Niagara by lb0190 - Model Shipways - 1/64

[Anja]

Hello Larry,

 

It's good to hear from you, you have been missed.  Welcome back 

Take good care of yourself and your loved ones first, we are not going anyware.

 

Regards,

Anja

[lb0190]

Hi Anja and Sjors,

 

Yes, it's been a while. I tried resuming the ship building life a few months ago but too many thing got In the way. My mother (85) had a heart valve replacement and I'm staying with them to help with transportation and home chores. Dad is 87 and does not drive plus he has his own health issues that need addressed. The shipyard is a mess right now but it will not take much time to get it operational again. 

 

I hope you and and yours are safe and healthy and that you both are making a lot of saw dust in the shop. I hope to ck out this new site in a day or so and maybe have enough time to see what everyone has been working on and maybe make a post or two while visiting my parents.

[texxn5]

Hello Larry, good to hear you're still here.  I've started my Niagara a couple of weeks ago and have a website for it, so I'm sure I'll be in touch for questions.  I just finished the Stern Bulkhead Q going from there.  Sorry to hear about everyone's health issues...we've got our own going on here.....welcome back 

John

 

http://www.niagaramodel.com

 

 

[jbshan]

Your build log at http://www.niagaramodel.com is one of the most thorough I have seen.  I hope you will show your progress warts and all, as there are some tricky bits to this kit which are so much easier to explain with the kit in front of you.  It (the log) should be a great help to anyone attempting this model.  Unless one is a master builder with several others under the belt this kit will stretch the mind, and as you reach those tricky bits and solve them you will be doing a service to those following in your wake.

[lb0190]

Hi John, 

Good to hear from you. I have complete faith your Niagara will outstanding. I'm still having trouble finding time to work in the shipyard and even less time to spend on MSW but this will change eventually. Tomorrow we head down to a Fort Lauderdale so the surgeon can do an eight week look at the Admiral's knee replacement. She's off the cane but still going to PT - overall it went very well. We'll head to Ohio in a couple days to visit parents and see how mom is doing with her heart valve replacement. And to top it off, we have our home up for sale... moving at our age was not planned, but living the HOA life did not turn out as well as we envisioned. 

Back to ship building... I have progress to report. I just need to write it up

 

Hi Joel,

Thank you for looking at my build log. As you probably read above, I  have some catching up to do and yes, it will show some warts! I've really struggled with a few parts and I plan on showing what worked and what kicked my butt.  

 

[popeye the sailor]

hello Larry.....good to see your getting back in the shipyard     looking forward in seeing more progress on this fine vessel.

[lb0190]

Hi Popeyes, thanks for looking in. I'm currently in Ohio helping my parents out. I hope to be back in Florida next week but the way things have been going, who knows...  

I've been working on the hammock brackets that mount to the main rail. I did not care for the material provided in the kit, so I bought some 1/32 square brass to work with and it's been trial and error trying to get results that I'm happy with - mostly error....lol 

I finally found a way to make them the same shape and size and figured I'll make the first batch of 11, mount them to see how they work. I'll post some pictures and the details once I have them mounted on the top rail.  

[popeye the sailor]

good to hear your still working on her......even if it is from another state  {that's quite a reach  }    look forward in seeing you back in the sunshine state,  and back at your table  

[lb0190]

Its hard to believe it's been over 18 months since I last posted an update on my build. I wish I had 18 months worth of work completed but it was not a complete shutdown on the shipyard. Below is a list of work completed. I'll add some detail as needed with the pictures.

 

• Main and Fwd masts completed
• Dolphin Striker Completed and Mounted
• Spritsail completed but not mounted
• Jib Boom completed and mounted
• Flying Jib Boom Completed (I'll
• Preventer Stays dry mounted on bowbrite
• Dual pawl for capstan – Still needs painted (Thank You John for the photos showing this item)
• Serv-O-Matic purchased from Chuck (assembled and sealed with poly)
• Many, many hours working on hammoch stanchions (its a long story and far from complete)

[lb0190]

The masts are assembled dry and sitting loose on the deck. I'll have to figure out the sequence for final assembly as I work on the shrouds and ratlines (it's getting close!)

 

[lb0190]

Dolphin Striker Completed and Mounted

Jib Boom completed and mounted

Preventer Stays dry mounted on bowbrite

Flying Jib Boom Completed. I'll hold off as long as possible before mounting. I can just imagine breaking this off several times...

[lb0190]

Serv-O-Matic purchased from Chuck. It's a nice tool,well worth the money.

[src]

Welcome back Larry. Good to see you posting again.

