Charles W Morgan Whaleboat by Salty Sea Dog - Artesania Latina - Scale 1:25 - POF - first wooden boat build - SMALL

[Ferit]

How and where have you found this giant penny Buck?!  

[JSGerson]

I for one would be very interested in how you made the stave blanks. I am always interested in learning new techniques, tips, etc.

[Salty Sea Dog]

How and where have you found this giant penny Buck?!  

 

Well Ferit, as you can see here, I get paid big money!

 

JSGerson- I'll try to post the steps with pictures when I get home this evening.

[Ferit]

I don't need any evidence Buck  , that was to emphasize the difficulty you confront and the skill you have...

[Salty Sea Dog]

Here's some info on the making of the tiny staves for the piggin using simple tools. The same method will be used for the bucket and lantern case. If you are a serious scratch builder, you would just use your Jim saw and thicknesser instead to make the custom size strips, and skip ahead to the tapering step. For a kit builder just needing a few custom sized strips of wood to bash a kit or scratch some items like these, this is an inexpensive solution to keep you going. You wouldn't want to make a ship's worth of planks this way.

 

The wood I used was cedar because it has a warm color that looks right for buckets, is easy to work, and best of all, it was free. There were some odd pieces of wood left in the garage by the previous owner of my house, and an old fence picket that had split was one of them. No doubt, the previous owner never got around to making buckets with it.

 

1) The first step was to whack off a length of the picket and cut that into rough strips. I whacked off a 15" piece just so I could have longer strips for stuff should I ever need them in the future. If you don't have a motorized saw of some sort, you could just cut off a 3" piece with a handsaw and then use a little razor saw to make some oversized strips. I used a bandsaw and a fence to cut longer oversized strips. I cut the strips so the grain would be quartersawn (the dark thin grain lines are perpendicular to the face of the strips). This was more for the looks than anything else. The dark rough piece was the face of the fence picket. The strips cut from this small cut-off of scrap wood is good for a dozen buckets or more!

 

2) The strips were brought to a 1mm thickness with a hand plane. Instead of trying to plane the 15" long pieces, shorter 3" long pieces were planed. It is really easy to snap a longer piece of a wood like cedar when planing this thin, and I can manage the short ones easily at my drydock work station. When you are planing this thin, you need something thinner but strong to hold the piece against, Don't use sheet metal! If you plane too thin, that could damage your plane blade. A thin piece of hardwood works great. This is a little veneer of Indian Rosewood that's about 40 thousands thick (.040") and is very tough.  I just butt the end of the strip against the veneer, hold the veneer with my left hand and plane with the right. Pretty easy and not much workspace is needed.

 

There are all kinds of small modeler's hand planes out there and I have an assortment, but I swear by my Stanley 12-960 low angle block plane.

 

My 2 cents on hand planes: Although the 12-960 dwarfs the little planes, it's features and adjustability make it much easier to use with very controllable, precise results. First off, the mouth (where the blade pokes through the bottom) is adjustable in width. You need a very fine opening to take the tiny shavings we will be making (about .0015"). If you look in the picture above, the 12-960 has been adjusted way tighter than the smaller planes without adjustable openings. The 12-960 has an easy adjustment (the big knob on the back) to control the depth of the cut. The others have a single set screw that you loosen to reposition the blade, and you may or may not end up with the ajustment being better once you re-tighten it. It takes a lot of practice to get a set screw holder type plane adjusted to within .001" tolerance, which is what is really needed for precision small scale stuff. The blade can also get rotated a little crooked when re-tightening set screws. With the 12-960, there's another adjustment that can correct a crooked blade. Once you are all finely adjusted, if you catch a gnarly change of grain in hardwood, a set screw holder can slip and mess up your adjustment. The 12-960 has an indexed holder that positively locks into a notch in the blade. Speaking of the blade, the 12-960's blade is about twice as thick as the others and is made of better steel that holds a sharp edge longer. I find this plane a joy to use. I bought mine about 15 years ago and it was made in Sheffield England then. I think they are now made in Mexico and hopefully they are still the nice tool that mine is. There are more expensive versions of this plane from L.N. and Veritas. but it's hard to beat this one at about $35. You can actually plane end grain with this low-angle version.

 

Once the strips were planed to thickness, the edges were trued up and planed to 3mm wide. I did this by simply holding the strip in my left hand and planing with the right. Sounds iffy when you say it, but it's actually very easy. You don't bear down on the wood, you just slide the plane past the strip and it scares the wood off the edge! No blood lost.

