Ex-FAAWAFU Posted December 27, 2015 Author Share Posted December 27, 2015 More fine work.... Ref cage aerials are you aware of the following https://www.whiteensignmodels.com/p/WEM+1700+1200+Cage+Aerial+Spreaders+PE+7102/15239/#.VoA8w_8rHIU Might help Kev I am, and I have a set. Thanks! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hendie Posted December 27, 2015 Share Posted December 27, 2015 this just keeps getting better and better. The soldering work is excellent and really takes the work to another level. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ex-FAAWAFU Posted January 1, 2016 Author Share Posted January 1, 2016 Sometimes working in this scale can frustrate the hell out of you. I haven't done any modelling over the past few days because of some of that real life stuff. So when I sat down today it was with a sense of anticipation. I am trying to build that cage thing, remember (also remember that it is 0.2mm rod, and the entire structure is about the size of my little fingernail). When you last saw it the two uprights were in place already attached to the base, but I soon removed them again because I couldn't find a sensible way of attaching the soldered frame to the top. Anyway, I managed to get the rear (spooling) frame soldered nicely, and got the main piece to this stage: Great; all that's now required is to fix it in place.... so, having prepared the glue, I pick it up in my tweezers... PING! I have searched high and low for about 15 minutes, and have now decided that the damn thing is destined never to be seen again; the carpet monster has had his new year snack. Back to Square 1! Still, at least I know the method works... 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ex-FAAWAFU Posted January 1, 2016 Author Share Posted January 1, 2016 Right, let's try again! I have decided that the most stable way to fit this it to solder the two frames (because they are the ones that will eventually have cage aerials attached, so need some structural strength), and then just glue the two joining cross-pieces in to join it all up. So here we are with the sloping frame now glued in place, and the front frame soldered in the foreground. Pencil included to give the iPhone something to focus on, and to give you some idea of scale. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ex-FAAWAFU Posted January 1, 2016 Author Share Posted January 1, 2016 ...and now the two frames in place; I will add the cross pieces tomorrow with Gator. Happy New Year to everyone, including the Carpet Monster! Crispin 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jockster Posted January 1, 2016 Share Posted January 1, 2016 Very tidy Crisp, fiddly too by the looks of it. Nice work and happy new year to you too! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hendie Posted January 1, 2016 Share Posted January 1, 2016 Probably a bit late now but for those two frames - I might have been tempted to try and make each one out of a single piece of rod.... take a length of rod and gently apply pressure with the snips - just enough to indent it. You now have a weak spot which should bend almost to a right angle. Be careful to ensure that both indentations lie in the same plane as that is the way the wire will want to bend. A couple of gentle squeezes and you might be able to get both front and rear frame that way - then all you have to do is join them with two pieces of wire laid on top ... with the caveat that every time I have tried that, the wire has snapped but it's worth a try 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sgeek Posted January 1, 2016 Share Posted January 1, 2016 Adrift, I apologise. Are these of any use to you? Afraid they are only photos taken on my iPhone from album photos. These were taken from Stbd. This one from Port side fm the signal deck/bridge roof. Ignore the colour one. That is positioned abaft the fwd funnel on the port side of the island (mirror on the stbd side) You are correct that they are the HF aerial cages. The 2 cages came down off the Fore mast and merged at the splitter plate (Y shaped piece of metal). You can see the join at the base of the middle photo. the long white blob was a ribbed glass insulator. The inside of the circular bit in the middle was a thin fibreglass tube that housed the connector for the HF aerial mount. Looked a bit like the end of a overhead power cable supporting insulator (mushroom shaped) there was a copper strop running from above the insulator to the top of the mushroom which somehow allowed the Sparkers in the MCO to do electrickery and talk to the otherside of the world ( I was a bunting if you remember :-)) The main body of the aerial mounting was normally a rectangular box. It was mounted on shock mountings if I remember correctly (the spindly things in your plan). In my photo you can see a set of boxes coming from the rear.That is the cable run where the wiring ran into the hull. Sorry I have nothing clearer. For timelines I was on there '88 to '91. The BW phots were taken alongside in Hamburg during floodlight ship. If you were on there at the same time we had a Greenpeace barge moored inboard of us that was using the hull for slideshows :-). I think that was '89 or '90. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Martian Posted January 2, 2016 Share Posted January 2, 2016 Nice work! you realise of course that the original part will be sicked up by the carpet monster the moment you have irretrievably glued the final cross piece in place. Martin PS: You must be the only modeller in the universe who wants the carpet monster to have a happy new year! If I listed just a few of the things I would like to do to the species, the mods would be jumping all over me. