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

[BANYAN]

Some very fiddly work nicely accomplished there Eberhard.

 

cheers

 

Pat

[Moab]

Wefalck; I visited the website for the lathes. It's amazing...Moab

[mbp521]

Wefalck,

 

This is just beautiful precision work you have going on here. I have been eyeballing a mini milling machine for several years now to try my hand at metalwork, but I just can’t seem to fit it in the budget. For now my mini wood lathe will have to do.

 

...but one day. 
 

-Brian

[Tony Hunt]

Nice work Wefalck. Ladders are so difficult, because of all the close parallel parts the eye can detect even the slightest imperfection. Yours look really good!

[wefalck]

Thank you very much for the kind words !

 

Regularity in the spacing of the steps was indeed one motivation for re-doing the stairs with the laser-cutter. Although milling the slots into the bakelite-paper can be done quite accurately, somewhow the assembly did not turn out as regular as I wished.

[wefalck]

Block-Making 1

 

The 1/160 scale from certain perspectives is rather inconvenient actually: too big to fake things and too small to do them properly due to practical limitations of tool sizes and materials dimensions.

Blocks at this scale would probably come in the range between 0.8 mm and 2 mm length. The latter would be a hefty 32 cm (or 13”) in real size, at least for smaller ships.

When I started dabbling with photo-etching in around 2007, I had the idea to fashion blocks from surface etched parts folded up and soldered together. As the need for blocks only arose now, I had never tried out the idea. Since then I got the laser-cutter and thought I might give the same principle a try, laminating the blocks from laser-cut pieces of paper. I am aware that larger blocks, build up from laser-cut wood pieces, are commercially available now.

My preoccupation was to produce blocks of the correct outside shape and through which the rope passes prototype fashion, i.e. to avoid the brick-like thingies from which the ropes sticks out vertically and then goes down with a sharp kink, as seen all too often on models.

 

*********************

 

Warning, the following text describes some dead ends without success - As aligning the tiny parts correctly would be the main challenge, I drew the pieces at their correct relative location into small frets of several blocks that would be laminated onto each other. Once the lacquer was dry, the blocks could be separated. As I needed various double-blocks for the boat-davits and the anchor-cranes, I started out immediately with that challenge, thinking that, once mastered, single blocks would be comparatively easy to make. In fact, due to the thicknes of the Canson-paper, I needed seven layers, one for the outer shell on each side, one in the middle separating the sheaves, and the sheaves made up from two layers each. While the lamination as such worked well, aligning the seven frets precisely enough did not work too well. It also proved impossible to sand the tiny paper blocks to shape and smooth enough. The main problem, however, was that somehow the hole for passing through the rope always got clogged up. Opening it up with a drill then invariably let to the distruction of the block.

After a dozen of tries with different variants of the laser-cut parts to facilitate alignment etc. I finally gave up that idea.

Next came several experiments with the classical methods of carving blocks from billets, but using styrene or acrylic glass, rather than wood. While both materials are easy to drill, they proved too soft for shaping the grooves etc. cleanly, particularly the styrene. Attempts to cut slots for the sheaves, then to glue on a bottom piece to close the slots, and to later insert turned sheaves failed also. It was impossible to keep the 0.2 mm wide and 0.8 mm high slots clean enough from glue and cleaning them out afterwards at this dimension is hardly possible. Using brass and soldering equally failed to produce the desired result.

 

**************************

 

Now comes the success story - In the end I resorted to my trusted bakelite. This material is hard and does not smear, but is much more brittle than the other materials. Drilling 0.2 mm holes is still quite easy and doesn’t strain the drills too much.

 

Drilling 0.2 mm holes into bakelite strips

 

I cut strips of the required width from a 1 mm sheet of bakelite to start with. The micro-mill then was used as a jig-borer and a row of holes drilled for a batch of blocks. Using a broken 0.2 mm drill, ground flat at the end, was then used as an end-mill to cut the grooves that simulate the slots for the sheaves.

