HMS Pegasus by Landlubber Mike - Amati/Victory Models - Scale 1:64

[Blue Ensign]

Re the guns Alistair, I think you came to the right answer for the wrong reasons.  Swans were nominally rated for 14 guns but pierced for 16, the foremost port at the bows was a Bridle port. According to Winfield it was from 1779 that 16 guns became the norm. Pegasus pre-dated this so I fitted only 14. Fly which dated from 1780 had the 16 guns, the extra ones in the aftermost port.

 

I have to admit to making things that can't later be seen, as I fitted out the after quarters and beneath the Foc'sle, but I do have the photo's to prove it

 

Cheers,

 

B.E.

[aliluke]

Hi Mike - I won't start a conversation with B.E in your log but he is your (our) man for better information and understanding than I have! I'm also going to show the bridle port closed. It is meant to be narrower than the other ports but the kit pattern makes it the same. I haven't made it narrower - a ship spotter will notice...but what the hell.

 

As B.E says, photograph what you can't see later, 'tis the only proof of your efforts .

 

Spyglass's advice is very good but from what I've seen of your previous work you'll be on to that any way.

[Martin W]

Mike -- I just want to add one Swan voice to the chorus of things unseen.  I remember (I hope!) that Remco put a Norwegian rat down in the bottom of his build, and I always thought that was a delightful touch.  In an old issue of either the NRG Journal or Model Shipwright, there's an article about a model from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century -- the article includes photos & xrays that show that quite a bit of attention was paid to details that haven't been seen for centuries.  I say, if it's fun do it.  And if it gives you a chance to learn the technique -- without your mistakes being laid bare to the world -- then try it out.  On the other hand, ahem, I didn't do the curved deck planks, mostly out of laziness, and concern that I might use up my wider stock of holly.

 

Cheers,

 

Martin

[Landlubber Mike]

Hi guys, thanks very much for all the responses, I really appreciate it!

 

BE and Alistair, that's very helpful information, thank you!  Alistair, I know what you mean about hiding the details.  I figure that I'll actually cheat a little with the run of the planks under the forecastle and quarterdeck, but try to accurately show the planking pattern at the waist.  Even though the planking will be hidden, it will be good practice for when I plank the fore deck and quarterdeck, and for planking in general.

 

Spyglass, I still need to go ahead and fair the bulkheads.  I'm not really looking forward to this task, which is why I've delayed and have been working on the upper deck.  I'll probably start that soon though - the picture on your log is very helpful, thank you!

 

Martin, I think I might cheat a bit at the ends when it comes to curved planks.  I'll probably just keep them as straight tapered planks, mostly to save on wood stock.  We'll see how it goes though.

 

One thing on the redheart - it might be a little more fragile than it looks, even as a close-grained wood.  I picked up my Pegasus by the hull as well as one of the bulkhead extensions, and the redheart extension snapped in two (maybe it was just the piece I used that had some kind of structural defect).  I was able to glue it back, but I'm a bit concerned about it's structural integrity when it comes down to fairing the bulkheads and planking (of course, it was bulkhead 1).  Anyway, just have to be careful I suppose.  Thought I would pass that along.

Edited October 14, 2014 by Landlubber Mike

[Martin W]

Mike -- when I was cutting the redheart for my capstan, I ended up wasting several pieces that just crumbled the way you describe your bulkhead doing.  I didn't see any knot, but the wood just literally fell apart.  Hmmm.

 

Martin

[Landlubber Mike]

It's interesting - the wood cuts very cleanly and seems to be tightly grained, but it just broke without much stress at all.  Makes we want to get the gunport pattern on as soon as possible to give the extensions added stability.

 

On a more positive note, I got an email from Woodcraft that my order of General Finishes stains has been shipped.

