HMSV Beagle - OcCre - 1/60

[Bertie McBoatface]

1 hour ago, Dmitriy1967 said:

It turned out very nicely!

Not the beak, but the bottom.

 

Next session will be carefully embossing some nail patterns. 

[Faraway]

33 minutes ago, Bertie McBoatface said:

 

Next session will be carefully embossing some nail patterns. 

After a good coppering, nothing beats a good embossing.

Ok, ok, I’ll get back to my paddler.

Jon

[Bertie McBoatface]

26 minutes ago, Faraway said:

After a good coppering, nothing beats a good embossing.

Ok, ok, I’ll get back to my paddler.

Jon

 

You've started?!

[Faraway]

8 hours ago, Bertie McBoatface said:

 

You've started?!

Have you seen the weather ?

Jon

[Bertie McBoatface]

1 minute ago, Faraway said:

Have you seen the weather ?

Jon

 

That's how I managed to finish the Beagle's bottom yesterday. Wasn't it awful.  

 

I bet you are 10% finished after a day like yesterday. 

 

Weather talk. Must be Brits. 

 

 

[Ray S]

10 hours ago, Bertie McBoatface said:

 

Next session will be carefully embossing some nail patterns. 

 

Make sure they are not 'finger' nails embossed Bertie!

 

That shiny bottom looks fab, I and I don't say that too often, at least not in public

 

Ray

[Bertie McBoatface]

 

That's the 'nails' done. I thought they were a lot tidier than the other side but enlarged like this it's hard to believe it.

 

 

I want more contrast on the nails and the plate overlaps so I'm going to wash some of this cheap oil paint into the recesses. I spread some on cardboard so that most of the oil would wick away, and then picked it up on a brush moistened with odourless thinners and scrubbed my bottom with it.

 

 

It looks like a 'dirty protest' at the moment! I'll let it dry over a couple of days and wipe it off with a tissue. There's no danger of the oil paint sticking too much to a bare metal surface, in fact the risk is that it will wipe out of the cracks too well. We shall see. I've not found anyone else doing this sort of AFV/Aircraft technique on a wooden boat so I'm either a trail-blazer or an idiot. We will all know which at the weekend.

 

131.45

Edited November 17, 2022 by Bertie McBoatface

[ColonelKrypton]

8 minutes ago, Bertie McBoatface said:

scrubbed my bottom with it

 

 brought to mind an old joke - What does toilet paper and Captain Kirk have in common?  - they both wipe out Klingons

 

Your copper bottom, nails and all are looking quite nice.

 

cheers, Graham

[robgizlu]

I've really enjoyed seeing this "coppering".  It looks great - Top job

Rob

[Dmitriy1967]

For some time now, I have been trying all the paints and impregnations first on an experimental small part that can be thrown away. And only then on the model.

I hope everything will be fine with your ship.

Edited November 17, 2022 by Dmitriy1967

[Bertie McBoatface]

20 hours ago, ColonelKrypton said:

 

 brought to mind an old joke - What does toilet paper and Captain Kirk have in common?  - they both wipe out Klingons

 

Your copper bottom, nails and all are looking quite nice.

 

cheers, Graham

 

Thanks, Graham.

 

20 hours ago, robgizlu said:

I've really enjoyed seeing this "coppering".  It looks great - Top job

Rob

 

By the end it was easy and fun to do. I haven't actually finished yet, as I haven't made a rudder. But that will only be a one session job.

 

20 hours ago, Dmitriy1967 said:

For some time now, I have been trying all the paints and impregnations first on an experimental small part that can be thrown away. And only then on the model.

I hope everything will be fine with your ship.

 

Don't worry Dmitriy, I model bravely (or foolishly), it's more exciting that way 🤪

[Bertie McBoatface]

 

I wanted to take this picture in natural light but in England today there is none available. However, I think this shows the exaggeration of the shadows around the seams and 'nails' resulting from the oil paint. I wiped it with a dry tissue working from bow to stern and bulwarks to keel. The oil is still wet but now that it's only a microscopically thin coat I'm hoping that it will oxidise in just a few days.

[Dmitriy1967]

And how does oil oxidation work? I always thought that oil, on the contrary, would protect copper from oxidation by air and moisture. Or do I misunderstand the process?

[Bertie McBoatface]

6 minutes ago, Dmitriy1967 said:

And how does oil oxidation work? I always thought that oil, on the contrary, would protect copper from oxidation by air and moisture. Or do I misunderstand the process?

 

Sorry, I did not phrase that very clearly. I meant that the oil paint will oxidize which is the way that it actually hardens. Oil paints don't dry by evaporation. 