 

Milling 0.2 mm slots into bakelite strips

 

A stereo-microscope helps to safely perform the machinining with 0.2 mm tooling

 

The profile of the blocks was roughly milled to shape using various cone-shaped burrs. The final shaping was done by first hand-filing with a diamond nail-file and then using a fine abrasive wheel in the hand-held drill.

 

Row of double-blocks ready to be separated

 

To separate the blocks, the strip was taken into a collet of the dividing head and the blocks were sliced off with a circular saw. To prevent them from disappearing into any black holes of the workshop, the strip was backed with some adhesive tape.

The sides of the block-shells were smoothed and shaped with the blocks clamped in a kind of special hand-held vice. This vice has brass insert jaws that are curved and stepped so as to clamp the block securely while working on it with an abrasive wheel.

 

A collection of blocks and the special pin-vice to hold them

 

 

A collection of blocks and 1 Euro-Cent coin for comparison

 

Two sizes of blocks of 2 mm and 1.6 mm length respectively

 

The blocks now have to be finished off with their external metal straps and hooks – another fiddly challenge ahead.

 

To be continued ....

 

Edited April 9, 2021 by wefalck

[druxey]

Amazing, Eberhard! Would a very small broach clear any clogged holes?

[wefalck]

Funny that you should mention this. One has too many tools and then forgets about them - particularly, when one is set on a particular process. When writing the text above, it occured to me that I just didn't think of the very fine watchmaking cutting and smoothing broaches I have. I have to try this on some leftover laser-cut blocks. However, it does not resolve the problem with the sanding. Perhaps one should soak the paper in CA, rather than lacquer - but I hate CA ...

[BANYAN]

Those blocks look great Eberhard, especially at the scale you are working.

 

cheers

 

Pat

[KeithAug]

Nice technique for the blocks Eberhard. The most rewarding part is finding a way of doing the seemingly impossible.

[wefalck]

Sorry for the belated thank you for your kind words !

 

*********************************************

 

Block-making 2

Somehow it seems to be always two steps ahead and then at least one step back … apart from the actual manufacturing problems, I somehow loose about 30% of the originally made blocks somewhere along the road. They jump of the tweezers and other tools … and the bakelite being light and elastic they jump far away and never seem to stay on the bench or in my apron …

 

I was not really entirely satisfied with the blocks I had turned out so far and tried out different variants of the above method over the past few weeks. Perhaps my improvised mill from a broken 0.2 mm drill was not sharp enough, anyway, the milled slots had a tendency to break out. I got myself from China (a lot cheaper than from European sources, where companies would have charged me for the shipping alone the amount of money that I paid for the item) a proper 0.2 mm end-mill, but the same happened. This is probably due to the fact that this kind of bakelite has a layered structure inherited from the paper that is used in its fabrication. Perhaps it would have been better to cut the block perpendicular to the layering.

 

Cutting the grooves for the copper-wire straps

 

I tried out a method that has been shown on various fora, namely saw cuts along the full length of the block to simulate the grooves for the sheave and then to drill a hole for the rope. The rest of the procedure was as above. 

 

Drilling the blocks with a 0.2 mm drill

 

A problem was also cutting off the blocks from the billet. Somehow my method was tedious and at least about one in five blocks ended up flying around the workshop to be never found again. Not very efficient. So, I built a tiny gadget for the saw table of my lathe along the lines of the cross-cutting slides used on table-saws. This clamps the billet and the cut off block securely during the cutting and allows to locate the saw-cut precisely.

 

 

 

A miniature cross-cutting slide for cutting off blocks from the billet

 

It is a piece of rectangular aluminium 8 mm x 6 mm into which a recess is milled at the bottom so that it fits over the saw table and is guided parallel to it. Then a step is milled into the front, over which a 6 mm x 6 mm brass angle fits to serve as down-hold. The angle is guided by two pins that have been hard-soldered into it. Two screws (I have added a second one since taking the pictures) push the angle down onto the workpiece. The saw slot was cut in situ with the 0.2 mm wide saw-blade that I am going to use with the gadget. Now I can cut off the blocks safely and quickly without the risk of losing them.