Edited October 14, 2014 by Landlubber Mike

[Landlubber Mike]

I've been slowly working on the deck hatches and companionways.  In the meantime, I thought I would share the results of some General Finishes stains that I tested on plywood (first pic) and on pieces of scrap pear.  The reason for the stains is that I'm hoping to go a little darker on my build, and the pear is a bit light for my liking.  Included in some of the pics are two companionway coamings and a grating that still needs to be sanded back, corners rounded, etc.  I thought about going with walnut, but with pear having superior characteristics and workability for modeling, I thought I'd try staining pear a little darker.

 

 

 

 

 

You can see the stains I tested in the pictures above.  I also tried out a few colored stains as you can see - Yellow, Amber and Blue.  Yellow is fairly yellow, but the Amber might be an interesting stain to lay over boxwood if you want to darken it a bit.  I was very interested to see the results of Blue.  Some Pegasus builds use a bluish color on the upper hull.  I thought about possibly going with a french blue, but didn't want to use paint.  It looks like the blue stain could work nicely.

 

Back to the brown stains.  The country pine barely changed the color of the pear, but did darken it slightly similar to what pear treated with tung oil looks like.  The others worked very nicely on pear, darkening it considerably.  I'm still undecided on which to use.  I plan on matching up the upper hull planking with the hatch coamings - walnut might be too dark, but I think Light Brown and Antique Oak could work out very nicely.  I have a little more time, so I'll mull it over before making a decision.  I'm quite excited by my results though.

[aliluke]

Mike

You sure are taking this to another level! I just used boxwood for the frames and the kit supplied gratings. Both served me well but I sense your mission is more intense. I'm looking forward to the results. I can't argue for one stain or another - that is balancing act for your vision of the completed model.

[Landlubber Mike]

Hi Alistair, thanks for looking in.  I really was intending to build the kit mostly out of the box, but my goal of not using any paint forced me to down the path of replacing some of the kit wood given that the walnut was all over the place in color.  It's been a bit of a detour, and it forces me to think three steps ahead, but it's been an interesting process.  I'm not in any rush to complete models, as the journey to me is more interesting than the destination (and my wife isn't too keen on me turning our house into a ship model museum). 

 

That being said, I think on my Lyme build I'm just going to stick with pear and boxwood, and not try to stain anything aside from ebonizing the pear for the wales, spars, etc.  That build is complicated enough given that I'm almost completely scratch building it 

[Martin W]

Hi Mike -- I, too, am fascinated by your experiments with the stains.  I can't quite make out the labels on the stained wood, but, like you, I find the walnut a bit on the dark side.  The light brown and antique oak look to be in the middle of the scale, and so about right to my eye.  Are you leaving the gratings un-stained?  That decision will affect the overall appearance of the hatches, so you might want to stain some scap gratings and set them alongside the different stained coamings.

 

Cheers,

 

Martin

[Landlubber Mike]

Hi Martin,

 

Sorry about the labels - I see that on the second pic I labeled two pieces the same color.  If you need clarification, let me know  I actually stained the gratings to make them slightly darker.  The gratings in the pictures show the effect of the stain.  I used Minwax but a week or two later, the gratings still stink. Since I have to sand in the camber, I might just restain the gratings with the General Finishes Country Pine or Early American.

 

It's a bit tricky to put together the gratings and hatches, as I'll be using two different stains and when I sand in the camber, I'll need to re-stain the gratings.  So, I haven't glued in the gratings into the hatches yet.  It's also tricky in that I want to butt the deck planks against the hatches - it's probably easier to run the planks, and then sand the hatches back to size.  Alternatively, I could finish the hatches and glue them down, and then run the planks.  The latter approach is probably easier to get a perfect line of planks running fore to aft between the deck items (i.e., the planks butting up against the head ledges), but the first approach is probably the easier way to get the planks to butt against the coamings.  Fun times.

Edited October 23, 2014 by Landlubber Mike

[aliluke]

I definitely would not glue the hatches down before planking the deck. It would make cleaning up the deck after planking very difficult. I did the deck planking before even making the hatches and then made them fractionally over sized allowing a light sanding of the coamings to lead to a very tight fit.