 

3) The 3mm x 1mm x 3" long strips were cut into lengths a little longer than the staves needed to be (about 9mm long for 1/25 scale). I then tapered the staves with the plane so the narrow end was 2mm wide. In hindsight, the fit would have been better if they had been a bit under 2.5mm. This was done by taking a short cut off the end to be the narrow end, followed by slightly longer strokes until the whole 9mm length is one continuous cut. Very little pressure was applied and it worked out to about 6 passes on each side. This looks scary, but I did it by holding the little stave in my left hand and planing with the right. Keep in mind that the blade is set for a .0015" shaving, so your fingers would pretty much have to touch the bottom of the plane to get cut! No blood in my bucket!

 

I back-beveled the edges of the staves with 220 grit sandpaper glued to a flat piece of hardwood. I have a courser grit at the other end. These sanding sticks are really handy and don't load up as bad as a small file. The bottom of the bucket was shaped from a wider 1mm thick piece of cedar. The bucket bottom (about 8mm dia.) was glued to the end of a dowel, it's edge beveled, and the bucket assembly continues as was shown in the earlier posts. The beveled notches on the inside stave bottoms were cut with a #11 Xacto blade to receive the bucket bottom. The tape around the dowel flares the staves out. It was necessary to adjust the stave tapers with the sanding stick because they were a bit over-tapered. The bands were cut from a thin plastic container's label (like the label on a plastic bottle of soda) and blackened with a Sharpie and stuck on with white glue. Geez, I guess I wrote another small book.

 

Best wishes

 

[NAZGÛL]

Hey nice working space! Good to see a guitar ready wheneveyou needs it.

 

Love the bucket mate! I renovated one I found in our old cabin and yours looks just perfect.

 

 

/Matti

[augie]

Thanks for putting this together for all of us, Buck.  I never knew there were so many planes out there!

[JSGerson]

Much appreciated and worth the minor wait. Now if I could only do that myself at 1:64 scale for my build!

[Salty Sea Dog]

Just a quick FYI: Forces beyond my control caused my car to stop at the local Woodcraft store today. I was talking to one of the guys there and he said that they have been really disappointed with the quality of the Stanley products out of the Mexico factory and have had to return full shipments of products. Just thought I'd mention that in case anyone was getting ready to order a Stanley 12-960 based on my raves about mine.

[Salty Sea Dog]

Merry Christmas everyone!

 

Got in a little boat time late this morning and decided to take a break from the mini coopering. I started working on the compass box and decided it needed to be put together with box joints. Sounded logical being a box and all...

 

 

The joints were filed using guitar nut slotting files working from .010" up to .032". I still have a little fine tuning to do on this corner, and then do 3 more corners. Maybe this isn't very logical at all...

Edited December 25, 2014 by Salty Sea Dog

[JSGerson]

I learn something every day. I didn't even know what guitar nut slotting files were till now and now it's a must have set of tools!

[Ferit]

Hi Buck,

I must leave the forum because of my envy if the compass will show the magnetic north besides...

[augie]

It will probably also be illuminated Ferit.  With Spermaceti candles.  That joint is spectacular Buck.

[Salty Sea Dog]

Hi Jon!

I've found the nut slotting files to be useful for quite a few things. You will want to look for the flat, double-edged type instead of the newer wedge- shaped ones that make more of a V- shaped notch.

[Salty Sea Dog]

Hi Buck,

I must leave the forum because of my envy if the compass will show the magnetic north besides...

No you can't leave this forum Ferit! I have way too much to learn from you! The compass will only point north if it is already pointing that way!

 

Thanks Augie! I think I'll stay away from the candles since I would probably burn the house down!

[JSGerson]

Thanks. The next thing you will have me playing the guitar itself!!

[JSGerson]

 

 

I've found the nut slotting files to be useful for quite a few things. You will want to look for the flat, double-edged type instead of the newer wedge- shaped ones that make more of a V- shaped notch.

I did a quick look on Google and if I understand it correctly, nut slotting files have a narrow rounded edge and smooth sides. It appears for guitar work, the square groove is to avoided. Your box joints have square slots. Is there a type of slotting file with a square edge?

 

BTY, those files ain't cheap!

Edited December 26, 2014 by JSGerson

[Salty Sea Dog]

I did a quick look on Google and if I understand it correctly, nut slotting files have a narrow rounded edge and smooth sides. It appears for guitar work, the square groove is to avoided. Your box joints have square slots. Is there a type of slotting file with a square edge?

 

BTY, those files ain't cheap!