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ex-FAAWAFU Posted January 2, 2016 Author Share Posted January 2, 2016 Nice work! you realise of course that the original part will be sicked up by the carpet monster the moment you have irretrievably glued the final cross piece in place. Martin PS: You must be the only modeller in the universe who wants the carpet monster to have a happy new year! If I listed just a few of the things I would like to do to the species, the mods would be jumping all over me. Of course it will be found about 30 seconds too late; it's the Law. If one does not appease the Gods of Carpet, they demand yet more sacrifices. We hear and we obey. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ex-FAAWAFU Posted January 2, 2016 Author Share Posted January 2, 2016 Adrift, I apologise. Are these of any use to you? Afraid they are only photos taken on my iPhone from album photos. These were taken from Stbd. This one from Port side fm the signal deck/bridge roof. Ignore the colour one. That is positioned abaft the fwd funnel on the port side of the island (mirror on the stbd side) You are correct that they are the HF aerial cages. The 2 cages came down off the Fore mast and merged at the splitter plate (Y shaped piece of metal). You can see the join at the base of the middle photo. the long white blob was a ribbed glass insulator. The inside of the circular bit in the middle was a thin fibreglass tube that housed the connector for the HF aerial mount. Looked a bit like the end of a overhead power cable supporting insulator (mushroom shaped) there was a copper strop running from above the insulator to the top of the mushroom which somehow allowed the Sparkers in the MCO to do electrickery and talk to the otherside of the world ( I was a bunting if you remember :-)) The main body of the aerial mounting was normally a rectangular box. It was mounted on shock mountings if I remember correctly (the spindly things in your plan). In my photo you can see a set of boxes coming from the rear.That is the cable run where the wiring ran into the hull. Sorry I have nothing clearer. For timelines I was on there '88 to '91. The BW phots were taken alongside in Hamburg during floodlight ship. If you were on there at the same time we had a Greenpeace barge moored inboard of us that was using the hull for slideshows :-). I think that was '89 or '90. Slightly adrift, maybe (them as is keen gets fell in previous)... but 100% forgiven for the mine of information that you bring. Much of it confirms what I had guessed and/or inferred from the sandy references I had, but it is still incredibly useful. It actually confirms my belief that the guy who drew the Jacobin plans must have had access to some serious info and/or pictures that are not widely available now, because he drew everything that you described - it's not his fault that in places you need to know exactly what it is before you can fully interpret his drawings! And, as is the way with these things, the colour photo that you threw in almost as an afterthought (and told me to ignore!) gives the best picture I have yet to see of that stumpy mast gizmo with the lumps and bumps in the foreground; I am pretty hazy about what that did, as well (ESM? Aerial for comms? But in both cases, why so low down on the ship?), but your photo shows it in about 300% more detail than anything else I have seen. It too disappears in later fits, along with the deckhouse it sat on (which suggests it might have been something to do with the Gollies). Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
perdu Posted January 2, 2016 Share Posted January 2, 2016 You're getting some serious accuracy done in ridiculously tiny scale kudos master Anyway, wot I woz gonna say (after have a very happy new year Crisp) is I reckon that when you finish the Cole's Crane 'your way' one of your naval cronies is certain to produce little snaps like the above colour one that would have made the scratch built one redundant . . . I remain your observant and obsequious ever present servant milor' Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sgeek Posted January 2, 2016 Share Posted January 2, 2016 You may have already found this site: http://arkroyal.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=11&Itemid=126 Just spent a period of skimming through the phots and there are some that may provide you with some further detail. After filtering out the gurning matelots of course :-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ex-FAAWAFU Posted January 2, 2016 Author Share Posted January 2, 2016 (edited) You may have already found this site: http://arkroyal.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=11&Itemid=126 Just spent a period of skimming through the phots and there are some that may provide you with some further detail. After filtering out the gurning matelots of course :-) I already have the commissioning book from the correct era (Mike Harris' time in command), which has been a great help; all those matelots who thought they were posing for happy snaps with their mates (and thus gurning like a good 'un) had no idea that the real purpose of the photo was to provide detail of some obscure piece of EW or Comms hardware 25 years later! But thanks again; there are quite a few on there that I hadn't seen. Today's biggest thumbs up, however, goes to Hendie. His casual remark a few posts back about making the frames from a single piece of rod... had simply not occurred to me - I'd become so focused on getting the angles exactly right and not using too much solder that a mere piece of bending hadn't crossed my mind. So I thought I'd try it; Sgeek's added photos meant that there were some elements of my guesswork that proved wrong (notably the ribbed effect, which I now think must have been the shadow of