[janet bode]

Hi Chris L Bren

I too am a kit basher,when i buy a kit it has saved me time i can just

open the box and more or less start building.Of course it is not quite

as simple as that as i try to add more details and for a lot of them the

fruit woods are ideal as i like to use as little paint as posssible,however

at my age i feel i do not have the time to build from scratch illness forces

me to spend valuable time in hospital.Of course if i had time on my side then

love to eventually scratch build and build entirly from keel up but time is not on my side.

 

Regards Janet (

[Landlubber Mike]

I made some more progress tonight - I installed one whole deck plank between the main hatch and the fore hatch!

 

 

 

Actually, a lot of work has gone into just making this one plank.  I am using 0.5mm maple for my deck planking.  I was having a lot of trouble cutting straight planks with my Byrnes saw, as the wood is close to paper thin and would at times slide under the fence or even ride up over the saw blade.  I tried hand cutting the planks with a little better success, but still not good enough.

 

So, I tested out the Microjig Grr-Ripper with the 1/8" leg option.  Man, that device is a godsend.  It supports the wood piece perfectly, so you don't have to worry about adding fingerboards, using push sticks, etc.  This plank is 6mm, but with the 1/8" leg, I think I calculated that I could cut planks down to about 3mm in width.  I wholeheartedly recommend it, and I'm actually surprised that more people aren't using it on MSW.  It's not cheap, but for the added safety, it pays for itself many times over.

 

Here is a picture in case people are interested:

 

 

 

I should be able to zip along a little faster now that I've worked out my plank ripping issues.  I'm just about done with making the upper deck furniture (made the capstan step last night), but I still need to decide on whether to stain the pear a little darker.  In the meantime, I tested wipe-on poly, Danish oil and Tung oil on some test maple pieces.  Wipe-on poly barely impacted the finish, and Danish oil made it a bit too yellow for my taste.  Tung oil gave a nice richness to the maple, so I will likely go with that.  I used Tung oil on my Badger build, and really liked how it brought wood to life.

Edited October 23, 2014 by Landlubber Mike

[aliluke]

I don't know a thing about power tools - don't own any - but if that's a goody I'll believe you.

 

But I'd advise that you run that very first centre plank the full length of the deck. It is all too easy to get drift on the plank runs from a slightly off line centre plank and it'll start to hurt a few planks either side of it. It is easy to trim the centre plank back to the hatches later but much harder and more annoying to rip off all the drifting planks that come from a slightly off line start (I speak from experience ). With a short plank that alignment is much harder to judge. From the photo I reckon your first centre plank has a faint starboard drift. I could be wrong but it is certainly easier to align and centre with a full length plank. This applies to the upper decks as well.

[Martin W]

Terrific, Mike, I like that Grr-Ripper well (and grr to you, too!  ).  So where'd you get it, Lee Valley?  I have something like that (homemade) for my regular full-size table saw, but have never seen a micro version.  Safety is a must.

 

Cheers,

 

Martin

[Landlubber Mike]

I don't know a thing about power tools - don't own any - but if that's a goody I'll believe you.

 

But I'd advise that you run that very first centre plank the full length of the deck. It is all too easy to get drift on the plank runs from a slightly off line centre plank and it'll start to hurt a few planks either side of it. It is easy to trim the centre plank back to the hatches later but much harder and more annoying to rip off all the drifting planks that come from a slightly off line start (I speak from experience ). With a short plank that alignment is much harder to judge. From the photo I reckon your first centre plank has a faint starboard drift. I could be wrong but it is certainly easier to align and centre with a full length plank. This applies to the upper decks as well.

 

Thanks very much Alistair for this advice.  Now that you mention it, I think you noted this on your build log.  I considered doing this, but I didn't want to cut a full length plank for a variety of reasons - and given the issues I had with cutting straight planks, I would have potentially wasted a lot more material.  The main reasons for not taking that approach were (1) I'm planning on going with the TFFM deck planking layout, which uses a lot of custom cut planks (with curved planks, anchor stock planking, etc.), and (2) the only portion of the deck that will be visible is in the waist area (the area under the forecastle and quarterdeck are more for practice, and I'll probably cheat in not fully adhering to the TFFM layout in those sections). 