They are a bit pricey and I acquired mine over time. I imagine it's due to their precision widths and limited market. The files do have rounded edges, so after getting the box joint slots to width, I went back with the skinny .010" file to square the corners and with some 320 grit sandpaper to fine-tune the slot widths. It's pretty tricky, but it looks cool!

 

You need to add a guitar to your must-have shop tools! When your build starts to get you frazzled, you can either pick up the guitar and play something to calm you down, or in my case, get frazzled by clumsy guitar playing fingers so that anything on the boat model seems super easy. Either way, it's a win!

[JSGerson]

Thanks for the tips. I think I will stick to strictly building boats. Making music is a lot harder than listening 8-)

[Salty Sea Dog]

We have 4 sides to the compass box now.

 

[Salty Sea Dog]

Hello eveyone!

 

I worked on the compass box today and was trying to make a "glass" lens for it. Once again, I found use for a plastic jar (this time one that sunflower seeds had come in). The curvature of the jar adds to the look and actually appears to maginify a little. Making the lens proved really difficult and resulted in plenty of failed attempts.

 

 

Here's what I learned when shaping the plastic from jars.

1) Do not shape it with sandpaper or a double-cut file. The plastic actually seems to be a 3-layer lamination and I'm guessing the heat from coarser shaping methods causes a de-lamination that clouds up the edge of the lens. It actually swells up too.

 

2) When using a single cut file, don't file too much in the same place for the same reason.

 

3) Use scissors to cut the plastic as close to the final shape as possible so you don't have to file very much. Don't try to cut curves with scissors or it will cloud up. Cut straight litle segments instead of curves, and then file to a smooth curve.

 

4) It's really hard to file a perfect circle. I wasn't able to. 

 

 

 

Here's the pieces ready to assemble. The housing is a short piece of brass tubing. The rose compass was from Google Images, and I found that if I put the image into a Word document, I could shrink it way down with decent resolution by grabbing the corner of the image and making it tiny on the document before printing. I shaped a piece of cedar to almost fit inside the tubing and then pressed it in and the tubing shaved it to shape. Note that the end of the cedar that the compass rose is attached to is at a slight angle. I was after the effect of the compass tilting on its mouting giblets....mounting gimlets?...mounting gimbals? Anyway, whatever those mounting thingies are that alows a compass to self-level.

 

 

The finished compass box.

 

 

 

Best wishes,

 

[CaptainSteve]

Nice job there, Buck. That just looks so realistic !!

I reckon that's another one of your ideas that I'm going to have to shamelessly copy.

Edited December 29, 2014 by CaptainSteve

[augie]

Very, very nice.  And well worth the effort.

 

Now, when can we expect the details regarding the calibration of the compass?

[Salty Sea Dog]

CaptainSteve and Augie - Thanks for the nice words. Captain you are more than welcome to copy anything you want! If I ever need hairy coconuts for a build, I will be copying you! Those are so freakin' cool!

 

Augie -The compass already appears to be perfectly calibrated!    Guess I'll get back to mini coopering now.

 

 

Best wishes

[Salty Sea Dog]

I think another bucket might fit on this penny...

[md1400cs]

Buck,

 

Your level of miniature details are well "outa sight"

 

Michael

[mattsayers148]

Hey Buck,

 

After seeing your incredible compass, I decided to see what you are working on. You are hands down one of the best craftsman I've come across! I look forward to seeing your future work.

 

Matt

[Salty Sea Dog]

Michael and Matt,

 

Thanks for the awesome comments! This is extra awesome coming from two folks with such amazing skills. I am trapped inside my drydock room because my head is now too big to fit back through the doorway!

[mattsayers148]

Hey Buck,

 

Thanks for the scale mod to 1:16. I got an idea in my mind, just gotta finish these dang oars. Works back in full swing after the holidays so my build might slow a bit.

 

Matt

[Salty Sea Dog]

The first full week back to work after the holidays was crazy for me too. I did get in some shipyard time today.

 

Yup, another bucket does fit on the penny!

 

For the latest bucket, I tried pulling out the big guns, well maybe the little gun. I used a 1/8" Japanese chisel I got years ago to help when cleaning up corners in inlay cavities on ebony guitar fingerboards. The heft of a "real" chisel made cutting the ebony end grain much easier than an Xacto knife. For the bucket staves, shaving the edges for a nice fit was a breeze with this chisel, and the bevels were much more precise than sandpaper.

 

 

The problem with scratch building these buckets is now the kit supplied line buckets look pretty bad. Dang! I may set a record for the longest time to finish a boat that was nearly done.

 

 

Best wishes,