Armed Virginia Sloop by GuntherMT - FINISHED - Model Shipways - scale 1:48

[dgbot]

Well done your planking came out wonderfully and the moulding adds to the effect.

David B

[russ]

The planking looks great. Very nice work.

 

Russ

[aliluke]

Superb Brian

I well remember the angst that this part of the kit gave me. You've cracked it with style!!!

[GuntherMT]

Ahoy mates!

 

I know it's difficult to believe, but I really didn't fall off the face of the earth, rather life just sometimes gets in the way of hobbies, and I had a stretch of work where I was working 70+ hours per week (went 6 weeks straight without even a day off), and then I went on a short vacation/road trip to a track event at Miller Motorsports Park.

 

I thought the work stuff was behind me for a while, but then my manager announced that I was in charge of the June release and oh, by the way, she was off to India for a month+ so not only was I in charge, but surprise, she wasn't going to be here to show me all the stuff I needed to do (none of which she has documented of course), so I was sort of muddling through on my own.  Then, her boss says "Oh, by the way, I'm on vacation for the next two weeks".  

 

Cool.  So the person who normally does it is in India, and the person who used to do it is gone on vacation.  Wee..  

 

In any case, I've actually gotten back to a little bit of ship-work in the last couple weeks, but it's been rather slow going.  Slow as in I've been working on gun carriages, and getting one of them done every few days.  So really really slow.

 

First I assembled one to make sure that the slightly larger than the kit carriages from Syren would work ok.

 

Looks fine to me!  Of course after this it occurred to me that a smart person would have painted the parts before assembly.

 

I finally got an air compressor, so I laid out the rest of the parts and primed them.

 

I then painted them all, but didn't take any photo's, and began assembly.  Late in the assembly process I did snap a couple pictures, but they are mostly pretty boring.

 

Tonight I got carriage #6 done finally, so I figured I'd stick them on deck and see how they look.  No quoins, so the barrels are a bit high in the gun ports.

 

Lots of work still to do on these, I have to respray them to get the parts without paint covered, make the quoins, add all the eye-bolts, then make the caps to hold the guns on, glue all the various bits in place and do paint touch-ups, etc.

 

Oh, and I also need to complete the finish on the hull & deck, right now there is only a single coat of poly on everything, and I need to buff that and add another couple of coats before I start putting stuff on the deck that will make it difficult/impossible to do later on.

 

But, it's good to see at least a tiny bit of progress after the almost 2 months since I finished the poop deck.

[_SalD_]

Brian, good to have you back and the cannons are coming along nicely and do yourself a favor take a vacation.    

[UpstateNY]

HI Brian,

 

Cannons look great and seem to fit really well.

 

Hope things are calming down for you at work now. 

 

Cheers,

 

Nigel.

Edited May 29, 2015 by UpstateNY

[JesseLee]

Looking good!

[GuntherMT]

Thanks for the comments and likes!  SalD - I will be taking most of my vacation this year by going to the conference at Mystic.  Really looking forward to that.  In the mean time, I'll take a few days off here and there.

 

The learning trials of ship-building continue.  Each little gun carriage gets 5 eye-bolts, which means I have to drill 5 little tiny holes (#78 drill).  I started with a pin-vise and I discovered rapidly that the boxwood which these carriages are made out of is a LOT harder than the basswood I've been drilling before, and it took 10 minutes to drill one hole through the side of a carriage, and I had 29 more holes to drill.  Ugh.  Then a lightbulb went off and I remembered that Mahuna had gotten me this really awesome collection of little drill-bits that were very sharp but needed to be used in a press, since they are very hard/brittle.  Well, I don't have a drill press yet, but I did just recently get a little Proxxon mill, so I chucked up the #78 bit, and then clamped the first carriage in the tool-bed vise.   So awesome, got the 29 holes done in less time than the first one, and they are much more precisely located than they would have been.

 

Next up, I cut down the eye-bolts and glued 3 of them into each carriage.  The other two for each carriage get a ring that the breech line will go through later on when they are rigged to the deck.  These eye-bolts and rings are tiny and I ended up doing all this work wearing an optivisor magnifier thing.

 

I assembled all of the rings to their eye-bolts and used a tiny drop of CA glue to join the ends of the ring.  Probably didn't need to do that.  Then I decided to just finish one gun assembly because I wanted to see it done.  I used very small strips of manila folder to form the trunion caps.  These were supposed to be made out of brass, but I made both brass and the paper ones, and the paper look better as I can't seem to get a nice smooth curve out of brass at this small scale.  I put in the eye-bolt / rings on each side, added a handle to the quoin, and painted the rims of the wheels black to simulate iron bands.  I was planning to add some more bolts and other details, like the retaining pins on each axle, but these things are so small that I decided I wasn't up to the task, so I think this is how the guns will all be completed, other than some clean up and touch up painting later on.  

