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Comments
Looking great - as usual.
Respectfully,
John
Karl.A
Dave
Phew … sure glad the move is over… all went well and we’re now comfortably set in our new house. As for the basement, I’ve managed to keep most of the railroad and shop areas clear. Still working out the layout plans, but at least now I know exactly the amount of room I have (pic’s to follow…)
Thanks Jerry, Dave, Mary, John, Brett and Karl, much appreciated. James, I was born in Vancouver (Trout Lake area in east Van), moved to Montreal 20 years ago (work related). Spent a lot of time at the RR club in the CN station (apparently the club is long gone now).
Now for some catching up on the build progress …
Started the ship just before moving, so here’s how its gone so far. First, staining the various keel and rib components:
Stained the keel with Floquil Roof Brown (somehow the pic shows PS Roof Brown … mixed up the bottles when setting up for the
pic….).
The keel consists of a chip board middle with wood sides. Glue applied with brush:
Once the keel was dry, moved onto trimming the keel with stained strip wood (and staining the cut ends).
The curved areas of the keel required softening of the strip wood by soaking in rubbing alcohol. The longer the soaking the softer the wood (and easier to bend), of course I broke a few pieces in the process of bending.
…and finally trimming the edges:
Next will be finishing off the keel prep and then onto the ships ribs.
'til Next
Paul
John
The sequential pics are superb as always and much appreciated.
The colouring looks good and I cant wait to see the ribbing in place, the boat area
is a whole kit by itself, looking forward to what you do with it.
Karl.A
Glad the move went well. Look forward to the pics.
Thanks Karl and Wes, I’m much more comfortable in the new digs … just need to get a coffee pot in the shop (beer fridge and freezer are already in the storage area).
More pics to follow of the rest of the basement once I get it straightened out.
As for the ship, here’s a few catch-up picks just prior to packing my work bench in the old house. On an aside … I diligently packed all of my computer desk (including desk-top power cords, wires, wall-warts etc.), but to no avail upon un-packing the wall-wort for the hard disk that I store all the pic’s in was not there…and of course it’s a special wall-wort. Took a couple of weeks to order but I finally got it back in operation. As for the desk-top, needed to install a Wi-Fi connection (now that I’m in the basement and the router is in the kitchen). Thought it would be easy to install a USB Wi-Fi connection, not so … had to update Windows XP, increase the RAM (went overboard to 8GB for when I Install Windows7), after which the LinkSys USB worked…. Ughh.
Ok, back to the ship, continuing adding strip wood to the keel:
End result:
The final outer stripping required bending of the pieces, achieved with soaking in Isopro alcohol. I found about 5 minutes did the trick, to soon and the wood snaps (especially on the outside corners).
Onto staining of the ribs, I used a mixture of the usual 408.3 (as you can see I’m running low), 704.7 (Grey) and Golden Ochre.
Note: the holder on the left is the center pieces for the ribs, no need staining these, they’ll be covered up.
The last pic was very helpful down the road when I arrived at adding the bracing …each rib center piece has a number etched in it, but once the outer pieces are glued on these numbers disappear (and there’s no numbers on the carrier sheet). Luckily, with this photo I was able to number the carrier sheet in order to make it easier to identify and cut the rib bracing. Of course the reduced pixel count requirement for the forum renders these numbers blurred (but the original 5MB pic shows them perfectly).
Now for the task of gluing them all together, just a couple of pic’s showing the set-up so as to not loose track of the pieces (ie keep them on the carrier).
Next I’ll be setting up the Keel for ribbing and then onto rib bracing … exciting times (I think)…
'til Next
Paul
Karl.A
A while back it hit me about another great feature in Brett's kits. There are many brands and choices of paper shingles on the market, but nothing jumps out at you more than when the cut between shingles is not long enough. If not cut properly, when the strips are overlapped it is very obvious they are not separate shingles.
I think you can see here what I am talking about. If you look for this you will see a lot of otherwise good modeling flawed by this little detail.
John Elwood
Your work is always crisp and precise! Continues to look great! Is the finish line in sight or do you have a ways to go yet?
What about the Expo...you planning on going?
Bill
Paul
Karl.A
I forgot to mention this in my last post, in the shop pic’s there’s a big piece of bamboo (meant for a kitchen counter or such, weighs about a hundred pounds) which will be used to make a second work bench in the shop …more space and I’ll be able to get twice as much done…(?)
Moving right along with the ship build, the next few pics were with LED lighting on the work bench (prior to my installing the Halogen spots on the ceiling). I could’ve adjusted the cameras white balance but I knew I’d be changing the lights to halogen. The LED’s are on when I’m working on non-color related RR stuff (lights up the back of the bench nicely).