 

 

The cross-cutting slide used on the watchmakers lathe saw-table

 

After separating, the blocks are shaped and rounded off individually using an abrasive wheel in the handheld drill. Earlier attempts with a small homemade tumbler were not successful, as the blocks are too small, too light, to few and the material too hard. Doing the rounding off in the hand-held vice works quite well.

 

All the previous methods were aimed to efficiently round off the entrance to the borehole in order to simulate the sheave and thus to make the rope enter and leave tangentially to the sheave. In order to achieve this now, the rounding-off has to be done manually. Not so easy as the bore is only 0.2 mm. For diameters above 0.25 mm I purchased a diamond-studded round fret-saw blade, but this is the smallest diameter on the market. After some head-scratching I fashioned a micro-chisel from a broken fretsaw-blade, which is held in a pin-vice for the time being (have to make a graver handle). With the chisel the groove is rounded into the bore, while the rough block is held in the hand-vice that I have adapted for the purpose.

 

The groove for the ‘iron’ straps were filed with a miniature (1 mm x 1 mm x 1mm) triangular file. 

 

Brass insert-jaws in the hand-vice, fashioned to hold blocks during manipulations 

 

The next challenge was the external strapping with a hook at the end. In theory, the straps are strips of flat iron bar. While it was possible to flatten the copper wire that I was going to use in controlled way, the material broke easily and it was difficult to place the flat sections before twisting the ends together to form the hooks. Therefore, a practical concession needed to be made and the straps were going to be round. The next issue was to hold the block while attaching the strap. I made a special clamp from Novotex for the third-hand, but it did not hold the block securely enough. In the end it occurred to me that also the hand-held vice could be used, while clamping it into a larger vice. Still the overall operation is very delicate.

 

Finally, the tail end of the strap is cautiously bent into a hook. However, the copper wire is too soft to serve as a hook and also the structure of the two twisted ends is too obvious. Therefore, the hook was covered in a drop of soft-solder, which stiffens it and covers up to some extent the twisted structure. In addition, the back of the hook was somewhat flattened to better simulate the shape of a real hook.

 

Overall, this is turned out to be a very time-consuming procedure and I reckon, that it takes me upward of an hour per block, adding up all the different steps, notwithstanding that they are made in small batches. That’s ok for a small ship, but would be out of question for a larger sailing ship. 

 

I am still not entirely happy with the fact that the blocks and in particular the hooks are not as uniform as I would have wished them to be.

 

The lighter 2 mm blocks and the darker 1.6 mm long double blocks (they will be eventually all painted white)

 

To be continued ....

Edited July 11, 2021 by wefalck

[RichardG]

I very much like the cross-cutting slide.

[Bedford]

It's the small details that take the most effort, just remember to look at them from a few feet away. The fact that they are that good at that scale is very impressive.

 

I think we all know the feeling of a tiny piece we've labored over disappearing into the abyss just as it's finished.

[mcb]

Hello Wefalck,

 Those blocks look great.  I cannot imagine making them any smaller.

So you must have a jeweler's apron.  I should have gotten one of those years ago. 

 

Well done.

MCB

[FriedClams]

Just catching up Wefalck.  Wonderful work on impossibly small components.  Great stuff.

 

Gary

[KeithAug]

Beautiful work on the blocks Eberhard - just thinking about them hurts my eyes. I liked the lathe saw attachment - i may do something similar one day.

[wefalck]

Thanks (belatedly) for the kind comments above and the thumbs-up !

 

********************

 

Some post-summer progress

 

It is quite amazing, how time passes – more than three months since the last up-date ! OK, I have been in sort of semi-vacation for six weeks in Spain, but then money-earning work seriously got into my way.

