NRG Capstan Project by JacquesCousteau - 1:32

[JacquesCousteau]

Although I have a lot of other builds going at the moment, I decided to start this new one for a few reasons. I've noticed that I could stand to improve the quality of woodworking in my other projects, and this project is intended to help build skills in joinery and some techniques that are a bit different from what I've done before. I'm looking to get better at precision woodworking for some jewelry boxes I'd like to make as gifts, as well as for more complex model builds I have planned for the future. I also wanted to experiment with different finishes. The NRG Capstan looks like a well-designed and fun build, and there are several useful preexisting build logs (one by designer Toni Levine) I can turn to if anything is confusing. I can pretty readily scale it to use stocks of wood that I already have, which is important because getting finely milled lumber here is hard and I don't have the tools or experience to mill my own. The project also is intended to use some power tools, like a mini table saw, that I don't have, so I'll be trying to use hand tools for everything. I've rescaled the project to 1:32, which matches my other scratch builds. This means that my version will be rather smaller than the practicum plans, which are for 1:16. The small size will certainly pose a challenge, especially for the grating, but I'm looking forward to it. (As will be seen, I have also made a lot of mistakes from the start, so do not expect this model to be the work of art that the other captsan builds are.)

 

First things first: the deck beams and carlings. At 1:32 scale, the beams are 1/4 x 5/16 inches. I have a sheet of 1/4-inch thick alder. I've liked working with alder so far because it's easy to cut with hand tools, but holds edges well and doesn't fuzz up with sanding like basswood does. My options to cut a 5/16‐inch strip by hand were to use a coping saw or to make repeated passes with a sharp knife. Alder is pretty soft, so I opted for the later. I marked out where to cut, going 1/32‐inch oversize to leave room for straightening and smoothing later, and used a razor saw to cut the end. Using a straight edge, I traced out the cut several times until there was enough of a cut to guide the knife without a straight edge. I did the same on the other side, and went slowly, slightly deepening the cut with each pass on each side. 

 

This went on for a while. I think the 1/4-inch wood is about at the upper limit of what can be cut this way. Eventually the blade was in deep enough, and the cut lines were defined enough, that the knife wedged the strip off of the sheet.

 

Of course, this left a messy edge, although straighter than I've gotten by using a coping saw for this sort of cut. I then used my mini-plane to smooth the cut edge. The main challenge here is making sure that the plane is held straight and isn't beveling the edge. Using scrap wood as a stop really helps with planing.

 

From there it's just a matter of zeroing in on the required measurement. I did a couple more passes after the photo below.

 

Finally, I used my razor saw and the miter box with a stop to cut the beams to length.

 

I used the same methods on the carlings (4.5 inches thick), although here I was able to use much thinner, easier-to-cut alder, scraps from making the frames on my bateau build. I actually made these before I cut the beams, and didn't leave enough margin, taking a slight gouge out of one edge that I decided I could cover up by making it the bottom (which gets slightly rounded anyway).

 

 

 

With all the parts of the deck structure "milled" to size, I was ready for the next steps.

 

Edited October 4 by JacquesCousteau

[JacquesCousteau]

I began the actual construction by cutting practice mortise joints in scrap. I decided to use the fake mortises as given in the intermediate instructions, because I don't have a chisel small enough to fit in the notches to cut the actual joints.

 

 

Next up, shaping the carling ends. This was straightforward enough with a sharp X-acto knife, which I used instead of a razor small due to the small size of the 1:32 scale parts and the ease with which alder can be cut. Unfortunately, I forgot about my plan to hide the gouged edge on the bottom. Fortunately, I realized that I can hide it under the hatch coaming later.

 

Cutting the joints into the beams was exacting, slow work, but I was mostly pretty happy with how they turned out. I followed the measurements from the plans from the tip of the beams to the inner edge of the carlings, then used the carlings to measure out the other side of the notch.

 

 

 

I then jerry-rigged a jig to hold everything square for gluing. 

 

At this point, I realized that I had made a catastrophic error. (Sharp-eyed viewers may have already spotted it.) The fore hatch carlings are much too close together. I realized that, when I was marking, I had held the carlings on the wrong side of the first marking. The actual model should look like the plan view below, with the fore carlings barely smaller than the aft ones.