 

The paint looks really rough zoomed in this close, but even 6" away with my naked eye it looks smooth.  Macro photography is both a blessing and a curse.

[Canute]

Brian, good idea firing up the mill. The cannons look very good, as does the sloop.

[rafine]

Really nice work on the cannon, Brian.

 

Bob

[GuntherMT]

This wooden boat hobby has changed my definitions of what is a 'productive day', as the time frame for finishing a project is so long.  I consider today to be a productive day, and I may actually go back and do more before it's over.

 

First I finished up the rest of the guns, and did some touch up painting on all of them.

 

Next I tackled the rudder.  I completely forgot to take any pictures of this in progress, but it starts out as a laser cut walnut piece with no taper.  To make it into a proper rudder, first it has to be tapered front to rear (it's about 1/2 the thickness along the back edge as it is at the front), and rounded at the front.  Then the lines have to be measured out and etched.  This is to simulate the fact that a real rudder wasn't a single piece of wood, it's built up out of multiple timbers.  In this case 4 pieces.   Next I have to cut recesses for the pintles.  This was accomplished with a very sharp, small chisel.

 

Next up, I got to learn something new!  Soldering.  I've soldered a lot of electronics before, but by before I mean 30+ years ago.  Soldering brass using flux, silver solder, and a torch is all new, but for my first effort I think it came out ok. 

 

I made the pintle - brass pin soldered to the strap that will go into that recess I cut into the rudder.

 

The plans make the gudgeon (the strap that the pintles drop into on the ship side) by simply using the brass strap, and letting the pintle drop into it.  I decided to solder a tiny brass tube onto the gudgeon to make them work like a real one would. 

 

Tthe pintle is too long currently, it will be trimmed later.

 

Now i just need to make two more sets of pintles and gudgeons, but my eyes are bugging me so not sure I'll get back to it today or not.

[russ]

Brian:

The soldered joints look good. File them up a bit if you want to remove the discoloration. Nice work.

 

Russ

[KenW]

I admire your work on both the guns and the rudder.  Does the method you use let the rudder move from side to side?

Really impressive.

[GuntherMT]

Thanks Ken, Russ, and all the likes.

 

Ken - Yes, in theory this will let the rudder swing.  In practice, I'll see how it goes when it's assembled to the ship and decide whether to use glue to 'fix' the rudder or not.  Since the ship doesn't have a through tiller, and I didn't build it to allow the ships wheel to actually turn the rudder, it really isn't of much importance to me whether it will end up movable or not, but I was interested in building it this way because I've seen other logs here done this way and I think it just looks much neater than simply dropping the pintles into the brass band of the gudgeon without any sort of receiver for it (that's how the kit is designed).

Edited June 2, 2015 by GuntherMT

[thomaslambo]

Brian,

 

I think your logic is spot on target, nice detail touch on the rudder but no need to have it move    

[mrangus]

Hey GuntherMT just catching up with your build, looks great and good info on the cannon builds. I'll be paying attention to this build, very attractive ship.

[GuntherMT]

The boat progress continues to be very slow, I've been spending way too much time playing Fallout: New Vegas again after watching the FO:4 trailer.    I may be old, but I guess I'm still a computer nerd at heart.

 

Finished all the pintles & gudgeons to mount the rudder, and then glued them into the rabbet's I cut for them in the rudder.

Then I used a small drill and drilled indents into the brass to put tiny drops of glue to simulate bolt heads.

 

 

I forgot to take pictures of the in progress of that part, but it's not very interesting anyway. Today I mounted the rudder to the hull. It actually turns! 

 

 

Next I move back to the deck, but before I can finish up all the various things that go on the deck, I need to mount all the eye-bolts and cleats while there is nothing in the way. The kit supplies white-metal casting cleats, and they are kind of ugly and I hate working with them, so I decided replace the cleats with the boxwood ones from Syren.

 

I have finished one of them, and I haven't counted, but I think I need 30+, so this will take a while. They aren't terribly difficult, just time consuming. Each one has to be filed to final shape, then have a tiny hole drilled into it to place a short brass rod to make them stay in place on the ship, since glue alone wouldn't work and they'd get knocked off the instant I started tying off rigging to them.

 

 

These things are pretty small, those squares on the cutting mat are 1/2". I hold them with jewelers needle nose pliers and use a small file to shape them. I then use a #72 drill in the mill to drill the tiny hole, and I'm using the small brass nails that I used for nailing the planking on the Carmen for the brass rod. I can get two of these out of each of those little nails, and I have a bunch of them left over.

 

The mill is pretty great for this, since the top to bottom thickness of the cleat is only 2.3mm, so the mill lets me get a very nicely centered hole and not accidentally drill all the way through the cleat when working with such a small piece.