 

The oxidation of the copper will continue for months, maybe years. Looking at my rate of progress so far and considering the seven group builds I wish to join next year, Beagle will be under construction for a very long time yet. ⏳

[Bertie McBoatface]

Some thoughts on the oxidation of copper by C Nepean Longridge (and what a name that is!) in The Anatopmy of Nelson's Ships 1(961)

 

 

So I might have to wait for a long time then. 😄

 

The oil wash has now dried so the hull can be handled and soon work will recommence. The first job will be to mount it on its base in to protect the soft and thin copper layer from damage. I found a wooden serving platter in the supermarket which I'll use as a base. This is a cheap and easy way of doing things but once again, remember that this is a training ship for me and absolute perfection is neither useful nor intended. The object is to finish it and learn as I go. If the model is good enough for display at the end, that will be an unexpected bonus.

 

131.45 (as before)

[Bertie McBoatface]

As some of you will know, I've been on shore for a while in the Armoured Car GB. (Won one, lost one) However, I'm now back on board and have no distractions real or scale, until 7 January when the Salty Sea Dog GB starts up (I'm building a 1/16 wooden kit of a whaleboat for that one). So the first order of the day was "Clear for action!" 

 

 

In a wooden warship that meant removing the furniture, livestock, even the walls from the gun decks leaving the maximum amount of space to work the guns. In my flat it meant getting rid of all the plastic modelling debris and organising my wood and metal tools and equipment.

 

 

This is my ready use ammunition locker and all that's in there is Beagle. It's been so long since I sounded the depths of the box that I'd forgotten what was in there and where I'd got up to before the great bottom coppering diversion. Now it's all spread out and surveyed, I'm ready to continue.

 

 

Before the boat is mounted on its stand I thought it would be a good idea to paint the white go-faster stripe. I spent more time applying useless masking tape than actually painting. I was able to control a paintbrush well enough without the crutch of masking tape so I won't do that again unless it's really necessary. In this case I was following the rubbing strakes so it really wasn't. This is the first coat.

 

 

I used a heavy body acrylic with tons of pigment to undercoat over the dark grey hull sides. Two coats of this will do it I hope. I put the first one on thick as Greek yoghurt and will thin the next one a little. Once the knee of the head is built and undercoated, I'll do the topcoat in a representative shade of nineteenth century white as they didn't have anything this brilliant back then.

 

 

A quick reading of the 'instructions' suggested another job that's best done with the boat upside down, hanging the rudder. For those unfamilliar with ship type instructions I will now describe the arcane ritual of decoding said instructions. Those letter/number codes don't relate to a component on a sprue, oh no. That would be far too simple.

 

 

The letter/numbers relate to this multi page parts list which will give you a lot of information and lead you to the parts you need, or more often lead you to the parts from which you will make the parts which you need. This rudder is provides a simple example.

 

 

Part H5 on the photo above is the actual hinge pin of the rudder irons. It connects the pintles on the rudder to the braces on the hull and allows the rudder to swing. The parts list tells me that I need three of them and that I will be making them from something with a diameter of 1.5mm and they will be 5mm long.

 

 

It's no surprise to find that the material is brass.

 

 

I've got a lot of brass rod in different diameters so these marvellously cheap and efficient calipers help me to find the right stock. Later I'll be looking for lengths of wood to make the masts and spars from...

 

 

Moving on to H4, the pintles and braces, you see the line above the highlighted H5 tells me this is pre-formed. I thought this meant PE and spent some time looking for them on the PE fret. There aren't any numbers on any of the frets, either brass, (ply)wood or MDF but you get a plan of each fret to guide you. Well, there's no H4 on that plan so let's look at the assorted baggies of treasure.

 

 

And there they are.

 

 

Part A is a nail. That took me a while to locate because A doesn't come before A1, A2 etc in the parts list. It comes after part Z. Oh, how I laughed!

 

So I now have all of the parts I need. I haven't mentioned the actual rudder, have I? Well that was fairly obvious on its laser cut plywood fret.

 

What is not obvious is what you are expected to do with the pieces. You are expected to know that the rudder must be chamfered at the leading edge to allow it to swing freely. You are also expected to work out how to assemble the irons, according to your skills and equipment. I think this is brilliant. Mr OcCre is treating me like a grown up person with some skill at hand and the ability to look things up in lists, plans and books. It took a bit of getting used to after being led by the hand for fifty years by Mr Airfix, Mr Tamiya and yes, even Mr MiniArt and Mr Bronco. On my first ship build which in retrospect had very lucid instructions by the standards of the genre, I hated having to make my own decisions but now I'm finding that it's half of the fun. 

 

 

The rudder irons will go together like this. How would you assemble them? I'll tell you what I did in the second part of this update, after I've had me tea!

