Bertie Builds a Boat - Lady Isabella - Scots 'Zulu' Herring Drifter - Finished ! ! !

[Bertie McBoatface]

10 hours ago, ColonelKrypton said:

 

You riveting turned out quite well.

 

Something seems to be missing. I had a look at the instructions - page 16 - the PE18 bits.  It seems that kit designers made a very simple attempt at representing the rubber hinging. It could have been very simple to create the required number of straps that would be formed into U shapes that would loop around on the hinge line - one set on the rudder proper and the other on hull resulting in a hinge rudder much more like a real rudder rather than just some simplified bit of wood with some brass strips and rivets glued to the rear of the hull ( on a boat or ship like this would this be the transom ? ).

 

Once all fixed into place I think it will look the part.

 

cheers, Graham

 

 

Yes there's still some PE to go on but yesterday the last of the wooden parts were fitted (though some were only dry fitted until the hull is painted.

 

I've been watching rigging videos on the University of YouTube to prepare myself for the next stage. I think I'll enjoy it and I'm now a little sad that there's so little rigging required on this particular boat.

[Dubz]

12 hours ago, Bertie Psmith said:

 

Thanks Dirk.

 

How's the Polotsk?

 

Veeery slow ... Baby is time consuming 😄

 

Dirk

[Bertie McBoatface]

1 hour ago, Dubz said:

 

Veeery slow ... Baby is time consuming 😄

 

Dirk

 

Of course! I had forgotten all that, my babies have grown up!

[Bertie McBoatface]

I have extracted the digit and started painting the hull.

 

 

I decided to spray the hull as I'm not confident of brush painting such a large area. I first pencilled in a waterline by holding the pencil on an appropriately sized book and pulling the model around next to it. This was hard to see even with a 5B pencil so I quickly backed it up with a line of Tamiya tape. Then I applied another line of tape above it to be the top of the white boot topping. This isn't exactly parallel as it swoops upwards at the ends. Once this was established, I removed the waterline tape and masked off the rest f the hull above the boot topping. No sense taking chnaces. (Anyone can make a mistake.)

 

I used Mr Color Light Gull Grey as an undercoat, heavily thinned with Mr Color Self Levelling Thinner which smells like it's cellulose based and seemed likely to bite into the yacht varnish already applied. 

 

 

And now you see my Lady in her translucent undergarment. Note that despite the silky finish you can still see her wrinkles.

 

 

And there's always a pingin' dog hair!!!

 

("Haha!")

 

The plan is to spray the topping white, with a solid opaque coat at the top and then fading into the grey. Then I'll  re-mask the waterline and spray the red below the line. Perhaps the area of red which overlays the white will be a little brighter red than the keel area which would be a good forcing of shadows but pre-shading is always a bit dodgy when I do it so it's likely that no-one will notice.

 

I'll walk the dog now and paint the white on our return.

[ArnoldAmbrose]

7 minutes ago, Bertie Psmith said:

And now you see my Lady in her translucent undergarment.

Gidday Bertie, you have a way with words that capture our imagination. Nice paint job. Oh, and brush the dog outside. 🙂 Regards, Jeff.

[Faraway]

Very sensible, spraying the paint. On such a large smooth surface, brushing would have been a nightmare.

Jon

[Faraway]

19 hours ago, Courageous said:

Sounds like you're about to get a wooden kit .

I’d love to, but, as I’ve said before, the cost of them AND the extra tools etc I’d need put them out of reach.

Jon

[Bertie McBoatface]

1 hour ago, ArnoldAmbrose said:

brush the dog outside.

 

It would be horribly messy brushing the inside of a dog.

[Bertie McBoatface]

 

Well that's startlingly different.

 

Rubbish masking and painting, caused by complacency and hurry as usual. Who'd have thought a simple paint job would trip me up?

 

Never mind, 'onnards and uppards!' I'll touch it up when it's all dried and hardened.

 

 

[Kitsticker]

Hi Bertie,

Great model and a great build log too, I like your style and humour! Those other guys don't know what they're missing

With all the new techniques you are honing, Beagle will be worth seeing and the unpronounceable one (OK, Bellerophon) stupendously good!

Looking forward to more, in your own time, mind

All the best

Geoff

Edited June 8, 2022 by Kitsticker
Spelling mistake

[Bertie McBoatface]

1 hour ago, Kitsticker said:

Looking forward to more, in your own time, mind

Thanks Geoff. 
 

I’m going to take your advice and slow down a bit. I might even take a holiday. 🏝
 

 

[Dave Swindell]

19 hours ago, Bertie Psmith said:

 

It would be horribly messy brushing the inside of a dog.

