SMS WESPE 1876 by wefalck – 1/160 scale - Armored Gunboat of the Imperial German Navy - as first commissioned

[wefalck]

Thanks 

 

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Skylights, Companionways etc.

 

I have used two basic techniques for the construction of skylights, companioways etc., depending of the type and purpose. Skylights particularly were constructed around small blocks of Plexiglas milled to shape. Other types were constructed from strips of Pertinax. More intricate parts were etched from brass. For some of the skylights a combination of the techniques were used.

 

Etched parts for skylights

 

Boiler-room skylight

The prototype construction of the boiler-room skylight is not completely clear from the drawings I had, so that I had to 'fudge' it a bit. First the central piece that supports the chimney was shaped from a piece of Plexiglas. The PROXXON drilling machine was abused as a milling machine to this end: a diamond-cut milling bit was taken up into a collet and the height of the machine set so that the bit reached just below the table. Now the Plexiglas part was passed free-hand along the mill. The form to be cut out was printed on a piece of paper that was stuck to the Plexiglas. It was tested against the shape of the etched grilles in order ensure a snug fit. The box around the skylight was constructed again from Pertinax.

 

Shaping a Plexiglas-core for the boiler-room skylight

 

The assembled boiler-room skylight

 

To be continued ...

[wefalck]

Engine-room skylight

 

The frame of the engine room skylight consists of a an etched brass part, folded up and soldered together. On the inside, grooves have been etched that will serve to locate the protective bars to made from thin copper wire. The lower frame was constructed from Pertinax. The ‘wooden’ gratings on both sides of the lower frame are again etched parts.

 

Unglazed framework for the engine-room skylight

 

Once this structure was complete, a square block of the size of the footprint of the skylight was milled from a piece of Plexiglas.

 

Squaring up a Plexiglas block for the skylight

 

In the next step the roof-shaped faces were milled on. To this end, a small insert vice was set to the appropriate angle of 40° in a larger vice bolted to the mill table. The fixed jaw of the insert vice pointed upward and the side of the block to be milled rested against it. This ensured that all four inclined faces would have the same angle and would start from the same height with respect to the reference (bottom) face of the block.

 

Milling the sloping faces

 

Polishing the sloping faces  

 

A very smooth surface with little tool marks can be achieved on Plexiglas. The final polishing of the surfaces was done using CRATEX-type drum polishers followed by a felt drum loaded with polishing paste. All in the same vice setting to ensure a flat surface. I was lucky the Plexiglas 'house' fitted like a plug into the skylight frame.

 

Finished Plexiglas 'glazing' block

 

Glazed engine room skylight

 

To be continued ...

[Omega1234]

Now that's really clever work and love it!!!  I'm definitely looking forward to more updates.

 

All the best!

 

Patrick

[Mirabell61]

smart idea on the Skylight Wefalck

 

Nils

[wefalck]

Yes, Plexiglas is a nice material to machine. I have been making small deck-houses etc. with this method since the late 1970s. My late father worked for a sister company to that manufactured Plexiglas (Röhm GmbH) and we had easy access to it in all sizes and shapes. Röhm GmbH also produced a comprehensive technical manual for working with Plexiglas, of which I have a copy - very useful.

[wefalck]

The 30.5 cm Rk/l22 gun

 

The main armament of the WESPE-Class was a massive 30.5 cm (12”) Krupp breech-loading rifled gun (Ringkanone, abrev. Rk). This caliber stayed the bigges in the German Imperial Navy for many decades and well into the Dreadnought-era. It is this gun that essentailly made the boats in floating batteries, rather than ‘real’ ships.

 

http://www.dreadnoughtproject.org)

 

A few years ago a detailed dtawing of gun-mount originating in the adminralty archives in Berlin surfaced on the site ‘dreadnought’. The arrangements for all the heavy Krupp guns of the time were similar, so that a visit to the Finnish fortress Suomenlinna (http://www.maritima-et-mechanika.org/maritime/models/wespe/suomenlinna/suomenlinna.html) off Helsinki was helpful; here a number of Russian clones of 28 cm coastal Krupp guns are still in place since the time, when Finnland was part of the Russian Empire.

 

28 cm Krupp-clone coastal guns in the Suomenlinna-fortress off Helsinki

 

Rails for the Lower Carriage

The lower carriage of the gun is supported on four races that run on semicirucular cast-iron rails bolted to the deck inside the barbette.

These rails need to go into their place in the barbette early during the construction. The same applies to the semi-circular toothed rack that is part of the gun-training machinery. I decided to make the rails from steel, even though ferrous metals in model construction are frowned upon by many. My justifications were that it is difficult to represent cast iron or steel by paint and that there hundreds of models in museums around the world that contain iron. I have used steel in models some twenty years ago and presumably due to the lacquering they shows no signs of rust.