 

So, what to do? The thought of remaking the beams through yet another slow hand "milling" process was not very appealing, not to mention that I'm loathe to consign any good modeling or jewelry-box wood (all of which I have carted around on flights in my luggage) to the scrap pile. So, I decided to try to salvage the beams. New notches could be cut on the other side. Meanwhile, I filled the incorrect notches with scrap alder, which I then cut and sanded to size. The color difference is notable, but given that these notches will be on the bottom, and most of them will be inboard of the hatch/grating, I don't think they'll be very noticeable. And if they are, it will be a good reminder to measure twice and cut once.

 

 

I then cut out new notches. As can be seen, one was miscut a little wide. Thankfully, it will be on the inboard side and will be covered by the captsan step.

 

 

Overall, I don't think these notches turned out quite as nice as the first ones. Possibly it's because I cut the first ones at the end of the day while I was very awake, while I cut the new ones in the morning while sipping coffee and waking up--there's probably a good lesson in there about not planning on doing finnicky work when you're not fully awake.

 

In any case, I was able to fill the largest gap with a thin slice of wood, and the smaller ones with a glue/sawdust mixture.

 

 

 

Despite the many, many errors I've committed so far, I think it's turning out all right. 

[Paul Le Wol]

A fine beginning Jacques!  You have great problem solving skills.

[JacquesCousteau]

5 hours ago, Paul Le Wol said:

A fine beginning Jacques!  You have great problem solving skills.

Thanks! I just wish I didn't cause so many problems for myself that needed solving....

 

I've now made the capstan step. I used 3/16‐inch thick cherry for the upper three pieces, as I don't have any alder in the right thickness and didn't want to plane down to the right thickness from 1/4‐inch thick pieces. Cherry is much harder than alder, so I used a razor saw for all cuts. For the lengthwise cuts, I scribed the cut line first (slightly oversize) to give the saw purchase, and planed smooth to the measurement afterward.

 

After gluing together, the ends weren't quite straight--one part had been cut with a coping saw at the end, which I struggle to get fully straight. So, I made up a sort of simple shooting board (e.g., I put some scrap under the piece and placed the plane on its side) and planed across the grain to smooth things out, then finished it with sanding.

 

The lower piece of the central board was made of alder scrap, slightly overthick (it needed to be 1/8-inch thick and was 1/64-inch over) and planed to the proper thickness. As it's on the underside, the color difference with the cherry doesn't matter.

 

Testing showed it fit the space well.

 

Before gluing the upper and lower parts together, I drilled a pilot hole through both pieces. I don’t have a drill press and don't have a good record of drilling perfectly vertical with my pin vise. So, on each piece, I marked the center on both sides, and drilled from both sides. It didn't turn out quite perfect, but close enough. I was then able to use a needle through the hole to align the parts and to glue the upper and lower parts together in place, so as to make sure the step was square on the framework. This is a different order than that given in the instructions, wherein the lower part is supposed to be glued to the upper step board before gluing on the side step boards, but it seemed to work out all right. The hole for the capstan barrel will be drilled out later.

 

I then rounded the edges a bit. In hindsight, I wish I had colored the edges of the cherry boards before gluing the step together, as it isn't all that visible that the step is made from separate boards instead of a single piece. I may carefully scribe the plank lines a bit.

 

I haven't yet drilled the bolt holes,  which will add a lot of visual interest to the piece, for two reasons. First, I still need to figure out what material I'll use for bolts, and from that, what diameter the holes need to be--ideally I'll be able to follow the plan dimensions, but if I don't have anything in the right thickness, I may need to just go with something close enough. Second, there's a discrepancy in the plans as to where the bolts should be located. One sheet shows the outer bokts as 10 inches from the edges, and the inner ones as 6 inches inboard from the plank seam.

 

The other sheet shows the outer bolts as 8 inches from the edge, and the inner ones as 5.25 inches from the plank seam.

 

Both sheets are labeled as sheet 13. The first sheet has a note that it was modified on 8/4/21 "because of change in P/N 12." Part 12 is the outer capstan step parts, the dimensions of which were apparently changed at some point (I think this is discussed in Cathead's build log), but I'm not sure why the plans don't include only the updated version (they don't include the original dimensions for the outer capstan steps, just the updated ones). In any case, I think that 8 inches from the outer edge looks better and places the bolt in the middle of the plank, as shown in photos, so I think that's what I'll do.