guardrails on an otherwise simple cabinet), so since there was going to be some re-work, it was worth at least testing Hendie's method to see whether it worked... The biggest challenge was getting two of them to bend absolutely the same - my trusty Hold & Fold machine came into its own, but even with that it took several attempts to get to here: Then it was working out a simple jig to make sure the bent frames were at 90 degrees to the crosspieces: [The parallax in that photo is horrendous; trust me, they were parallel!] A few swipes with the soldering iron later, and I ended up with this: Needs a bit of cleaning up, but I am confident that it will be much stronger in the end, and thus able to do what it's supposed to do, namely hold one end of the HF cages aerials. So thanks to everyone who follows this - but today, special thanks to SGeek for the reference photos and Hendie for the statement of the bleeding' obvious that I had somehow completely overlooked! Now to rebuild the cabinetry to sit underneath it; that should be relatively simple - it's only plastic! More soon Crisp Edited January 2, 2016 by Ex-FAAWAFU 7 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ex-FAAWAFU Posted January 2, 2016 Author Share Posted January 2, 2016 That's a bit more like it: 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hendie Posted January 2, 2016 Share Posted January 2, 2016 nice one!!! glad to have been of service 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ex-FAAWAFU Posted January 2, 2016 Author Share Posted January 2, 2016 ... and dry-fitted in position, just for some context: 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Martian Posted January 2, 2016 Share Posted January 2, 2016 I think I would get that part glued to the ship before your friend the carpet monster eats that one! Martin Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sgeek Posted January 2, 2016 Share Posted January 2, 2016 Looking good. Had a chat with a former Sparker as well. The Az in the colour phot looks to have been a golly one. Could not remember its designation though. Glad to have been of some help Have a final couple that may be of help/interest Steve Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ex-FAAWAFU Posted January 3, 2016 Author Share Posted January 3, 2016 Thanks, Steve. Nice picture of Ark playing at being at LPH; all those Junglie cabs and boxes of green stuff littered all over 5 Spot. [incidentally, for those readers who do not have the privilege of a background in the Royal Navy, "the Gollies" - as used by both me and Steve in past few postings - is the normal slang term for the Electronic Warfare branch. EW people operate jammers => Robertson's jam => golly (though happily without the second bit of that outdated term). So all we are saying is that the unidentified lumpy stick is some sort of EW aerial - a RWR, if you are an aircraft modeller.] 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phildagreek Posted January 3, 2016 Share Posted January 3, 2016 This is going well, glad you're very much on track. Any thoughts as to how many hours you have invested? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ex-FAAWAFU Posted January 3, 2016 Author Share Posted January 3, 2016 How many hours? I have no idea! An awful lot; I love this sort of modelling - solving problems, and so on... but it does involve a certain amount of trial and error, rework, etc. Anyway, this HF thing-a-mi-jig is now complete; I have added the small cabinet behind (which, thanks to our Bunting friend, we now know contained the electric string associated with this transmitter), and a stretch of railing. You know it's your day when the railing you pick trust out to be the perfect length - all I needed to do was to trim it, bend it to shape, and then bend down the end piece. This will now be left to dry, primed and then glued in place. Job done! 7 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fritag Posted January 3, 2016 Share Posted January 3, 2016 Stick a coin or knife or something alongside that little work of art Crisp - just to remind us how small it is 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ex-FAAWAFU Posted January 3, 2016 Author Share Posted January 3, 2016 (edited) And the last pics of this particular section; the HF transmitters in position, along with the funnel floodlight brackets on the side of the for'd funnel, and a couple of random lockers which hold I know not what. Third picture at Fritag's request, with a bog standard Swann Morton No 11 blade to give a better idea of scale. Edited January 3, 2016 by Ex-FAAWAFU 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ex-FAAWAFU Posted January 3, 2016 Author Share Posted January 3, 2016 (edited) Like lots of us, I am going back to work in the morning - in my case after almost a month, because I was ill for a while leading up to Xmas. So it seems a good time to put up a few pictures taking stock of where I have got to. Pure self-indulgence (but you can't really make whoosh and dakkadakka noises with a ship, so at least I don't feel like a 5-year-old). I have also removed the protective tape from the fo'c's'le, which has been there for what feels like a lifetime; I'd almost forgotten what its looked like underneath. So anyway, here we are as at 3 January 2016 (1022 radar and Sea Dart launcher just dry fitted). [Edit: I wasn't sure about the PE handrail around the top of the funnel - thanks, Eduard! - but when not seen in such close-up it looks pretty sound. It was more fiddly than an especially fiddly day with Mr Fiddly in Fiddlytown, but worth it... now I just have to match it with the one on the aft funnel...] More soon Crisp Edited January 3, 2016 by Ex-FAAWAFU 8 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now