I'm sure you will find a way to do it.
regards
Alan

Love your simple but very effective jig, in fact I think all your improvised jigs are superb..... Very nice work Robin....

Regards

Alan

NO, NO, NO!

Thanks for the great comments guys! Necessity is the Mother of Invention and Penniless-ness is the Mother of everything else!

Here comes another experiment!

Today I have actually done something to the Victory! This was another ‘experiment’ as are most of my answers to the various (and many) upgrades and scratchbuilds. Although I’ve been modelling in various mediums from plastic kits to white metal miniatures, Victory is only my third wooden ship and by far the most complicated with much of her having to be not only created from scratch but also the means to that creation having to be designed in most cases too!
This post is another of those ‘What If’s’ which I have to admit, although it was really fiddly to do, has worked out really well and was, apart from certain things snapping off at the wrong time, quite fun to do as well!
The subject of this little exercise was the actual hammocks to fit inside the hammock nets around the sides and other areas of a man of war in action. Many other models have just the hammock frames and netting on the sides and they look just as good that way too, in my case however, with crew figures running all around the ship (eventually), engaged in the battle of Trafalgar, those nets should be full of rolled up hammocks to protect the little Jolly Jack Tars from the perfidious Frenchie sharpshooters and canister shot.
To those real newbies just getting into this wonderful hobby, a quick explanation of the main material used for this project – Milliput. Milliput is what is known as an Epoxy Putty, this is a material which, just like epoxy glues, comes in two parts which have to be mixed together in order to be used and harden off. Today there are dozens of such putties available used for everything from modelling to repairing cars and sealing leaks, Milliput has been around for donkey’s years and was one of the first examples to be available to the general public. Originally there was just one Milliput, a pale pea green in colour and designed to be used for all of the above, this was the modeller’s sculpting medium that I grew up with from my youth. Today however, Milliput comes in a variety of forms: Original, Fine Grade, Superfine Grade, White, Silver-Grey, Terracotta (for repairing ornate ceramic plant pots) and now even in Black. The material comes in little cardboard boxes containing two ‘sausages’ of putty six inches long. To use the stuff just cut off an equal amount from each roll and thoroughly mix and knead them together until the two colours have blended into one. You then have about 30 minutes while the putty remains sticky to the touch and about an hour until it begins to stiffen up. Sometimes it is hard within a couple of hours, sometimes it takes overnight, I think it depends a lot on the temperature and humidity but either way this is a chemical reaction which once begun can’t be stopped. It will also take place under water too, hence it’s application in stopping leaks!
Ok, introduction aside, for this little experiment I used the Silver-Grey Milliput. I could have used the superfine white but the Silver-Grey was my last purchase and therefore the freshest and least likely to ‘not harden’ as can happen with out of date putty. All the hammocks in the top picture below were made from two discs of the putty less than 2mm thick mixed together, this stuff, although over a fiver for a box, will last a very long time (that’s why my old stocks always go way past their ‘best by’ dates) Once mixed and blended, the putty was rolled out into a couple of long thin sausages and left to begin the hardening reaction whilst I made up the next tool. This is simply a coiled up cylinder of metal foil also visible in that first photo. The metal foil came from a tube of plastic wood putty, which had gone rock hard over the years. In my model soldier days I used to make their belts and rifle slings out of the metal foil from salvaged toothpaste tubes – then some H&S idiot went and changed the tubes to useless plastic. These tubes are either a form of lead or aluminium alloy, I think the wood putty tube is aluminium as it’s a little stiffer than the old lead varieties. I cut a narrow strip and coiled it around a thin drill bit to form the roll which once formed was used to push into the still soft end of the putty sausage to imprint an impression of the end of the rolled up hammock.
After this I then gently pushed the 0.5mm brass wire into the centre of the hammock end to hold it for insertion into the netting. This also had the effect of distorting the shape of the hammock a little so it was rolled out again with the wire still stuck in it and trimmed to shape if required.
Now came the paintbrush handle! The gap between the netting rails was actually a little thinner than before, probably due to handling it when I sewed in the netting. It was necessary therefore to gently push the tip of the handle between the two ‘rails’ pushing them slightly apart and with them spread, the hammock still impaled on its brass wire was introduced into the gap and pushed down inside. Once in place the paintbrush was pulled out again and the netting frame contracted back in, trapping the hammock, which then allowed the brass wire to be gently pulled free. I then used either the brass wire or a thicker sewing needle to lever the hammock upright if it was lop sided and then repeated the procedure down the line of the netting frame. In some cases I applied the foil cylinder again on top of the hammock if the coiled impression had diminished.
And that was it! The only problems I encountered were fairly easily fixable, the first hammocks I inserted didn’t have a large enough gap and they pulled the netting down with them (on the right of Photo 2) I’m going to cut a couple of netting off cuts to cover up the gaps to fix that. Secondly the entire netting frame came away from the barricade right at the end so I had to super glue it back again – no great problem. The third problem was logistical! The final hammock on the right of the frame is missing. The simple reason for that was there’s nowhere to stick the brush handle in to spread the frame apart! I’ll sort something out for the remaining frames, but for this one I’ll have a crew member running up the steps carrying his hammock to complete the group!!
Although I’m working in the diminutive 1/100 scale, this method would work just fine in just about any scale. And one last thing, although the milliput is Silver-Grey, there’s very little silver or grey visible, it comes out as a slightly off white colour, in fact almost the exact colour of canvas – so it doesn’t even need to be painted!