[Bertie McBoatface]

On 6/8/2022 at 11:03 PM, Bertie Psmith said:

I might even take a holiday. 🏝

 

I did. I refrained from posting updates on Thursday and Friday. That doesn't sound like much of a holiday does it? Not exactly a Mediterranean Cruise, but since I have been posting daily, often multiple updates, it made a refreshing change to slow down just that little bit. I guess you guys have better things to do than read my ramblings every single day, and I found that I have better things to do than write them. 

 

I may not have been writing but I have been boatbuilding.

 

 

First, that paint job. I was disappointed that my go-faster stripes were so far off from symmetry. On the good side I masked off the white by eye following a few tiny pencil marks and the line of the masking tape at the top pf the white area. I believe that on the bad, too wide white line, I inadvertently followed one of the seams between planks, thinking it was the edge of the tape. Say "Lavvy". It's quite difficult to see both lines simultaneously so this isn't a glaring mistake and I'm certainly not bothered enough to do it over again.

 

The next job, which I'd been putting off, was attaching the remaining PE. I'm not a fan of the fiddly stuff but it's fairly thick material and there's not a lot of bending involved. At my age, things don't bend as well as they used to. 👴🏻 On the other hand, I'm becoming very good at mono-tasking. Monotasking is the greatest advantage of retirement: doing one thing and ignoring the to-do list on the fridge door. This hasn't been a deliberate policy, it gets difficult to do two things at once and remember what both of them are, but my increased aptitude for doing endless repetitive tasks like fitting eyebolts is a great advantage. (The dog reminds me when it's time to eat or toilet.)

 

 

Eyebolts come with the usual square PE pegs and since my drill tends to bore round holes, this is a slight disadvantage.

 

 

Some of the locations are between two pieces of wood, right down the glue line. I need them to be a snug fit but not to wedge the joint apart as might happen when square peg meets round hole.

 

 

The answer is simple. The stems must be filed to a round cross section. The filing leaves a good clean, rough surface for the glue too.

 

 

There weren'tactually as many of these eyebolts, which secure some of the rigging, as you might think. However, I'm fairly sure that there were more than the kit plans suggest. Surely the boat would need to be able to sail on both tacks? There were many spare eyebolts on the PE sheet so I'm taking these (Right side only) warnings to mean "this is the minimum needed to do the rigging, use the rest for authenticity if you wish". The more I see of wooden modelling, in reviews and so on, the more I understand that the instructions are advisory, not compulsory. They are hints and suggestions, no more, and were often written by people with great skill in model-making but little interest in technical writing. At first this urinated me off! However, I'm now coming to see it as a liberation - I never followed the instructions in plastic kits anyway!

 

 

This is a Warhammer robot snapping a chain to prove how strong he is. 

 

Not really. There's a pair of deck fittings which consist of an eyebolt (sigh), a long metal link, and then a hook to attach to ...

 

 

I can't actually find anything on the plans to show what they are for, but doubtless I'll come up with something.

 

Anyway, the link had a gap in it and while this may have been part of the rig, I thought it would be better closed so I soldered over the gap. It was a fun thing to finally find a use for my 'Helping Hands' robot. 

 

 

This is what they look like under anti-gravity conditions. I was planning to paint them when they are attached to something (anything!), and clear of the deck, but I might have to revise that little plan.

 

 

As expected, I broke the rudder off and did what I should have done in the first place, which was to pin the joint.

 

 

And here we are, resistant materials battered into submission and ready to turn my hand to textiles. It's rigging time!

 

Almost.

 

First, I pause for thought and enjoy the satisfaction of reaching this second major milestone for a day or two.

 

 

 

 

 

These boats don't half take up a lot of room!

 

I showed some of these photos to my geeky male friends the other day, as we walked our dogs together. They have always enjoyed seeing my aircraft and tanks and showed a lot of appreciation for the Lady Isabella too. Another of the morning dog walking crowd is a normal person, not a modelmaker, who also happens to be a woman. She hasn't really been that keen on the military stuff and I stopped even mentioning models to her some years back. However, I asked if she would like to see a photo of this one and when she looked at it she said, "Oh, that's lovely!" I don't think she was faking it because she was never shy to show her distain of my plastic kits. I shouldn't care what other people think, but of course, I inevitably do, and it was rather pleasant to be appreciated outside the small world of modelmaking. Such is the power of wood.

 

[Bertie McBoatface]

It seems that I'm still doing multiple updates but how could I not tell you about my first attempts at rigging?

