Zuiderzee-Botter by wefalck - FINISHED - Artitec - RESIN

[mtaylor]

Interesting technique for creating the ice.  Looks fantastic.

[amateur]

convincing ice!

 

Jan

[Foremast]

Yesterday I saw your log and I stared.

Than I went to bed telling to myself: "tomorrow I'll give a look again". After a night full of Dutch ships in my dreams (I really love them) up and down the North sea, now I suceed in re-looking your pictures. Astonishing diorama! It seems we're really close to your ship.

 

Best regards

Alex

[wefalck]

 

Italian exaggeration ...      ... well, Thanks ! We all try to give our best, at least trying that is.

 

********

 

The next step will be building the (Plexi)glass case, but this requires some preparations and it is very hot here in Paris ...

 

wefalck

[amateur]

 

 

and it is very hot here in Paris ...

 

wefalck

 

 

 

But you have plenty of ice available    

[wefalck]

As I noted before, the model is now at a stage, where it needs protection from the domestic elements. The first step was the base-board with the scenic surroundings. The second step is a glass case.

In spite of the hot weather I started this today – it turned out that the study/workshop was actually the most pleasant room in the appartment, but I had to restrict the lighting to a 100 W lamp ...

 

Scoring of the Plexiglas before breaking (it is still covered in its brown protective paper).

 

The construction of the glass case is inspired by the design MCCAFFERY describes in his book ‚Ships in Miniature’ of 1988. In the past I used silicate-glass for the purpose. Silicate-glass has the advantage, that it doesn’t scratch. From another project, however, I had a pile of 3 mm thick Plexiglas-sheets since 1980 in my materials hoard. My father then worked for a subsidiary of Röhm GmbH and we got the stuff quite cheaply. From that time I also have a copy of the very useful manual on how to work with Plexiglas.

 

Fixing the plate at the edge of table

 

Lucky for me, the panels for the case could be cut from those sheets with just a few cuts. In a domestic context, when you don’t have a big table saw, sheets of that thickness are best broken, rather than sawed. When marked the sheets are scored with a ‚cutter’ knife. Per milimeter of thickness it needs one go with the knife. It is important to score right to the edge of the sheet, otherwise corners may break out. The sheet then is clamped down with the scored line exactly at the table edge. Then, with a decided jerk, the plate is broken off. A clean, straight edge that needs little or no sanding before glueing is the result.

 

A clean broken edge

 

To be continued soon ...

 

wefalck

[wefalck]

The individual parts were cut such that the front and back pane abutt against the side panes. Since ordinary Plexiglas is much more prone to scratching than silicate-glass, the protective paper is being left on as long as possible. On the inside, however, it would be difficult to remove, once the case has been assembled. This was even more the case with the slightly oldish sheets I am using. Therefore, the paper was completely removed from the side that will face inward. On the outside a narrow strip along the edges was removed to prevent the glue sticking to it. The paper was only removed from the parts that were assembled at that moment.

Plexiglas can be cemented together with a variety of glues, including cyanoacrylates or those UV-hardening acrylates that recently entered the DIY market. Epoxy resins, however, should not be used, as their exothermic reaction can stress the Plexiglas, which eventually will lead to fine cracks. If you can produce a perfectly flat edge that is at a right angle to the sheet, you can use a low viscosity cement. In most DIY applications it is better to use a more gap filling higher-viscosity cement.

In order to achieve high quality bonds from both, the optical and mechanical point of view, the best option is to use the Plexiglas-manufacturer’s (Rhöm, now Evonik) own cements. I used Acrifix 192, that is easy to obtain. Acrifix is a light-curing cement, essentially liquid Plexiglas (http://www.acrifix.com/product/acrifix/en/products/reaction-adhesives/acrifix-1r-0192/pages/default.aspx, more information on Plexiglas cements here: http://www.acrifix.com). This means that the bond has almost the same optical and mechanical properties as the sheet itself. According to the manufacturer, Acrifix 192 has a shelf life of two years. The stuff I bought apparently in 1998 and kept in different fridges at various places around Europe since then worked without any problems. Only the open time was a tad short, but this seems to have been due to my two 100 W worklights. When I used only one and turned it away from the case, I could work longer on the bond.