The progress looks great! You cant go wrong with Chucks serving machine, especially for the price. I am toying with asking him to sell me another set of gears and trying to put a motor with a foot peddle switch on mine.

Sam

[texxn5]

Hi Larry, she's looking great, good to see you back at it.  Mine's going to slow down at this point, we're leaving in a day or two on our annual RV trip.  Going east again to Florida then up to Maine. I'm taking the model with me and going to work on small stuff, carrondades and such.  I'll be watching how you're doing along the way.

John

[popeye the sailor]

good to see your back at the table Larry.......nice progress considering time being tight.   I hope all is well,  or better  

[lb0190]

Good morning everyone. THANK YOU for the warm welcome back. Family issues are still very busy but I'll post when I can and eventually catch up on all of the fine ship building going on on MSW. 

[lb0190]

Well, here is the saga on stanchion building...

The hammock stanchions have been driving me crazy for more months than I care to admit. The kit provides flat brass strips to make them from but I could not get a look I was satisfied with. Looking at photos of the Niagara on Lake Erie that John provided, they looked like they were made from square stock, with three holes in each leg for the rope and with a horse shoe shaped saddle on the top of each leg to hold the wood runner. All I need to do is figure out how to replicate @ 44 pieces. I did a little research and found out that K&S Precision Metals sells brass square bar, with the smallest being 1/32 square which scales to 2” which sounds close. The local hobby store ordered it for me and from there it became difficult. I'll admit I'm known to overly complicate some projects and this quickly became a great example. I decided the width of the stanchions needed to be ~0.200 wid, based on the drawings and the width of my toprail. The drawings also indicated a height of ~0.25 which sounds a little short when scaled up, but adding the horse shoes the the top of the legs added a little height and visually mocked up to look right, so now I have my overall dimensions and shape.

[lb0190]

I figured out the straight overall length of square bar needed to be taking into account the bends, but bending the material to get a consistent shape and size was not working out well using the usual hand tools. The width varied too much to suite me, the corners were more rounded than I liked and the the leg heights were not consistent enough, but other than that it looked good...lol. I quickly realized I needed a more controlled way to bend the square bars and also needed to figure out when to drill the holes for the rope before or after I bend. The plans call for three rows of rope which means I need to drill over 250 holes. Since the square bar is 0.031 wide, I need a pretty small hole, so I found a 0.014 dia drill bit which leaves me with a side wall thickness of 0.008 – not a problem I thought ( I must have been crazy to think that). Just to get an idea of how well the square bar would drill, I quickly found out the brass was so smooth the drill bit would dance around and not take a bite without a center punch indentation, which presented the next problem – centering the center punch on the square stock where there will only be 0.008 wall thickness left. Anyway, that's a problem down the road, I need to drill a hole to see how easy it drills. Another issue that came up was the bar stock would not clamp up tight enough in my drill press vise without tilting as I applied pressure to the drill bit. The vise has very smooth jaws and only one screw to tighten, so another method was needed to hold the bar stock in place. I center punched the bar stock (yes its off center) and glued the bar stock to a jig for stability and started drilling, but after breaking one drill bit I managed to drill the hole very slowly. It was difficult to do. I could not feel any resistance to the downward pressure I applied without first breaking the drill bit. I tried to watch how fast it cut chips in order to control how much pressure to apply but I still managed to break a drill bit even after adjusting spindle speed. If I break off the drill bit, it leaves the broken bit on the bar stock which I could not remove which basically scraps that piece, hmmm I thought with my luck I'll get three holes drill then break off the drill bit...lol. Oh well, I'll deal with that if it happens. Now I need to figure out how to center punch @250 places, in the same spot so the rope line is nice and straight – I found out it's much easier said done. My first decision was two rows of rope would look OK reducing the number of holes to ~176 – progress made!! I decided several jigs were needed to get consistent shapes, consistent center punch locations. Gluing the pieces to a wood jig for drilling provided a stable platform, using MEK to remove them later. Here is the wood jig to hold the bar stock in place.

[lb0190]

Here are the jigs used to cut and grind the bar stock to consistent lengths. This is a two piece jig. Jig no. 1 sits on the grinder table fixed in place with jig no. 2 laying between the white guide strips on jig 1. I slide a piece of bar stock into jig 2 and cut it long with a hand side cutter, you can see the excess sticking out in the photo. When I place jig 2 on jig one, I carefully slide it to grind off the excess material. I simply eyeball the amount I grind off taking care not to grind the brass square tube. The square tube has a piece inserted and glued in place from the back to set the overall length I end up with, hopefully getting 44 consistent lengths of stock. 