 

Finally, as this model is built of several subassemblies that are joined together only at the end, I'm considering adding a finish to the deck framework now. I'm thinking about using either linseed oil (which I have but which is very slow drying) or shellac (which I'm hoping to get this coming week). Below, you can see the color difference between unfinished alder (the deck framework) and with linseed oil (the scrap wood), although I think the scrap alder was a bit darker than the deck beam alder to begin with. I know that adding oil now would impede strong glue joints later, but it seems like few of the glue joints between subassemblies will be under much pressure, and in most cases I could add pins to better hold parts to the deck beams. Something to consider, although I want to see how the shellac looks (if I can get any).

 

[JacquesCousteau]

Minor update. I scribed the plank lines on the step, ran a thin pencil down them, and erased, leaving just the scribe line slightly highlighted. As for the bolt holes, I found that the full-size 3/4-inch diameter bolts would correspond to about 0.59mm at scale (at these tiny dimensions and odd fractions, I find metric much easier to work with). I have .51mm brass rod, which is close enough. I drilled the holes after tack-gluing the step in place. It looks much less boring now.

 

[JacquesCousteau]

 

While I usually go for more or less realistic paint schemes, I wanted to use this build to experiment with some other finishes. I decided to apply linseed oil to the capstan step and deck framework. It significantly darkened the wood and really brought out the grain on the cherry, especially. I think it looks quite nice. It will take a long time to cure, though, which is part of why I went ahead and applied the finish now.

 

Next, I began work on the hatch. I plan on making the coaming out of walnut to provide a color contrast--it should really pop with the oil. I just so happened to have a scrap chunk of 1/4‐inch walnut that was just the right size to make the four sides of the coaming. Lacking a table saw, I used the razor saw to cut it into strips, and then used the mini hand plane to zero in on the correct width while smoothing the sides and squaring the pieces. It's a very slow process, but interesting enough. The walnut planes beautifully, except for around a knot in the wood.

 

While the instructions recommend making the coaming first and then the grating, I decided to make the grating first, so that if it was very slightly off but otherwise acceptable, I could adjust the coaming dimensions to fit. I decided to make it out of basswood so the color would contrast. The ledges are supposed to be 3 inches deep, so I used 3/32‐inch basswood for them, and 1/32‐inch for the battens.

 

Working out the width of the ledges and battens (which are the same) was tricky. The grating is supposed to be 33 inches square, or, at my scale, 1-1/32‐inch square. I initially screwed things up because the text of the instructions says to divide this into 15 equal parts, but if you look at the plans and count, it's actually 13: 7 ledges/battens and 6 spaces in between. Even after realizing the mistake, there were a few times I still erroneously divided by 15, not 13. Getting it right, the ledges and battens should be .079 inches wide (which, as it turns out, is about 2mm, but I didn't think to convert to mm until later).

 

The battens were easy enough to make--just a long strip to be cut to size lengthwise--but the ledges were tricky. Following the instructions, I cut them a bit long, tack glued them together in a "sandwich," and marked out the cutout locations with a knife, measuring as best as I could with a ruler. My first try looked pretty uneven (below), so I flipped the sandwich over and tried again on the other side.

 

For the second attempt, rather than try to consistently measure a tiny fraction of an inch, I used a batten to mark the widths. There was still some unevenness, but I decided to go ahead, hoping to either fill any gaps with sawdust and glue, or to just use this attempt as practice. I used the razor saw to cut, and marked which areas needed to be removed.

 

I then cut out the marked areas with an x-acto blade. As can be seen below, in which the ledges are still over-long, there were some very uneven parts.

 

It was now time to glue up the grating. Around this time, I realized my grating, by trying to follow the batten width, had ended up about 1/16‐inch short. I decided to keep things square and so shortened the other dimension. Gluing up was pretty straightforward: after getting the edges, I used the batten to space out the ledges, moving inward from the sides.

 

 

However, when I got toward the middle, I realized that I had miscalculated: I only had space for six, not seven ledges! Given that this was a test piece, I decided to just finish it anyway. As can be seen, the resulting grating is pretty uneven.