 

[Mahuna]

Hi Brian

 

If you glue in the rod with epoxy before you start shaping you could hold the cleat by the rod - might make the shaping work go a little faster.

 

Hope you can make the next meeting on 6/20 - can't wait to see your progress in person.

 

Frank

[GuntherMT]

Hi Brian

 

If you glue in the rod with epoxy before you start shaping you could hold the cleat by the rod - might make the shaping work go a little faster.

 

Hope you can make the next meeting on 6/20 - can't wait to see your progress in person.

 

Frank

 

That's a most excellent idea, now that I've gotten all 30 of them done.  Hahaha.. 

 

 

The best part is, that I just spent the better part of a day making cleats that when the ship is done, will almost all be mostly hidden under rope coils.  

 

I plan to stain these a darker color so they don't stand out as such light wood against the walnut, black, and red.

[thomaslambo]

 

The best part is, that I just spent the better part of a day making cleats that when the ship is done, will almost all be mostly hidden under rope coils.  

 

Ah yes, spending hours on details that most people won't even notice....this is what some of us call enjoyable trips to "The Dark Side" 

 

Nice job by the way    

Edited June 14, 2015 by thomaslambo

[GuntherMT]

Making more progress, although it's small stuff.

 

I got the holes drilled for the eye-bolts in the cap rail, and trimmed them to size and placed them.  They are chemically blackened, so don't show up in the pictures very well at all, so I didn't bother why photo's specific to them.  I still have the eye-bolts in the outside the the hull to place, and the ones around the base of the mast.  I am going to wait on those until I have the mast made and can test fit it so that I get the bolts placed correctly rather than relying on the plan location.

 

I permanently place the eye-bolt with rings on the deck for the gun haul-in tackle.

 

I stained the cleats with red oak stain, and placed 18 of them on the bulwarks and bow cap-rail.

 

I opened up the bow-sprit opening to fit the bow-sprit, and to do that, I cut down the dowel for the bow-sprit to the proper maximum diameter where it goes through the hull.

 

I cut the hawse holes, but still need to paint them.

 

[jwvolz]

Looking very nice Brian!

[Blue Pilot]

Very nice clean lines. The deck looks great! She is going to be a beautie when launched.

[Canute]

Very nice work. Love the deck work.

[GuntherMT]

Pretty sure I'm going to like the results of replacing the kit blocks with hooks, blocks, and rope from Syren.  If working with these doesn't make me go blind first.

 

 

The two on the far right were stropped with 28 gauge wire.  The wire was a pain to work with and the block are so small that they are quite easy to crush, so I switched to stropping them with .08" rope.  I think they look better, and it lets the hooks 'float' much better as well.  Very time consuming though, I'll be working on these for a while, and will probably work on other stuff rather than just sit down and try to finish all the blocks at once.  The single blocks are barely more than half this size, so they should prove pretty interesting, since I also have to attach a rope to them!

[Canute]

Brian, don't do too many at one sitting. It will take a little longer, but you won't go cross-eyed. I did that when I built some N Scale houses with double hung windows with all the sashes and sills. About seven pieces, counting the glazing, for a window about a half inch tall. And then I put shades in some of the windows.

[GuntherMT]

Moving forward with gun rigging, I made a breaching line and put it on a gun to test fit it.

 

Oops, way too long.  Need to pull almost an inch out of this rope I think.  

 

Surprisingly, I got the smaller rope I needed to rig the guns today (thanks Chuck!), so I had to charge forward and rig up a pair of the single blocks so that I could make my first gun tackle.

 

And of course I wanted to see how it would all look, so I plopped it on the deck.

 

Unfortunately, I got a bit overzealous tightening the tackle on the right side, and while it's sort of hard to make out in that last photo, I broke off the hook that attaches to the bulwark, so I'll have to redo that side again.

 

Also need to be careful of which way I have the hooks pointed when I rig the tackle, as that left side shows, when they are 180 degrees off from one another it doesn't look so great.  Not a big deal I can just pull the rope out and re-rig it.

 

[russ]

Brian:

The breeching rope looks about the right length. It should be about three times the barrel length.

 

Russ

[GuntherMT]

Brian:

The breeching rope looks about the right length. It should be about three times the barrel length.

 

Russ

 

I was basing it being too long on the fact that if I pull the gun back until the breaching line actually stops it, I've run the gun back past the in-haul ring-bolt in the deck.   I would expect the breaching line to take up tension and stop the gun just after the barrel comes inside the bulwarks, and before the gun starts tearing up deck fixtures. 

[thomaslambo]

This is why I pay attention to as many builds as I can...I had no idea what length to cut breaching ropes.

 

Very clean work as usual Brian