 

I used my iPhone to take pictures, and given the angle, etc., I think there's just an artifact in the picture where it appears that there is some drift.  I'll measure again tonight, but I was very careful and actually reinstalled the plank after I found it had some slight drift on the first installation.  It's also a bit hard to see in the pictures, but what I did to avoid further drifts in the waist area was to draw lines parallel to the center line in the waist area.  Those will help me to keep the planking from drifting too much.  As long as the waist is centered, I won't care if there's much drift in the other areas where the planking won't be seen anyway.

 

We'll see if it all works out in the end.  The nice thing about using custom planks as opposed to straight planks is that I can account for small differences and drift.  The bad thing about using custom planks is that I'll have to cut custom planks 

[Landlubber Mike]

Love your stain experiments - absolutely fascinating!

 

Its probably the pic angle but I note that your aft two mast holes seem a bit "off round"  while the foremast is spot on round - I presume you have test fitted the deck fittings in their holes so there is no danger of your two deck halves being slightly too close at the aft end?

 

Thanks SpyGlass, we'll see if the stain approach looks good, or if I end up treating the model as kindling 

 

On the mast holes, I did test the holes during the deck template installation and they seemed to work fine.  I can always expand the holes a bit if necessary, but you're raising a good point in that I should confirm that things are ok.  Installing the deck template is a bit nerve wracking - you have a lot to glue, and not much time to keep things centered, the deck pinned down to the tops of the bulkheads and spine of the keel, etc.  I'm not looking forward to the gunport patterns which are much harder to install 

Edited October 23, 2014 by Landlubber Mike

[Landlubber Mike]

Terrific, Mike, I like that Grr-Ripper well (and grr to you, too!  ).  So where'd you get it, Lee Valley?  I have something like that (homemade) for my regular full-size table saw, but have never seen a micro version.  Safety is a must.

 

Cheers,

 

Martin

 

Hi Martin, 

 

I bought mine from Amazon.  It's actually marketed for full-sized table saws, but I found a youtube video where someone used it on a mini table saw which made me feel comfortable buying it.  I bought the 200 model which allows you to do a little more, but just installed the components for the standard 100 model.  I also bought the optional 1/8" leg to rip narrower planks (the 100 and 200 models come with a 1/4" and 1/2" leg standard, which are a bit too large for some planks).

 

Having seen pictures of table saw injuries and experienced kick back myself, I have been very nervous about using the table saw.  I tried using feather boards, push sticks, etc., but nothing really seemed to work well enough.  The Grr-ripper really is a game changer.  It's important to maintain a healthy respect for the saw, but using this device makes using the saw almost foolproof when it comes to safety.  

Edited October 23, 2014 by Landlubber Mike

[Martin W]

The experience of kick back, even on the little Byrnes saw, will definitely make you respect (if not fear)  that tool. 

[usedtosail]

Mike,

 

The Griper looks pretty cool and I can see how it can make ripping planks a lot safer and more accurate. My question, though is, even with the extra attachment, are you limited to 1/8" think planks, or is there a way to cut them thinner?

 

Thanks.

[Landlubber Mike]

Hey Tom,

 

The Gripper works by keeping one leg against the fence and then another leg on the other side of the blade.  You can't cut pieces any thinner than the leg against the fence.  I suppose you could modify the leg to be thinner (though, it's tough plastic so I'm not sure how easy that would be) or not use the leg against the fence and hope that you can use the block to push the wood stock on a straight path through the blade.  

 

You could maybe use some kind of spacer I suppose the same thickness as the wood you are cutting and put it in between the fence and the wood to be cut, but I'd have to think about it and wonder if that would work.  If you're looking for pieces thinner than 3mm, I suppose you could always try cutting them by hand?

[usedtosail]

OK, thanks Mike. I have not tried cutting planks yet with the Byrnes saw, but this may be an option for the future.