 

Normally, I leave painting as much as possible to the very end, just before the assembly stage. This avoids damage to the paintwork by handling the model or the problem of removing dust from it. However, I felt that the project had progressed to a point, where I wanted to see how everything comes together. This also boosts the motivation, rather getting lost in fabricating endlessly little pieces.

 

So, the model was given a good cleaning to remove dust, grease etc. The sequence of colours had to be carefully considered in order to work from the light ones to the dark ones. I also wanted to work inside out, because in this way masking was facilitated.

 

Photograph of 1876 showing quite clearly the livery of SMS WESPE at the time.

 

The whole paint-work is done with acrylics from Vallejo (marketed here in France under the brand ‘Prince August’) and Schmincke (a German manufacturer).

 

Hence, I started with the white of the inside of the casemate, the bulwark and the walls of the deckhouse, which was spray-painted with the airbrush. Unfortunately, I had some trouble with the airbrush that had not been used for a while. Apparently, some paint had accumulated in the nozzle from insufficient cleaning over time. This particularly affected the white, which seems to have comparatively bigger pigment particles and is more difficult to spray anyway. Due to the various bits and pieces added to the bulwark etc., it is virtually impossible to rub down the paint and begin afresh … so the white paintwork is not as good as I had hoped for …

 

 

The decks were not originally laid in wood (with the exception of the quarter deck and the floor of the casemate) or covered in linoleum at that time. They appear to have been painted with a mixture of tar and black oil-paint, with sand mixed into to provide a non-slip surface. I assumed that this mixture would attain a dark greyish colour with time due to weathering, similar to older tarmac. Prince August 996 (German ‘Panzergrau’ - tank-grey) seemed to be a suitable choice. All the deck areas were sprayed white together with the other parts to give a better key for hand-brushing. I began with painting the kicking-strips and water-ways between the bulwark stanchions and then progressed to several coats on the deck areas. All this painting was done by brush, as it would have been virtually impossible to mask-off the bulwark.

 

 

The paint-schemes of the Prussian and then Imperial German Navy ships are reasonably well known for the years after 1867, as the ordinances were published in official gazettes that have survived. For the first couple of service years of SMS WESPE, the 1874 ordinance paint-scheme would have been applicable. This specifies that hulls below the waterline were to be red and above black, with a white boot-topping; another white strip was to be painted below the main rails; all ginger-bread work in white as well as all superstructures and deck-houses, ventilators, etc. Funnels and masts were to be painted yellow (buff). Photographic evidence indicates that there were some variations to this scheme for SMS WESPE, but I will discuss these, when I come to describe the painting of respective parts.

 

First, the narrow visible part of the underwater hull was painted in Vallejo 71.269 (red RAL 3000). This area was then masked off with Tamiya masking tape. The inside of the hull was also masked and the hull sprayed black.

 

 

The bulwark-rail appears to have been varnished wood. It was first given a coat of Prince August 77 (bois-wood), followed by a light wash of 834 (bois transparent), which has a slightly lighter tone, followed by another light wash of Vallejo 71.074 (beige). Finally, a very light wash of Vallejo (transparent orange) was applied, which gives the wood a deep, warm tint. 

 

The images above show the ‘raw’ paintwork. It still needs to be touched up and items such as the scrollwork needs to be refined. Eventually, there will be also a light weathering and ‘griming’ with pastels – the idea is to just show the effects of being in use, but with good maintenance.

 

To be continued ....

[Keith Black]

 Eberhard, the paint looks great! I too have more problems with white paint than any other color. 

[druxey]

Good to see you back in action, Eberhard!

[Roger Pellett]

Eberhard,

 

Your paint job looks good to me!  It’s good to se you making progress again.

 

Roger

[BANYAN]

Welcome back Eberhard; hopefully you had a great vacation.  The paint work is looking grand!  I look forward to the finished job with light weathering etc applied.

 

cheers

 

Pat

[mtaylor]

Beautiful paint work, Eberhard.