 

Cementing the parts of the glass case together

 

The parts were arranged around the base plate. It would have been better to build the case before starting the scenic display, but my impatience to try out my ‚icing’ skills got the better of me. Now have to work a bit more cautiously when cementing the parts together. The four parts are held together temporarily by a gadget that is normally used to fix picture frames and the likes during glueing. In addition I used cellotape to keep the parts together. In order to allow the application of cement, the fixations are loosened a bit at the respective corner. The cement is applied rather sparingly in order to avoid it squirting out and damaging the surfaces of the Plexiglas sheet. All four corners are cemented together one after the other.

 

Cementing the parts of the glass case together

 

It is possible to obtain a perfect bond without any bubbles – with a bit of practice. However, I wanted to be on the safe side and used a minimum of cement, which may result in some bubbles. This is of no consequence as the corners will be covered later by L-profiles in brass anyway.

 

To be continued ...

wefalck

[BANYAN]

Hi Wefalck,

 

I am just back from my overseas jaunt and slowly getting back into the modelling side of things

 

That is a very nice model you have created (you know we Aussies always understate? ).  The paint finish you have created over resin is very realistic and the whole diarama fits together very well.  During my travels we actually visited Volandam (and very much enjoyed it) where I came across a Dutch wood vessel that I may try to model at some time.  If I remember, I will try to post a pic of it; you may be able to identify the type - but it had side vanes and single mast.

 

I am very impressed with your "smithy"   Some great fittings you have turned out.  I have now cleaned up my jewellers lathe; just need to find a decent motor and buy a few accessories (that book you recommended is very good!) and hopefully, with some (read a LOT!) practice, I may be able to produce some metal parts to an acceptable standard

 

cheers

 

Pat

[amateur]

Hi Pat,

 

Single mast and side vanes isn't enough to identify a Dutch wooden vessel.

(but being in Volendam, it's presumably a botter )

 

Jan

[wefalck]

Pat,

 

Thanks for your kind words.

 

Most Dutch vessels have leeboards, owing to their shallow draft. Volendam was most notable for a special variant of the botter, the kwak. The kwak is a bit bigger and wider than an ordinary botter and has a particular spill mounted in the stern, the 'kwakkerol' to handle the net.

 

wefalck

[amateur]

But apart form botters and kwakken there are many ships around on the Dutch inland and shore waters.

Many belong to a certain 'group', but the variations between ships from various villages and even various builders within a village were large.

Many of the ships therefore have apart from their type (botter, kwak, bol, schokker, bons, blazer, punter, hoogaars, schouw etc) an indication of the village/region they were build:

Marken, volendam, urk spakenburg, schelde etc.)

Local variations existed dus to different sailing and fishing conditions, but also just do to local habits.

 

Almost all these ships were build to specification of the owner/schipper of the ship, so even personal preferences may have played a role.

 

Jan

Edited July 26, 2013 by amateur

[BANYAN]

Hi Wefalk and Jan,

 

@Jan, yep -  I was at work and could not recall enough detail to say more  

 

@Wefalk,

I have attached some photos of the vessel.  Not great, but I hope enough to identify it?  I can provide higher resolution if needed.

 

 

cheers

 

Pat

[wefalck]

This is a botter, just like the one I am building. There are some fine variations in detail by which the real expert can tell where the boat was built, whether Voldendam, Marken, Urk etc. She seems to be in the process of re-registration, as the registration number on starboard is being scraped off and the one on port has not being repainted.

 

wefalck

[amateur]

http://www.fonv.nl/vbb/galerij/VN4.html

 

It's an botter originally build in Urk in 1899, and now recreational purposes.

 

She was rather heavily restpored in 2000

http://www.johvdmeulen.nl/pr-bottervn4.html

 

Old ships for recreational purposes are allowed to use their last known fishing registration (this one VN4, wich is for Vollenhove)

 

Jan

Edited July 26, 2013 by amateur

[wefalck]

Thanks, Jan. I think I saw the link to the boatyard before. It is particularly interesting, as it shows the construction of the underwater body, which otherwise is not often seen, even if the boat is hauled out, as it usually covered by a thick layer of tar.

 

I gather, if you don't want to sail on a sieve and constantly pump, you have to replace planks from time to time. It is a problem with 'historic' wooden ships, that much of their wood has been replaced at some time or another. I don't remember the percentage, but I think a good deal of what now is the VICTORY actually has not been in the battle of Trafalgar  ...  

 

wefalck

Edited July 26, 2013 by wefalck

[wefalck]

In the meantime the case received its lid. The fifth piece was cut to size using the technique described above and cemented on the others. This open box now has a remarkable stability.

