St Roch by Lecrenb - 1:48 scale - RCMP Schooner rigged as schooner c. 1930/35

[Lecrenb]

On 12/9/2024 at 6:21 PM, wmherbert said:

Nice job.

Your plates and rivets came out great.

What is a NWSL riveter tool?  even Mr. Google couldn't help me. 

Bill

Hi Bill, and sorry about the delayed reply!

NWSL is NorthWest Short Line, a hobby tool company geared towards model railroaders but their tools will of course work on any genre. Their riveter tool is a calibrated table, part number 51-4, that attaches to their small arbor press, part number 50-4. You tape your work to the table allowing it to advance a precise amount, per the pitch of your 'rivets'.

With some practice you can draw pencil lines on your work and manually advance it to each 'rivet' location... this goes a lot faster than using the calibrated screw. I used this method for my Flower class corvette where I had over 10,000 rivets to emboss!

The dies come in assorted sizes and you operate the press every time you want to emboss a rivet. My understanding is that NWSL has had patent issues and so this and other products in their tool line have been knocked off, so if to can no longer find it at NWSL try Micro Mark or others, and I have seen it come up on ebay.

Edited Friday at 03:36 AM by Lecrenb

[Lecrenb]

G'day everyone, and thanks in advance for following along. Since my last update I have been working on the cap rails, starting with the main deck. These rails follow the curve of the bulwarks at each end where they sweep up to the fo'c's'le and poop decks.

No matter how much heat and hot water I applied the rails always splintered and buckled when I tried to bend them. I ended up wrapping the ends of each rail with thread as seen in the picture; this prevented the wood from splintering when bent. I also rolled the ends around a Tamiya paint jar which was close to the desired curve, this support prevented the wood from buckling when it came out of the hot water.

I made a jig from scrap pine, to hold the rails in the correct shape as they dried.

The first picture shows my setup; with a small slow cooker for the hot water, one rail set in place after drying, and the other drying in the jig with the wrapping at each end.

The rails were painted Tamiya X-18 semi-gloss black off the ship so I wouldn't have to deal with masking and touching up.

The second picture shows the painted rails installed on the ship as the glue dries.

Edited Friday at 04:01 AM by Lecrenb

[AON]

I was told to laminate tight bends with multiple thin strips.

Make the pieces wider because they will wander. Steam and bend them as an assembly without glue. Allow for spring back. When dry, glue them together and clamp. When cured, sand the edges to proper width then assemble on the model.

[druxey]

As Alan said, tight bends require lamination, or they can be cut to shape from a solid piece of wood.

[Lecrenb]

Thanks Alan and Druxey... I appreciate your comments and advice.

I would have preferred using thin laminated strips but neither I nor the LHS had what I needed and the postal strike was looming when I made the rails. I had a good supply of correctly dimensioned scale lumber on hand, so at the end of the day I used the method that I did, with eventual success after some frustration... The string wrapping is similar to a pipe bending trick to keep a pipe from collapsing when bending, and it did work on my rails. 

I did use shapes cut from basswood sheet to plank the hull around my stern section, and this method matches the plans of the original ship! I presume the shipwrights also had problems making sharp bends in Douglas Fir and Ironbark!

As you will see in my next post, when faced with bending the rails across their width to follow the curves of the upper decks, I used the saw kerf method with success, and more basswood sheet shapes to work around the stern rail. 

Merry Christmas!