maury S]

It seems to me that the pattern of the individual gratings is square to the outer edges of the chevrons, but the line of holes is across both halves.  Tiny Trapezoids?   Maybe an illusion.  What amazing work.

Maury

[druxey]

Alas, Grant, my mill does not have a rotating head, or that would be the easy answer!

 

Maury: Yes, the holes are tiny parallelograms indeed.

[wefalck]

Can't you glue the paper to a small block of wood that you then can put vertically into the vice so that you can make horizontal cuts with the circular saw ?

[druxey]

Well, the test run seems to work, if a little labor intensive. The brass strips act as depth stops and I used a piece of cross-batten stock to act as a spacer. A little refinement of the method, then the actual grating is next....

 

 

Edited May 21, 2021 by druxey

[wefalck]

Looks rather promising. How long is the grating actually ?

[Keith Black]

 David, you seem close to a solution so the following may not be applicable  but there maybe something to be gleaned starting with Keith's post # 707, page 24. 

 

 

Edited May 21, 2021 by Keith Black

[druxey]

Eberhard: It is 1 3/16" long.

 

 

Kieth: Thank you. Were the grating square, I would have done exactly that, but this one is not....

[Keith Black]

2 hours ago, druxey said:

Were the grating square, I would have done exactly that, but this one is not....

 

 David, understood.

 

I went to Eberhard's photos and looked at the grating, it doesn't match the drawing. 

 

Edited May 21, 2021 by Keith Black

[shipman]

I'm usually a bit cock eyed with these things, but is it possible the original grating was in two haves?

It may profit to study wefalks photo more closely.

Edited May 21, 2021 by shipman
New content

[druxey]

It could be in two halves, but at model size....

[shipman]

Spent entire evening trying to find new photo's on the web, with no result. Is the boat still in the Venice museum?

Keith is right; the drawing (at least for the grating) is fiction. That's what I was getting at.

However you extemporise, I'm sure your solution will be a credit to the rest of your superb model.

[druxey]

Shipman: I agree that there are disparities between the photos from Eberhard and the drawings, but they are generally minor. The photo seems fairly close to the drawing of the grating.

 

[Keith Black]

 David, you had to be using the photo to layout your grating (and spot it is looking at the photo) because your rendering is much different than the drawing. Had I only the drawing to go by, I would never have come close to your grating layout.  

[druxey]

To clear up any confusion; the grating shown in my photos above was a simpler trial version only. The actual grating will be finer in scantlings. 

 

'Willl be' is the operative phrase. I've attempted several gratings now and, despite a spacing jig, cannot get sufficient consistency of spacing for the cross-battens. I found a tiny Dremel circular saw blade (bought about 50 years ago and never used!) that cuts an .020" kerf and am figuring out how to mount the grating on my cross-slide  with sufficient clearance under the headstock. It would not work at all on my Unimat DB200, but might just work with some McGyvering on my Boley lathe as the saw will be held in a collet rather than a chuck. The cross-slide will provide accurate spacing. Stay tuned!

[tkay11]

On 5/21/2021 at 11:40 AM, druxey said:

I don't have a suitable tiny milling cutter to do this on my small mill

I am totally out of my depth here, but although the cheap Chinese carbide micro-mills used for cutting PCBs have a reputation for being very brittle and not useful for wood, I have used the 0.4 bits as mills (as well as drills) on pear and boxwood and while I certainly did break some in early experiments, I found that if I go to a depth of about 0.1mm at a time, and travel slowly with my Proxxon MF70 mill, I have no breakages and a clean line. The downside is, of course, that it takes a longer time and patience is needed while watching the bit so that I stop if there's the slightest sign of bending. Unfortunately this still hasn't improved my skills very much!

 

I apologise for treading where angels would rather not, but I thought I'd throw this in as an example of an amateur's experience.

 

Tony

[noel_colledge]

This might brand me as a heretic on your build, but have you considered resin printing the grate as a solution to making in timber?

 

Regards

 

Noel

[druxey]

That  or photo-etch had crossed my mind, I must confess, Noel! However, this is one of the challenges that I've set myself. There are exquisite examples of miniature gratings in some museum models. If the old timers could do it....

Edited May 23, 2021 by druxey

[wefalck]

I think, at this size it is still doable and will look crisper than with other techniques. Whether you use photoetching or laser-cutting, you will always end up with corner radii for technical reasons. I have been down the road, albeit at a much smaller scale, but was never 100% satisfied with the result (however, handling non-rectangular gratings of less then 10 mm square with battens 0.3 mm wide was too much of a challenge).

 

Some people mill/saw the grooves into a a sheet of wood, then cross-mill/saw the grooves for the half-thick battens (or perhaps better the other way around, glue the sawn battens in and then mill/sand away the backing wood. In order to get the grain running along the long battens in the chevron, one may need to glue together two pieces of wood cut to shape appropriately.

[bruce d]

30 minutes ago, wefalck said:

Some people mill/saw the grooves into a a sheet of wood, then cross-mill/saw the grooves for the half-thick battens (or perhaps better the other way around, glue the sawn battens in and then mill/sand away the backing wood. In order to get the grain running along the long battens in the chevron, one may need to glue together two pieces of wood cut to shape appropriately.

I was looking at the problem and decided this is how I would approach it, however with one twist: I would attempt to do one thick half-grating and then slice it in two.

Also, I would use a large, thick workpiece. Once the gratings were glued in place, cut away surrounding wood to leave the half-shape before slicing off the two halves.

This is not an original thought. I saw something like this done in a video by a Japanese woodworker making an irregular shaped grating. Admittedly he was working with larger components but the idea works. If I can find the video I will post it.

HTH

Bruce