 

[Bertie McBoatface]

When I fitted the rudder to Lady Isabella, my first boat, I used Superglue. I'm very experienced with superglue because I stuck that rudder on so many times. I knocked it off almost as many times and once it just climbed off the boat for a lie-down while it was safe and secure in the glass fronted display cabinet. I hate CA adhesive even though I know I'll be using it to fasten the braces and pintle to the hull and rudder (assisted by the nails). The idea of assembling the rudder irons to each other with subglue was not attractive.

 

Soldering is faster, neater, stronger and easier. So that's what I did. It took 15 minutes to do all three 'hinges' (which don't actually hinge, by the way. I hate gimmicks like that). 

 

My tips.

 

 

Find a way to hold the parts in position better than this. 😆

 

 

Remove the oxide layer from the mating surfaces using sandpaper, a wire brush or a scraper. You don't need it to be perfect, just to have enough clean surface to which solder will stick.

 

 

Get fluxed! Don't rely on flux cored solder, use some of the good old stuff. A pot will last a lifetime.

 

 

Get a hot iron. Cheap 'handwarmers' are a waste of time. If you want to solder large heat-radiating bits of brass you need to put heat in faster than it gets out.

 

 

Don't use too much solder. If you have followed the first three tips you will be able to run a tiny amount of solder INTO the joint. That's what holds it together. The stuff on the outside of the joint does nothing apart from looking like amateur solderers at work. If you are soldering a multi-stranded cable to a terminal, you should be able to see the outline of the strands afterwards, not some shiny lead bunch of grapes. 

 

 

That's messy. Too much solder. I'll file it off later and forgive myself because I haven't done this for a while, but you get the idea.

 

 

The others were tidier. And faster too. (My mistake on #1 was to touch the iron to the strap instead of the hinge pin.) 

 

 

That's roughly how it will all fit together after the rudder is bevelled, painted and coppered and the pintles secured. I think it might look quite good.

[Faraway]

54 minutes ago, Bertie McBoatface said:

I think it might look quite good.

Yup, I think you are right.

Oh, by the way, welcome back to the light.

Jon

[Bertie McBoatface]

1 hour ago, Faraway said:

Yup, I think you are right.

Oh, by the way, welcome back to the light.

Jon

 

In Darwin's five year attachment to the Beagle, he spent all but 18 months on shore. 🤷‍♂️

 

I hope it doesn't take me five years to complete my Beagle journey! 😱

[Dmitriy1967]

The assembly instructions are impressive! 

[Bertie McBoatface]

My apologies for the shortness of today's update - it's been a busy day and I have only found time for a short session in the shipyard.

 

 

Chamfering the leading edge f the rudder was easy enough once I recalled that I owned a vice to hold it in while I plied the adze file.

 

 

Drilling out the hole for the rudder head made me a bit tense. It was complicated by the idiot who built the main deck all the way to the transom when he was intending to build Darwin's cabin. D'oh! Now I understand why the charting table was so big and what exactly was underneath it. That's right, the steering gear.

 

 

In a half-hour session I made things more or less fit together, and slapped some paint on them to hide the mess. Next will be copper plating the rudder, almost all of it in fact.

 

134.15

[Courageous]

Many of us have palette cleansers to give us a break from the norm or in my case 'stash reduction', nice to see you back on the Beagle.

An interesting update where you mention the oxidation of copper, something I may have to look into for when I get round to building Bounty...it's plastic.

Lovely work on the rudder hinges with the soldering iron, another art that I'll have to relearn when I start using PE.

 

Stuart

[Faraway]

3 minutes ago, Courageous said:

Many of us have palette cleansers to give us a break from the norm or in my case 'stash reduction',

Indeed, my ‘palette cleanser’ is my PS4.

Jon

[Bertie McBoatface]

 

EDIT: Sorry chaps. I digressed way off topic there so I've deleted it.

[ColonelKrypton]

1 hour ago, Bertie McBoatface said:

I currently have a plastic stash of 15 vehicles

 

Sounds like you have reasonably good self control in this; I think have about double that and  know others have many more than that. 

 

Keep telling myself to stop buying kits but that at least slows me down a bit. Something new follows me home every once in a while albeit at a rate greater than what I build. I think part of the problem, if you want to consider it a problem, is the fear of losing out on something new and interesting if I don't get it now - it may not be there next month, next week or even tomorrow if I don't get it now. 

 

I have known a number of individuals who just collect kits. They want one of each of a particular brand or type and have been known to buy multiples of one just to use as trading material to get something else that they want. I suppose it is no different an interest or obsession to someone collected fine china, figurines, books, paintings, pressed leaves or flowers, bottle caps, match books, HO or OO or N or O gauge trains, tools (etc) or even garden gnomes. Collecting interesting stuff has many faces.  I am still looking for the ultimate modelling knife, tweezers, and pin vise but alas there is no one ultimate of anything

 

Bertie's HMSV Beagle is progressing nicely. Your brass work has turned out well. 

 

cheers, Graham