 

So, I'm clearly going to have to make a new grating. What have I learned, and what caused this to turn out so poorly? It seems that there were two reasons why I could only fit six ledges where seven were supposed to go. First, rechecking the dimensions of the parts with digital calipers, I realized that, while the batten was pretty close to the correct size (1.95mm instead of 2mm), the ledges were 2.25mm wide, meaning that six of them took up 1.5mm (nearly 1/16‐inch) more space than they should have. Compounding that error, I had shortened the grating to keep it square without paying attention to how this woud impact its layout. 

 

So, above all, I realized that I need to be more precise in measuring. With so many repeating parts, any small error compounds quickly and throws everything off. I'll need to make frequent use of the digital calipers to ensure that everything is the right size. 

 

Hopefully grating no. 2 turns out better!

[Paul Le Wol]

Great result for such a difficult part to make manually!  Good luck with version 2

[JacquesCousteau]

On 10/8/2025 at 6:20 AM, Paul Le Wol said:

Great result for such a difficult part to make manually!  Good luck with version 2

Thanks, Paul! I'm happy to say that version 2 turned out much better. This time I was better about using my digital calibers when preparing the strips of basswood in the right thickness. While I couldn't get them exactly the same width across the whole length, they were much closer than in attempt 1. I then trimmed to length and sandwiched the ledge pieces to cut the notches. This time, I used a very thin (0.3mm) pencil to mark out the cut lines. It took several tries before I got them set up in a way that worked for the required dimensions--being consistently off by 0.1mm is enough to significantly screw up the grating.

 

I then marked the lines with a knife and marked which were to be cut out as notches.

 

Then, I used the razor saw, followed by an X-acto knife, to cut the notches out. I made the notches deeper than attempt 1. When it came time to glue everything up, I used a spare bit of batten material to get the ledges properly spaced.

 

As can be seen, this time I was able to get the right number of ledges on the grating! Despite exercising much greater care, the central ledge still ended up having slightly narrower spacing than the others, but I felt that ungluing to redo it had a high chance of damaging the notches (the basswood is rather fragile and they wantec to split off). I think I can live with it.

 

To square it up, I used a simple sanding block/platform that I made from scrap pine and mdf. Although in hindsight I should have located the 45-90-degree angle jig piece elsewhere on the platform. The block with sandpaper on it is free and you just place it against the edge of the platform's lower piece to sand straight.

 

Despite the grating's faults, it looks a lot better than attempt 1.

 

And it measures 1-1/32-inch square, as it should. (Or at least close enough).

 

[JacquesCousteau]

The hatch coaming was much simpler to make than the grating. I started off with some scrap walnut left over from a jewelry box I made, which I cut into somwhat oversized portions with a razor saw and then planed to the correct thickness. Below, I've tack glued the pieces together for the final planing and sanding.

 

I then cut the joints for the coaming pieces. I went with the simplified basic lap joint given in the intermediate instructions, rather than the more accurate but more complex joint shown in the advanced. I used a razor saw and a chisel for this. Using a 3/4-inch chisel on such small parts took some getting used to. The chisel cut the wood quite nicely--having only used it on pine before, I can really see why hardwood is often said to be easier to work with for this sort of precise work.

 

The joints didn't turn out quite perfect, and one had to be built up slightly with a shaving of walnut when I cut the joint slightly wide.

 

The rabbet was added separately, using a bit of 1/16-inch walnut strip from a kit. I have to say, while I've read a lot of comments about walnut being too hard to work with and unsuitable for modeling, I found it to be very nice to work with. Maybe I got lucky, but I've found that it cuts, planes, and sands beautifully. (Granted, I'm not trying to bend it or anything.) The grain may be a bit large for scale, but at least on this model I'm not really concerned about that. I then began gluing everything square.

 

Once the coaming was glued together, the grating required very little sanding to fit. I then sanded the edges, including the taper and the rounded corners.

 

And then added some linseed oil. This really brought out the color of the walnut.

 

Here's the hatch assembly resting in place. Although I suppose I could have made the grating a bit more consistent, I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out.

[CiscoH]

That looks great!

Thank you for including your build process; its what is most interesting to us readers i think

[JacquesCousteau]

11 minutes ago, CiscoH said:

That looks great!

Thank you for including your build process; its what is most interesting to us readers i think

Thanks! I'm interested in exploring build techniques that don't use power tools, as I think it's still possible to do a fun build without them. We'll see how the capstan itself turns out, though--I've paused this build for a bit while I consider how to make it.