 

Roughing out the rails from a metal disc with the backing of a wooden disc

 

Grooving the races with a specially ground bit

 

Cutting thin disks from round stock of large diameter is a pain I wanted to avoid. Against my better knowledge I picked a suitably sized steel washer as starting material. Unfortunately, the steel used did not machine very well and lot effort was spent to avoid chatter marks while turning and to obtain a reasonably good finish. The various types of wheel collets and chucks available for the watchmaking lathe came into good use for working on inside and outside diameters of these discs. The rails were shaped using a specially ground forming tool.

 

Cutting out the inside of the large ring for the tail-races of the lower carriage, while holding it in a so-called bezel-chuck

 

Trimming the outside of the smaller forward ring holding the material in a so-called wheel-chuck

 

The rails laid out in the barbette

 

To be continued ...

[druxey]

Lovely bit of miniature machining, wefalck!

[bear]

Hello

 

As a retired Tool and Diemaker I bow to your skills sir. You are truely a Master at machining and most impresively in minature machining. At the watch making levels.I have patience but your level is truly wounderful to see. I just hope that people around you can let you know just how good your work is.

 

 

 

So much for the CNC button pushers now machining parts. These are the real skills of a great trade,and have all but gone away now in the modern world.

 

Those who have never machined parts or designed progressive die's have no way of completly knowing just what you are doing here. Or just how hard it is to do. Only with God given tallents can you get to this level of work. No training can get you to this level of mastery.

 

It is sometimes hard to see this kind of work when you know just how much time and work it takes to acomplish.I have been in the amchining and toolamker world my whole life. I am second gereration toolmaker,who was trained by my Father and worked with him for over 25 years,and was working in the trade for 44 years.

 

You are the master my Friend.

Keith

 

Keith.

[wefalck]

@bear, I must say, you rather embarrass me with your praise   I gather, a professional mechanic would throw up his hands into the air seeing me doing things, being just a self-taught amateur. Actually, collecting old machine tools and their restoration developed into a hobby of its own: http://www.maritima-et-mechanika.org/tools/toolsmain.html

 

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Back to the subject ….

 

Rack-and-pinion drive for training the gun

 

The gun was trained by pinion acting on a circular rack. The pinion was driven from under deck by a sets of gears and a couple of cranks manned by a number of sailors. The chief gunner was able to connect and disconnect the drive with levers from his aiming-stand behind the gun.

I set up my hand-shaper (http://www.wefalck.eu/mm/tools/shaper/shapers.html) for cutting the rack teeth, but had to throw away the first two attempts because of the poor material and because - again against better knowledge - I did not lock the traverse slide when cutting. The table was removed from the shaper and the home-made dividing head bolted on instead. For lack of a proper tool grinder (another project now in hand) I hand-ground a cutter for the rack teeth (0.1 mm at the bottom) from a rod of high-speed steel. For holding this tool-bit in the shaper, an old lantern-style tool holder from the watch lathe came very handy. The unwanted parts of the ring were cut away on the shaper using ordinary left and right hand lathe tools. Finally the necessary sections were trimmed off with a fine saw blade on the lathe's sawing table.

 

Hand-shaper set-up for cutting the toothed rack

 

Cutting the toothed rack with a specially ground tool

 

Cutting away the unwanted part of the ring with an ordinary tool

 

Rails and rack provisionally in their place inside the barbette

 

 

To be continued ...

[wefalck]

And the show goes on ...

 

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The gun barrel and lock

Turning the barrel

Because there will various visible areas of bare metal, the material of the original, that is steel, was chosen.  A piece of round bar was faced, centred and rough drilled for the bore. This hole served as a protective counter bore for the tailstock centre during the following turning operations. In order to get a good finish the automatic longitudinal feed for the lathe was set up with the change gears. Unfortunately the minimum feed per revolution on the watchmaking lathe is still too high to get a 'mirror' finish. One day I have to construct some sort of reduction gear. The outer part of the barrel has a slight taper (1 degree included angle) and the top-slide was off-set accordingly for this operation.

 

Facing and centring a piece of steel rod for the gun barrel

 

Rough drilling of the gun barrel

 

Turning the barrel using the automatic fine feed

 

Taper-turning with slide rest off-set

 

For rounding off the ends of the rings the lathe’s hand tool rest came to good use. The work was finished off with fine wet-and-dry paper (remember to cover ways!) and steel wool. The bore was bored to diameter using the slide-rest and a micro-boring tool. I had originally envisaged to also show the rifling, but a quick calculation told me that for a 1 mm bore and 72 rifled fields I would need a tool edge tha is just over 0.04 mm wide ...