 

 

I began here at the crutch for the bowsprit. There are holes in it but no mention in the instructions of these or of the need for gammoning the bowsprit. If you think about it, it's obvious that the bowsprit and the boom that sticks out of the back of the boat need to be held down against the upward pull of the sails. The rope that pulls the front corner of the sail down is cleverly routed downwards, as you will see later, which will do this job, but I can't believe there wasn't some sort of lashing of the booms themselves as well.

 

 

The usual form of this 'gammoning'  lashing is seven or eight turns of rope made taut by a form of seizing, which pulls them together. This is the sort of arrangement as seen on a square rigger.

 

 

I added some sawn-off nails for the multiple lashing passes I was planning.

 

 

And then did this. You can see the lashings around the lashings. It may not be accurate but I think it makes sense and looks good, which is the most important thing. It took a while to do and was a little fiddly but it was actually a lot easier than I had been expecting. This was the cotton thread from my ill-fated HMS Victory, pulled through a cake of beeswax which made it slightly stiffer and heavier than usual so that it behaved almost like rope. The wax also lubricates the thread so that it pulls through knots etc without jamming and at the same time makes it stick to itself just a little so that I could make the turns lie nicely next to each other.

 

 

At the butt end of the booms I wanted some more lashings to act as a fore and aft stopper. I've no evidence that this was done on the real thing except a faint grasp of physics and that's good enough for me and MY boat. This was even easier than the gammoning as I could begin and end it with a simple clove hitch around the boom.

 

 

The first attempt was a bit of a bird's nest.

 

 

But new skills improve rapidly from zero with just a little practice.

 

 

Next job was the steering ropes which go from the wheel box on deck to the tiller head on the rudder. They can simply be tied on but knots weaken rope and I don't think a critical joint like this would have been knotted. I've gone for an eye, seized onto the end of the rope. This would have had a metal thimble inside to prevent the rope fraying but in this scale - no way, it was quite enough of a challenge wrapping cotton around string without bothering with a microscopic thimble. I could not knot the black cotton at this stage in my learning so it's secured with a little CA.

 

 

The rope runs through a hole in the bulwark, into that box where the steering gearing lived, then back out and down to the other side of the rudder. If I was more experienced or clever, I'd have started here and threaded both ends outwards. I'm neither, so I spent a while persuading the string through the hole into the box. This was actually the hardest part of today's rigging.

 

 

I had to enlarge the holes. Fortunately, during my tool buying frenzy at the beginning, I acquired a set of broaches. Wicked square section but tapered reamers for enlarging holes. Dentists use them during root filling and they work brilliantly on wood.

 

 

Finally it was laid through the box and back outboard where it could be seized to the tiller just like the other side.

 

 

I wasn't sure I could do a seizing and keep the rope tight so I left a loop in the box and then tensioned it afterwards with a piece of pencil eraser.

 

 

I am mightily proud of that even though I know I'll look back on it with dismay in a couple more boats time.

 

 

My little pink tool is a dotter. A tool used for making dots on ladies' fingernails and a tool which is invaluable for guiding rigging lines. You can both hook the line and push it and the round ends do no damage.

 

 

This is the business end. I bought a set from Amazon/China. They come in a range of sizes and I can't think of a joke at this point.

 

Rigging? So far, so good.

 

[ColonelKrypton]

2 hours ago, Bertie Psmith said:

I acquired a set of broaches. Wicked square section but tapered reamers for enlarging holes.

 

Square section?  Not that I don't believe that is what you have but the ones I have are five sided - I don't think I have ever seen four sided ones, perhaps I just haven't looked in the right place.  

 

Indeed, very useful for enlarging holes. Jewellers, watch makers, clock makers, etc. 

 

As to lashing the steering ropes, I wonder if a fly tying bobbin might have been handy. In fact, so might have been a fly typing vise https://modelshipworld.com/topic/4181-fly-tying-vice-for-rigging/#comment-120708

 

I have a few fly tying bits and bob such as a bobbin, a whip finisher, and couple of squeeze clamps - all very handy.

 

I think the read and white lower hull with varnished upper looks quite nice - colourful but not overdone.

 

cheers, Graham

 

 

 

[Bertie McBoatface]

On 4/13/2022 at 1:25 PM, roginoz said:

Hello Bertie,

 

Late as usual, but thoroughly enjoying your first attempt at maritime modelling.

 

Strangely enough I've been considering having a go at it myself, becoming a  bit bored with cockpits, wheel wells, camouflage and the like and keen to have a crack at something like this.