[KeithAug]

Remarkably crisp lines on the edge of the hand painted deck Eberhard. Not sure how you achieved that?

[wefalck]

Thanks to all for their kind comments and 'tumbs-up'.

 

@KeithAug: well, if you look really close up, you would see that it is actually not so crisp. Painting on a threedimensional surface has advantages, but also a lot of traps.

In fact, on the prototype there was an angle-iron running around the edge of the deck, to which the bulwark was rivetted. I simulated the upright leg of the angle-iron by impressing rivetts into some self-adhesive aluminium foil that I cut into strips and then ran around the inside of the bulwark. The edge of that was not as crisp as I had wished for, but really saw that only during the painting. I will not do this again.

This upright leg was painted black/grey on the prototype, forming a sort of waterway/kicking strip. Due to the thickness of the material it is not so easy to decide where the separation between the colours should be and paint has the tendency to creep into corners. It required touching up in both ways, the grey as well as the white, until I had a reasonably clean line.

My hand is also not so steady. But I have the model mounted on a foot on which I can incline it to near vertical, which makes access easier. I used a flat hair brush to approach the kicking-strip - and was holding my breath ...

[KeithAug]

On 10/17/2021 at 10:51 AM, wefalck said:

if you look really close up, you would see that it is actually not so crisp.

Eberhard - You must have much better eyes than I do.

Edited October 19, 2021 by KeithAug

[mbp521]

Beautiful paint job! Very clean lines. I’m with Keith on this one, you must have excellent eyesight to see any imperfections. 
 

-Brian

[Bedford]

We are our own worst critics

[wefalck]

That's probably true, Bedford, but only that way we improve

 

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More Paintwork

 

According to the 1874 ordinance on paintwork, the ships were to have a white boot-topping stripe and a somewhat narrower white stripe just below the main rail. This scheme is clearly visible on the old photograph shown in the previous post. At that time also all the scroll-work was to be painted in a sober white, rather than the ochre/gold of later paint-schemes.

 

 

It occurred to me that the easiest way to apply the white stripes on such a small model would be to cut narrow strips of white decal sheet and to place them appropriately. However, the latter part resulted in a lot of stress, fumbling and cursing. These long, narrow strips needed a lot of coercing and touching up with white acrylic in places. As I do not work with decals very often these days, I did not have any decal-softener to hand, which might have made this operation somewhat easier. In the end, the strips had to fixed additionally by infiltrating dilute satin varnish underneath them with a brush. In order to blend everything together, the hull then was given a coat of satin varnish. Perhaps the Prince August Air varnish was too viscous still for the air-brush, but when sprayed on it turned out rather matt and made the hull grey! Brushing on another thin layer got me over the shock moment.

 

 

Perhaps it would have been easier to air-brush everything in white and then cut a narrow strip of Tamiya masking tape to mask the area of the white stripes and also to mask strategically for painting the hull in red and black …

 

The scroll-work at the bow and stern then was picked out in white acrylics using a spotter brush and a (reasonably) steady hand.

 

Wooden decking for the barbette and the forecastle.

 

I also painted the only two pieces of wood decking on this ship, namely that on the forecastle with the distinct radial plank pattern (to minimise blast damage from the heavy gun) and within the barbette. The planks had been engraved a long time ago already with a hand-graver. The pieces were given a base coat of Prince August 77 (bois-wood) with the air-brush. This was followed by a light wash of 834 (bois transparent), which has a slightly lighter tone, applied with a flat hair-brush. Some planks were given another light wash of Vallejo 71.074 (beige) with a small brush. The planks then were followed with 0.05 mm black pigmented ‘fine-liner’. The excess was immediately wiped off with a clean finger-tip. In this way a narrow to scale seam remains.

 

 

Forecastle put into place temporarily.

 

 

To be continued ....

[Keith Black]

 Eberhard, everything is so beautifully executed but the forecastle decking is especially stunning and all at 1:160. 

[Roger Pellett]

Beautiful work!