 

The next step was to fit a wooden plinth around the glass case. It was cut from  5 mm x 20 mm ramin-wood laths using a mitre-saw. The fit of the mitres was perfected on a home-made disc-sander.

 

The parts of the plinth

 

After careful sanding on the future outside, the parts were glued together using PVA glue. The fixture for picture frames came handy here again. When the glue had set, the top of the resulting frame was sanded flat. Before that two holes were drilled through the wood and the Plexiglas. They were countersunk for brass wood-screws with which the glass-case will be secured to the baseboard.

 

Waiting for the glue to set

 

The drilled and sanded plinth

 

wefalck

[Rail and Tie]

New to the forum and just went through your build thread!  Fantasti, inspiring work in 1:90th!!

[wefalck]

Thanks for the kind comments !

 

 

Just a quick note in case someone is interested: this design is only possible with Plexiglas, as drilling through silicate-glass would be a bit tricky to say the least. In the past I used a design, where the glass tightly fits into a groove of about 6 mm depth formed by the baseboard and the frame and was not secured any further. In the image below I sketched the construction used here (left) and how I did it for silicate-glass (right).

 

Cross-section of vitrine construction

 

to be continued soon ...

 

wefalck

[wefalck]

When this structural work was completed, the plinth was treated with a mahagony stain. After a light rubbing down with steel wool, it was ready to be varnished, again in mahagony colour. A treatment with wood filler and shellac in several rounds would have been better, but with age one gets a bit lazy.

 

Plinth and glass case joined.

 

I had to interrupt the work on the glass here until after my summer vacations: I realised that I bought 3 mm brass angles (for 2 mm glass), but actually used 3 mm glass, which requires 4 mm angles to cover the edge joints. I won’t have time to buy the angles before going away.

 

To be continued ...

[mtaylor]

Have a good vacation, wefalck.   I'm looking forward to seeing this all come together, but I'll be patient.

[BANYAN]

Ditto, I hope you have a great break.

 

cheers

 

Pat

[wefalck]

Thanks, gentlemen, but I still have another working week ahead of me   , not too bad actually, as I am working from home (in France, believe it or not, the universities really close and are shut for almost the whole month of August ...).

 

 

As it hasn’t been so hot today here in Paris and the sweat didn’t trickly onto the desk, I tackled a job that filled me with some apprehensions: painting the registration number onto the botter’s main-sail. This is something that can easily spoil a whole model.

 

Finding an easy way to produce white lettering or other markings on a model would deserve a modellers’ Nobel Prize. Any procedure I could think of requires several, sometimes elaborate, steps. There are virtually no printers that can print white. In the past there was one or the other thermotransfer printer, but they seem to have disappeared from the market. Owing to the fact that you really need heavy pigments to arrive at good coverage, ink-jet printers are not really a feasible technical route. Recently OKI came onto the market with a laser printer that uses white, yellow, cyan and magenta toners: http://www.okidata.com/procolor/711wt. I don’t know anyone who has one already and for that price, I would rather buy some other machinery. Printing on white decal sheet is also not really a practical option, as you will never match the background colour, at least not with the murky terracotta I used for the sails. Then I thought about stencelling. This would mean to etch a stencil first – too much work for just two markings. Technically speaking, a good option would be tampon printing. This is routinely used e.g. to apply the lettering on model railway rolling stock. Again, you need to etch a cliché first. For one offs, you could use a drill press as transfer press. You would also need to find some chunk of silicone rubber to make the tampon. All these options are too involved, though I will be watching this laser printing thing. Some day they may come out with a consumer version of it.

 

Main sail with registration number painted in.

 

So, in the end I resorted to hand-painting. I took out my old lettering stencils that hadn’t been used for decades and marked the lettering on the sail. I then used a short-haired 5/0 brush and white airbrushing acrylic paint. I had also experimented with a pen, but the brush allowed more control on the somewhat uneven surface of the sail. I painted the main strokes of the letters/numbers and then added the serifs. They will have rounded corners, but the lettering was touched up with the base colour of the sail to get sharp outside corners. Finally the sheen was equalized with a light touch of matt acrylic varnish.

 

wefalck

[mtaylor]

NIce work on the lettering.  Better than anything I could (or most of the people I know in real life) could do. I had to look at several times and it still looks perfect.   Sometimes, it seems, technology just doesn't work and the "old" ways are the best.

[amateur]

And chances are that the original was also free hand painting....

Your lettering fits the period quite well!