Something similar to the craft you are building might be suitable especially as I qualify as a beginner [of boats] and no more than an intermediate modeller of other subjects. Added to that, who could fail to be impressed with such a pretty craft !

 

So I 'll have a look at Chris' website and check out something suitable, at the same time cheering your progress and sympathising with your struggles.

Your thread is providing much inspiration ! Onward 'n' upward !

Roger the Cabin Boy

 

I hope my stumbling adventures with Isabella haven't put you off?

 

[roginoz]

Absolutely not !!

 

She's looking magnificent with her rouged bottom, and I've been enjoying your progress and commentary, nautical language and problem solving immensely.

I've no doubt the Beagle will be a whole new ballgame, and I'm anticipating further interesting modelling skills when you commence her in earnest.

Can't add to the large number of admiring comments except to say.......I love it !

Rog

[MRMRL]

Bertie, your progress on this is really impressive, it's been a joy to watch. You have inspired me to get started on Mary Rose again, but I've only just begun first planking so I'm a long way behind 😄. Love how the varnish brings out the wood grain.

 

[Bertie McBoatface]

2 minutes ago, roginoz said:

I've no doubt the Beagle will be a whole new ballgame, and I'm anticipating further interesting modelling skills when you commence her in earnest.

 

I have actually cut some wood now so the Beagle has landed, on the bench that is.

 

It has a totally different approach to the hull planking, and planking the decks is new to me and calling for some experimentation. All good stuff.

 

The first proper update will be next weekend most likely.

[Bertie McBoatface]

1 minute ago, MRMRL said:

Love how the varnish brings out the wood grain.

 

It's the money shot in woodworking as far as I'm concerned. 

 

I'm glad to hear that Mary Rose will rise again, again. I look forward to seeing our progress. (Post a link here when you get going again.)

[Courageous]

I have to agree with the others, looking great. Your lashing work is looking neat and tidy. Great work.

 

Stuart

[Bertie McBoatface]

6 minutes ago, Courageous said:

I have to agree with the others, looking great. Your lashing work is looking neat and tidy. Great work.

 

Stuart

 

I've just spent two and a half hours working on the mains'l in some kind of a trance. It's amazingly relaxing, requiring just enough of my attention to stop me thinking of anything else. ⏸️ (the closest emoticon I can find for the feeling)

 

That's apart from the first half hour spent working out what the heck this diagrams actually mean!

[SafetyDad]

Excellent stuff Bertie ! Watching and enjoying the Lady starting to emerge fully clad!

 

SD

[Bertie McBoatface]

15 hours ago, Bertie Psmith said:

I've just spent two and a half hours working on the mains'l in some kind of a trance. It's amazingly relaxing

 

I've reflected on this overnight and believe that this is because it's almost impossible to rush, which is my usual downfall. The process goes at the pace that the boat dictates and in hindsight, that applies to almost all of the build. This is because there are so many operations that demand great concentration and seemingly endless repetition which adds up to total mental absorption, for me at least, and the possibility of getting into a 'flow state'.

 

Flow state is that sense of fluidity between body and mind, where you are totally absorbed something, beyond the possibility of distraction. Time  slows down. Your senses are heightened. You are at one with the task at hand, “in the zone.” There’s a focus that gives a sense of clarity: you know exactly what you want to do from one moment to the next and are able to do it without making slip ups. My sewing on the sail was perfect! (photos later)

 

When you’re giving your fullest attention to an activity or task that you are passionate about, focused on, and immersed in, the mind’s usually endless chatter begins to fade away, removing all distraction. The feelings that would normally interrupt you, hunger, fatigue, aches and pains and minor worries all melt away, and all that matters is the job in hand. I forgot to eat my pudding yesterday and didn't drink anything or listen to the radio either. I only stopped when the dog told me to, and after her walkies discovered my cup of cold tea and sad bowl of fruit salad. 😆

 

It's not just boat models of course, I've had this with plastic aircraft kits many times but not in the last few years. I think this was because I stopped feeling passionate about aircraft and carried on far too long with only half my mind on the job. New subjects and new materials have made it all interesting again for me and the hobby isn't 'work' anymore.

 

 

4 hours ago, SafetyDad said:

 

Watching and enjoying 

 

 

 

That's great to hear.

 

16 hours ago, Courageous said:

Your lashing work is looking neat and tidy.

 

Thanks Stuart

 

[ColonelKrypton]

Good morning Bertie - well, still morning here, the birds in the cedar hedge are singing up a morning serenade. 

 

Absolutely spot on.  It can be a very meditative state and overall feeling. 

 

cheers, Graham