 

Rounding the 'rings' using a hand turning rest

 

Boring the barrel using a micro boring tool

 

To be continued ...

[druxey]

Nice mini-tutorial, Wefalck.

[kees de mol]

Very impressing metalwork. It inspires me to make more work of my detail-work on my ship!

 

Regards, Kees

[harvey1847]

Hello Wefalk!

 

I have read your entire log till now, took me about an hour or more and one thing is for sure...

 

 

ii) I like the challenge of working at a small scale, trying to pack-in us much detail as others may do at twice the size;

 

Excellent log!

 

 

Daniel.

[wefalck]

Thanks, gentlemen, for the encouraging comments 

 

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Milling the trunnion seats and the lock

For drilling holes for the trunnions and milling the seat of the lock the diving head was set up on the slide-rest. I could have done this operation on the milling machine, but on the lathe the dividing head (http://www.maritima-et-mechanika.org/tools/dividinghead/dividinghead.html) is centred automatically. The outer end of the barrel was supported by the arm with an appropriate centre fitted. The resulting shape from the milling operation looks like a keyhole, but something like a mushroom shape with sharp edges is required. This was achieved by hand filing.

 

Set-up showing for milling the seat for the lock

 

Close-up of the milling operation in the dividing head with support

 

Working drawing and files used to finish the lock seat

 

For the next operation the set-up had to be transferred to the mill anyway: milling the seats for the square trunnions. The trunnions merge in a concave curve with the barrel. The trunnions were turned up on the lathe as disk with two round stubs protruding from either end. In the dividing head on the mill the disk was milled square to the size of the seat (or rather the other way round). These parts then were soft-soldered to the barrel. Back on the mill the concave curves of the square part of the trunnion were milled using a miniature ball-head cutter, rotating the barrel in the dividing head.

 

Milling the square part of the trunnions

 

Milling the seat for the trunnions

 

Trying the trunnion

 

Milling the concave transition between trunnion and barrel

 

Aiming a gun in these days was a rather primitive affair, using just simple sights. The sights (two of them on either side of the barrel) consisted essentially of a round bar with a sliding rod to give the elevation. The beads (mounted near the trunnions) were observed through a ring of inverted U-shape on top of the rod. The bar was screwed into a notch in the barrel. Now, drilling into a round at a tangent is nearly impossible without deflection and breaking the drill (0.3 mm!). Therefore, I ground flat a broken drill bit to make a make-shift micro-mill and sunk a start hole. This was finished with an ordinary drill.

 

Milling the seat for the sights

 

Drilling the seats for the sights

 

To be continued ...

[wefalck]

Lock for the 30,5 cm gun

 

The next thing to be tackled was the lock piece or ‘wedge’. This 'wedge' has a rather complex shape with a flat front, but a round back and various recesses and cut-outs. I decided it would be best to undertake most of the machining operations while it is still attached to some (round) material that can be easily held in a collet. The round back was milled in an upright collet holder on my mill's rotary table after the various coaxial holes had been drilled and the flat sides milled, all in the same set-up. For machining the other recesses the piece had to transferred to the diving head on the mill.

 

Round-milling  the lock piece in an upright collet-holder on the rotary table

 

Cutting off the finished lock piece

 

The most time consuming part turned out to be the cover piece for the lock, which in the prototype was fastened by five hexagonal head bolts. It holds the moving and locking screws in their place. It took me four tries before I produced a half-way satisfactory piece. Soldering the microscopic bolts (0.4 mm head diameter) in place got me quite a few grey hairs. Finally a fake locking screw was turned up and the moving screw, which moves the lock in and out, was faked from a couple of drilled-together 0.1 mm copper wires, covered in a thin layer of solder to make them look like steel.

 

Milling square and hexagonal bolts

 

Facing the locking screw in special protective brass collet

 

The large re-enforcement ring for the barrel was also turned up and two holes drilled into it for seating the rack quadrant that forms part of the elevating gear. In fact, I had cheated a bit, when drilling/milling the lock seat: the front of the hole should have been flat, which is difficult to machine; so I continued the elongated hole under the re-enforcement ring, which was made as a separate part and slipped over the barrel.

The various parts of the lock were assembled using lacquer and cyanoacrylate glue.

 

 

 

The (almost) finished gun barrel with its lock (toothpick for scale)

 

To be continued ...

[druxey]

Brilliant work, Wefalck. Your toothpick will gain mythical status like another miniature model maker's Tic Tac.