Test fitting the keel to the template, planning on gluing the keel supports to wax paper on top of the template:
Taping the the wax and template down:
Glueing (Weldbond) the keel supports to the wax paper, the middle of the supports were marked to help align the keel.
Added blocks and shims (2 part epoxy) to keep the keel level (all done by eye):
Glued the keel (2 part expoxy) to the supports and weighted down.
Finally turned off the LED’s (just the halogen’s on):
The first rib glued (Weldbond) and held in place. Note the tweezers and strip-wood as a gauge for getting the rib height even on both sides.
Next I'll be finishing the ribs and cross pawls (bracing for the non-nautically inclined, as my friend John Elwood has pointed out on the other forum) and then it's onto the scaffold supports.
'til Next
Paul
Superb update as usual, I shall comment further when I view your work on a better screen.
Karl.A
Looking great. Now it is beginning to look really interesting. Your new shop is well lit and spacious. I am interested to see what you use for legs on the new table.
John
Do you use the LEDs as lighting for your work bench?
Thanks Karl, John, Marty and Wes (I use the LED’s most of the time when I’m working on my electronics projects/Fast Track turnouts and such, but turn them off when I’m modeling (and picture taking), you really need to get the LED color temp right for modeling).
On an aside, finished the new work bench in the shop, just need to add lighting and it’s ready to go (John: the legs were made from cubicle framing (scrap) that we use at work for our excitation systems, it’s very sturdy and easy to cut with a hack-saw. The different pieces are attached with metal angle braces that are screwed into holes (self-taping) in the frame). Now I’ll able to roll my old work bench into the center of the room while I work on the scenery aspect of the Shipyard and still have a work space for all the details.
As for the Shipyard, the ship construction continues, here’s how I’ve aligned and attached the ribs (cross pauls) using tweezers and a strip wood height gauge:
… gotta stay inspired…
The length of the cross pawls (rib bracing) required knowing the corresponding place in the laser cut sheet the crass pawl came from, but this information is lost once the pawls are removed from the sheet. Luckily past photos allowed me to number the pawls correctly:
Staining of the cross pawls … at the time I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the coloring of the wood, I just went by eye. In hind-sight, I should have made the keel and pawls appear as new wood and all the rest (supports/scaffolding) as aged and worn, but there’s noturning back now…we’ll see how it pans out.
That’s it for now, you need to let these first two pawls really dry before attempting to put the remaining pawls in (the first two will be actingas a support for aligning the remaining braces).
Once the ship frame is complete it’s back to the dock for piling and then onto planting the ship on the diorama … getting close to working on the scenery (an aspect of modeling I find the most daunting…).
For those down south, have a Happy Thanksgiving and enjoy the turkey and football games.
'til Next
Paul
Thank you for commenting on your work bench legs for me. The final product looks excellent. Additionally, it is hard to believe we are looking at the former concrete basement wall of a few months ago!
I am really excited to see you starting the ship. You sure have the ribs well aligned. It looks really good. I am looking very much forward to reaching that point. I own three massive such kits from The Lauck Street Shipyard that I have not yet had sufficient courage to begin. In each of them, the ribs generally consist of nine separate pieces, sistered together as done in the real world. They are admiralty style.
I'm looking forward to your continuing progress.
Respectfully,
John
Thanks John, glad you're following along. I’m almost ready to transfer my modeling tools and mat to the new bench to allow me to pull the old bench away from the wall so I’ll have access to all sides of the shipyard when I start the scenery aspect of the build (pic’s to follow…).
Continuing with the cross-pawls (rib braces), once the cross-pawl locations were identified and cut the bow and stern pawls were glued to the ribs.
Of course, I glued the bow pawl to the stern side of rib #1 …this was noticed quite quickly when I went to place the ¼” strip wood to align the pawls (not to hard to remove the first pawl and re-glue to the bow side).
Once the glue was dry, added the ¼” strip-wood in order to get the correct height for the subsequent pawls:
Gluing from both the bow and stern towards the center of the ship:
The completed pawls (spin shots):
…ok, enough spinning, onto the scaffold bracing. These were cut as per the template and glued to the corresponding ribs (but on the bow side of the rib), the height was done by eye.
Now onto the turn-table to make spinning easier:
... ok enough pic's, that's it for the ship building ... for now. Next will be piling and adding barnacles to the dock and then onto the scenery and placing (sinking) the ship into sculptamold…the sculptamold will probably do me in...
'til Next
Paul
Karl.A
Dave
John