[lb0190]

Now I have equal length pieces and need a consistent way to center punch holes. I ended up with two more jigs. One each for the top and bottom hole for each leg. I again used square tubing to set the distance the bar stock can slide in. I V notched the leading edge of the square tube to rest the center punch in, helpfully also centering the punch on the 0.031 wide bar stock.  I made another metal jig used to bend the two legs. Like the previous jigs, it also was made to only allow the metal to go in a set distance. Bending the bar stock would twist the material a bit, but once I had the end shape, I used an old arbor press to flatten it back out making it square again. Sorry - the pictures are out of sequence but it's easy to figure out.

 

 

 

 

 

[lb0190]

After all of that, the legs are still not exactly the same length, so I made another jig to grind them the same length...

Did I mention earlier, I tend to over complicate things...?

 

 

 

[lb0190]

Now here is where it got interesting to me. I could not bend the legs to get a ninety degree corner. I was ok with a radius but wanted to improve it a bit. My neighbor used to be a machinist for the airlines. Showing him what I'm doing and the issue I'm trying to resolve he said he may have something he made 20 years ago that may help. It was a metal jig used to form a part that had three sizes to choose from. Here is his jig with one mandrel that worked for me. I place a stanchion on the edge, assemble the two jig pieces and hit it a few times with a brass hammer and it took some of the radius out of the legs! Something made for a custom purpose, 20 years ago.... lol

After this step, back the the arbor press again the square it back up.

 

 

 

[lb0190]

Now that I have the shape I need, squared and trimmed, I need to center punch each leg at a high and low spot to run the rope through. Two more jigs are needed, one for each spot. As you can see in the photos, the depth of immersion is fixed and the V notch aligns where the center punch is located.

 

One photo shows a stanchion with an anchor tail solder in place. I'll use this method to help secure the stanchion to the top rail. I soldered them free hand which was not pretty or very straight, but I'll clip them off short, use a bigger than necessary hole that will fill up with CA glue, so I hope its a non issue.

 

The next post will be a; CRAP, that does not work out as planned!!! 

[lb0190]

After all of the above I could not successfully drill another hole without breaking drill bits! I went thru 8 bits, breaking them off each time and losing a stanchion each time. I varied the drill bit speed, tried to drill much slow in respect the bit pressure, talked to two machinist friends until I finally gave up. Plan "B" is to glue the rope on the inside of the stanchion. At this scale is should look ok providing I use small enough thread. 

 

Next is to add the stirrups on the top of each leg.

 

I found some StripStyrene plastic channel thats 0.060 wide with  0.037 channel walls. I think this will give me the look I want if I can glue it on and sand the channel down to the width of the brass bar. below are some photos on where I'm at with this process. The macro shots show dust, fuzzies etc, which I hope will clean up. I painted one unit but did not clean it very well before painting and looks pretty bad but I'll clean it up later - I think this looks like this may work out. I used enamel paint for this step, thinking since I'm gluing rope to it, it may be less likely to peal off.

 

[edmay]

Hello Larry ,Nice to hear from you,I have also been semi absent from MSW, there seems to be many folk swimming in the same direction as far as health issues go , getting old is not all it's cracked up to be,so my thoughts and prayers of wellness to all is paramount including those members who do not comment on health . I wish you gods speed in your helping your family ,hope to hear more from you soon and your model ,Your return today is like a breath of spring air ,your friend Edwin

[lb0190]

Hi Edwin,

Thank you for the kind words and thoughts. I agree with you on the downfalls of aging. Family and health is precious and becomes more so once you realize how fragile they become in later years of life. I hope you and yours are doing well and enjoying life as much as possible.

 

It's  good to be back posting on MSW and I hope I can provide more timely updates this year. Take care....

[Tigersteve]

Nice work!

Steve

[lb0190]

Thanks Steve, glad you stopped by to look.

I now have eleven metal stanchions painted and ready for installation. I'm currently working on the wood stanchions that mount by the steps.

[lb0190]

I managed to finish making and mounting the aft starboard hammock stanchions after a couple of aww hecks. First, I broke two of the mount pins by simply handling them too rough, I managed to. solder them back on without melting the plastic stirrups by clamping the stanchion in a wet cloth which provided enough heat sink – lucky break for me. The next mistake was measuring the distance between each stanchion. The plans call for eleven pieces. I carefully measured and started mounting them using a wood spacer but did not account for the thickness of the stanchion resulting in mounting only ten. What a rookie mistake...lol. I think it will look fine with ten.

 

I also made the four wood stanchions that mount by the two ladders. One photo shows them with primer, mounted loose for a photo. Sorry to post and run but we have a house showings today and we need to vacate the home for most of the day.

[popeye the sailor]

really nice job Larry.......you need to do the other side too,  I take it     coming along splendidly!