[Landlubber Mike]

I suppose another thing you could try to do is have the cut pieces come off the side of the blade opposite the fence so that you are not limited by the 1/8" leg.  You would still run the Grip-rrr against the fence for a straight cut - the downside of doing this is that you would have to continually adjust the fence after each cut if you wanted to cut identical strips - a bit hard to do with precision.

[Landlubber Mike]

It's been a while since I last posted any progress - I had family staying with me the past couple of weeks, and unfortunately the guest room is in the basement next to my workshop.  So, I couldn't play with my power tools much during that time unfortunately.

 

I did manage to hang a fluorescent fixture over my workbench (what a difference good lighting makes!) and hung an air filter unit from my ceiling joists in my workroom.  On top of that, I also did sneak in some progress on my build:

 

 

 

The hatches for the upper deck have been cut and assembled, and now I just need to round the corners, add camber, and sand them back slightly to fit the eventual deck planking.  On the planking, I've added a few more planks.  If I went with straight planks, I'd be a lot further along.  But, I'm going to attempt to plank the upper deck as per the TFFM sample deck plan, so I'm trying to gear myself up for the challenge of cutting and fitting curved planks.

 

I made the capstan step, which will be sanded down a bit to fit within the planking.  i plan on also adding the main mast partners, but probably won't do the fore mast and mizzen mast partners, since these won't be seen once the quarterdeck and forecastle are up.   

 

Question for my fellow Swan class builders - aside from doing the hatch coamings for the fore hatch/stairway, did you add framing or other covering so that the plywood deck under the coamings was not visible?  I believe that when I did the companionway for my Badger, I added small strips of wood on three of the sides of the companionway (each side except for the side that the ladder touched the companionway).  I'm more interested in covering up the plywood than historical accuracy, but is it correct to add some framing on some or all of the sides?  Thanks in advance!

[aliluke]

Hi Mike

I don't think this is a big issue at all. See post 520 in my log - you really can't see those edges and if that is a concern when all the other stuff is fitted then you are over concerned! I'll probably give a little wipe of black paint to the edges before fitting down those stair hatches and that will suffice. I do a little bit of framing port/starboard of the coaming for the ladders but nothing fore/aft.

[Landlubber Mike]

Thanks Alistair.  Did you shave back the plywood template at all under the coamings?  My plywood might be a little more exposed as I've modified the hatches a bit to conform to the NMM plans.  So maybe fore and aft I sand back the plywood, but athwartships, use the small piece of framing like you did to cover those sides up.  From a structural integrity standpoint, you probably only need two sides of the hatch to sit on the plywood - so, as long as I have enough plywood for the port and starboard sides, the fore and aft sides could freely float.

[Blue Ensign]

Hi Mike,

I wanted to add a little depth to my hatchways so I added  strip below the plywood  false deck, (which also strengthened the arrangement) and because my gratings are removable, I added an internal ledging to support the grating.

 

 

This shot of the Fore hatch shows the arrangement.

 

B.E.

[aliluke]

Hi Mike

No I didn't shave anything. I also found that the hatch sizes in the kit were fine in respect to the FFM sizes (I don't know about the sizes in the NMM plans) . With the coamings set inside the deck - that is set on top of the plywood false deck with the real deck planks butted into the hatches - you just can't see the plywood of the false deck at all. The port/starboard pieces are a nice touch but weren't done to conceal the plywood - just to add a realistic detail. Hope that helps?

 

It'd be nice to see your pictures at a higher resolution. I reckon you can go up to 1900 pixels wide and still sit well below the site limit.

 

Edit: B.E slipped in before I sent my post. Forget the hatch linings and check out those perfect railings! Still I don't think you need the linings fore/aft, with the hatches inserted the false deck ply disappears. However a port/starboard rail inside of the ledges suited me for a level of detail add.

Edited October 30, 2014 by aliluke

[ASAT]

Mike, nice build you have going here, I was reading back and noticed you want to keep a subdued look. I have used bubinga as a replacement for walnut - it is dark like walnut but very tight grain and several overtones of brown/black. Workability is much like pear. You can see it in my Harvey build log..... Nice wood for various deck fittings.

 

Lou