Edited February 28, 2015 by druxey

[mtaylor]

Holy cow.... Here I've been thinking the gun was bigger....  Beautiful work, Wefalck

[Omega1234]

Holy cow.... Here I've been thinking the gun was bigger....  Beautiful work, Wefalck

 

 

...that's exactly what I was thinking, too!

[amateur]

Wouldn't surprise me if it was fully funtional

 

Jan

[wefalck]

… don't have a gun license 

 

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The upper gun carriage

 

Based on the profile drawings from (http://www.dreadnoughtproject.org)

 

Part view of the drawings for the photo-etched upper carriage cheeks

 

Surface etched cheeks for the upper carriage

 

Filler and covering pieces laid out for soldering

 

Assembled cheeks and ties laid out

 

A core for the cheeks was sawn from 0.8 mm brass sheet and the etched covers soldered on. Then 'rivetted angle-irons', from etched parts were soldered on. These are connected by tie-plates. The frame of the upper carriage is also strengthend by horizontal ties. These are composites from several etched parts in order to show the rivetting. The horizontal ties were soldered to the side pieces, while the bulkhead-like ties were glued in because it would have been to difficult and risky to bring the heat for soldering at the right places. The covers for the trunnion-bearings were bent from an etched part and soldered together.

 

Assembled upper gun carriage from the rear

 

Assembled upper gun carriage from the front

 

The upper carriage was further kitted-out with wheels. The front and rear rollers were turned from steel to give them a real 'steel' appearance. On the prototype the rear rollers sit in excentric bearings that allows them to be brought into to contact with the rails on the lower carriage: when being fired the upper carriage slides back on these rails, the rollers allow it to roll back into the firing position.

 

Carriage with the barrel in place. Note the trunnion bearings cover (not yet trimmed to length)

 

 

Added the rollers plus the sockets aft for the lever that is used to turn the excentric bearings of the rear rollers

 

(Sorry, replaced the toothpick with a match - normal size not the large fire-place one   )

 

To be continued ...

[Mirabell61]

beautiful work Wefalck,

 

the gun and ist carriage looks very realistic....

 

Nils

[druxey]

Impressive work at any scale, never mind so small!

[allanyed]

Wefalck

 

Well made and well documented/photographed for any of us that might be so foolish as to want to build something similar at such a small scale.

 

Allan

[Omega1234]

Amazing!!

[Jason]

Wow!  Superlative work.

[amateur]

Next he will show us that it is fully functional

Although it is on a centimeter-scaled mat, and there is one huge match-stick in front of it,

my mind is still struggling with the size of this gun....

 

Jan

[Matle]

As to the scale: I chose the 1:160 scale really for three reasons: i) I don't have the space to keep large models and I don't like to give my models away, once completed; ii) I like the challenge of working at a small scale, trying to pack-in us much detail as others may do at twice the size; iii) this is the model-railway N-scale, so you can crew water-line models easily.

 

Bolding mine: I'd be more than happy to be able to pack in these kind of details on twice the size...    Stunning to say the least! I found your log searching for tips on metal working, and now I'm giving up on my hand tools and thinking which machines to buy (and where to buy the skills needed to use them ). 

 

The home-made photo-etch has fantastically well-defined edges, any change of sharing your procedure or a link to similar resources? Especially curious how you managed the profiles/variable depth (rivets, ridges).

[wefalck]

Thanks for the praise to all 

 

I think there are numerous tutorials on the Web on photoetching, Matie. I am using pre-prepared brass sheets available from various vendors. In order to keep things simple I work with small frets only and use small vessels, such as plastic film containers, for the processes. Compared to professional foam-etched parts, my shop-products are not that well-defined at all. It is not so easy to agitate the parts in the etching solution sufficiently uniformly. In fact, I produced probably two bad parts for every good one. In the end I picked the best parts from all tries.

 

Surface etching (e.g. rivets) is simple, you just need two different masks for both sides. As you can see from the pictures in the post above, one mask just covers the areas not to be etched-away, namely the rivets and other raised features. 

[wefalck]

Thanks for the 'likes'   I hope that the project will continue in the not too distant future. I have become distracted by a couple of machine-tool building projects (http://modelshipworld.com/index.php/topic/10278-shop-made-filing-machine/ and http://modelshipworld.com/index.php/topic/13268-a-lorch-micro-mill-that-never-was/) that in turn were prompted by some machining needs for exactly this project. Things may go slow, however, as I will have a heavy professional travelling schedule until the end of the year

Edited September 8, 2016 by wefalck

[BANYAN]

Some how I missed this Eberhard; extraordinary work!  I am impressed with that micro-machining.  Don't want to knock up a set of those cable stoppers etc in 1/72 scale huh?  

 

cheers

 

Pat