 

Jan

[wefalck]

Thanks, gentlemen. The dilemma one finds oneself in is that the paint-job on the original may have been pretty rough, so it should look rough on the model as well. However, most of the time a rough paint-job on the model looks just like that and reflects badly on the modeller. The art is to make a neat paint-job looking rough ... not so easy 

 

wefalck

[amateur]

Not so easy perhaps, but you succeeded!

 

Jan

[wefalck]

I still found time to begin with the rigging. Work will progress only slowly since the parts are rather delicate and the work is rather nerve-wrecking.

 

At the prototype one would install, of course, the fore-stay first. The fore-sail would be attached with its iron hoops. In my case, however, the hoops have already been sewn onto the sail, a work that would be largely impossible to do in situ. Therefore, the fore-stay has to be installed with the fore-sail attached to it. Form a modelling point of view sailships of the late 19th / early 20th century are quite difficult to rig. In previous periods ropes were often either spliced directly into eye-bolts or sewn on, which both are quite easy to reproduce in a model even at small scales. In later times, to the contrary, shackles and hooks became ubiquitous. It made the rigging and repair easier, but making shackles or hooks of 0.5 mm or 1 mm is quite impossible (the smallest shakles I managed to make are about 2.5 mm long). Just the fore-stay of the botter is hooked into an eye-bolt of the mast. Wire with a scale diameter would bent open under the load. So I had to take a shortcut and to sew it on.

 

Reeving of the fore-stay deadeye with the help of a tripod

 

There were various methods of rigging the fore-stay of a botter in use up to the end of the 19th century. I chose the somewhat old-fashioned method with a dead-eye. The lanyard was made from a rope made on my own rope-walk: three strands of Veevus fly-tying thread 16/0 in golden brown. The colour was chosen because the lanyard would have been tarred. I wanted to put a real wall-knot onto the end, but the fly-tying thread works almost like wire and is well nigh impossible to splice.

 

The fore-stay deadeye

 

The first picture shows my rigging aid: a small tripod that came from deceased father’s estate and was used to suspend a pharmacist’s balance (not sure sure what he ‚above’ would say to this re-use ...). A wire loop suspends the dead-eye so that it keeps clear.

 

To be continued after my vacation ...

 

wefalck

[wefalck]

I didn’t like the sewn-on fore-stay in the end. So I went and fabricated a minute hook from copper wire. Once the hook is tinned and soldered together it is actually quite resistant against the forces on it during the rigging operation.

 

The now correctly attached fore-stay

 

Lucky me that I am not dafi working on his VICTORY and that I don’t need hundreds of them ... 

 

wefalck

Edited August 9, 2013 by wefalck

[wefalck]

Now the rigging begins in earnest. As different sizes of rope are needed for the various parts of the rigging, they are made on my ropewalk as the rigging progresses.

 

A special difficulty arose from the fact that fore-stay and fore-sail have to be set up simultaneously: the eye-splices of the stay do not fit throug the hanks of the fore-sail. Hence the stay has to be first reeved through them and then hooked into the hook of the dead-eye. This operation cannot be performed on the worktable, but has to be carried on the model.

 

Rigging of the fore-stay

 

In a first step the various blocks, namely the sheep’s head-block for the fore-sail halliard had to be hooked into the bolt-rope and a single sheet-block with second eye had to spliced to the clew of the fore-sail.

 

Fore-sail with hallieard and sheet read to be set

 

The halliard is an interesting item, as it also serves as a down-haul, i.e. it sort of endless its ‚free’ end is spliced around aone of the hooks of the sheep’s head-block. In real life the halliard is a pointed rope, meaning it becomes thinner at the ‚free’ end. However, this cannot be reproduced seriously at the 1/90 scale.

 

Head of the fore-sail with halliard and down-haul

 

The sheet is also lead in an interesting way. It is lead like a gun-tackle, but the second single block inboard is missing. Instead, the sheet is lead around the groove of a half-cleat on which it is also belayed.

 

Clew of the fore-sail with block attached (actually, the block should have been spliced into the bolt-rope, but I didn’t notice this when making the sails)

 

BEYLEN (1985) describes alternatives for the arrangement of the fore-sail sheet, some of them lead like a gun-tackle, but with one or even both single blocks missing. He does not explain the rational for the absence of the blocks. The increased friction would be of advantage when holding the sheet in strong wind, but would make it more difficult to haul it in.

 

wefalck

[BANYAN]

That is very neat work Weflack, especially when considering the scale you are working at.  That will be one very 'nice' realistic looking model.

 

regards

 

pat