Cutty Sark by uscharin - Sergal - 1:78

[uscharin]

Thanks, Peter.

The wheel was a real challenge.  I will absolutely not try to improve on it, as I sometimes will do.  Tough to be a perfectionist.  I'm starting to get antsy to move on to masts and rigging.  Love how your CS is coming along and looks really close to being finished.  Are you going to case it?  I hope so.

Ron

[uscharin]

Fourth time the charm?

 

This will be short.  After placing my new helm on the CS, something simply did not look right.  Turns out the poop skylight I had just finished redoing was way too large.  It made everything around it look wrong.  Proportionally it was not too bad unto itself, but the overall size was way too big.  I did not check the dimensions against Campbell's plans, which was a huge mistake.

 

Of course, smaller is harder.  The big problem was reproducing the metal protective bars.  The fine electric motor wire I used in my last attempt was now far too big.  I ended up sacrificing an old USB cable to harvest the fine wire within.  Of course, the fine wire was a nightmare to work with. The bars add a great deal to the look so really wanted to have that modeled.

 

This is what I had to do:

 

These closeup pictures make the wire look not so bad.  Reality is, it was like working with baby's hair.  I tried all sort of ways to stretch this wire into a pattern so I could then glue it to the panels.  I tried double-sided tape, etc., to hold the wire into position but it always allowed too much creep.  I printed out two paper patterns with spacing that I felt would work and then glued to a piece of plywood.  I then drilled holes at either end to insert the wire and then soak with CA.  On one end the holes go all the way through the wood so I could gently pull the wire taut and then fix with CA.

 

This method worked fairly well but several of the wires broke during the process so had to redo them.  At the end, some wires ended up slacker than others.  I re-tensioned the wires by using a couple small brass rods.  I then slid a piece of wax paper under the wires and then pressed down the skylight panels while introducing CA under the wood stiles.  A very tedious process but got away with it.  Once the glue had set up, I cut the panels away with a razor blade.  The wire spacing could be improved a little after-the-fact by pushing the wire around with a needle.

 

The results are not bad but still need to clean up the bars a little and try to straighten/space them a bit.  The new skylight tuned out to be ~20 percent smaller, which magically made everything look and feel much more balanced.

Edited Friday at 06:04 PM by uscharin

[Sailor1234567890]

Nice save. She's looking great.