Happy Building to All!

Robin

Different, innovative and brilliant.... .. Nice one Robin....

That skylight is a work of art Robin,love it .I have seen Kristal Klear used on many builds and it remains cloudy even when thoroughly dry,I guess they must be putting too thick a coat on.The glazing on yours looks spot on.I love the miliput hammocks as well,very innovative.
Kind Regards Nigel

Truly artistic work Robin, can only imagine how long it took you to put the skylight together..... Brilliant work and another beautifully explained method.... Love it.....

Regards

Alan

Lovely work and some good ideas on the skylight Robin
The hammocks have been on my mind for some time too, for the same reasons, (crew at battle), but I was thinking more of using actual cloth rolled up. Is there much weight issue with the rolls of Milliput.
Regards
Alan

Another wonderful lesson on modelling. Well done Robin, looks great.

Another excellent lesson in craftsmanship Robin... lovely work....

Regards

Alan

Many thanks to the Alans! Read on and you're both 'mentioned in despatches'!

OK then, here’s part two of the Flag Locker Saga!

I’ll start off with the shot of the finished Transom Knees from Part One. In the first photo, Photo 6 you can see the finished Knee assembly with the cap for the Ensign glued on top. In this shot the cap has only been painted in Admiralty Black and hasn’t been dry-brushed to bring out it’s angles yet.

And now on to the Flag Lockers! (These are the two large wooden storage lockers situated on the poop deck from where the signal pennants are retrieved to be sent up the halyards. The flags used to spell out Nelson's famous "England expects etc etc" signal would have been taken from here (usually by a young Midshipman). To begin with I had fully intended to build these items out of the grating strips previously used within the decks, but when I checked the old first grating which used to sit on top of the Foc’sl deck I found a problem – using that grating, I would only get a grid of six along and two high giving me only twelve pennant ‘cubicles’ for the locker, which, in reality, has ten cubicles along and four high, a total of forty! Some difference! It was at this point that I decided I’d have a go at trying for the full complement of cubicles by once again going down the same route of the hull entry steps – ‘drastic plastic!’ Not only would it be plastic, it would be the same plastic that I used for those steps. The first step (sorry, unintentional!) therefore was to measure up the dimensions from the McKay drawings and construct a basic frame out of the 0.8 x 2.5mm plastic strip. My ‘cheapo’ guillotine cutter came in very useful here giving a nice right angled cut each time. Once that was done and super glued together (probably the fiddliest part of the whole build) three more strips were cut to fit snugly inside that frame running horizontally from side to side, giving me the four tiers of cubicles. After that came the next most fiddly part, forming the vertical joiners to create the square pennant cubicles. These were so small that it proved impossible to achieve an exact result on the guillotine so I ended up cutting each one by hand with the safety razor blade. It was a slightly hit and miss technique, the tiny bits of plastic had to be large enough to just wedge themselves in the gap between the longitudinal bars but not too loose that they would fall flat inside before they could be glued in position. As it happened, even being ‘just right’ would very slightly push the long strips out of true which meant that the next one above or below it would be correspondingly smaller to fit the thinner gap. The beginning of this procedure can be seen in Photo 7.
The spacers were fed into the gap held by tweezers and once just sitting in position and held firm by their own pressure, secured in place by a cocktail stick applied drop of super in both corners. NOTE! They were only super-glued at the back face of the grid, this kept the face that would eventually be on view much cleaner.
It was at this point, when I had already put some hours of work into the project (time really flies when you’re engrossed in this kind of sub-miniature work!) that a little niggle began to grow in the back of my mind. It was something to do with reading up on the excellent diaries from Gandale and his SOTS, and Sparks and his twin of my DelPrado Victory. Something about wooden gratings it was. I knew that from Sparks diary, he had made his lockers using wooden grating strips but had got far more cubicles into them then I would have using my pack of strips. And as for Gandale, Alan had mentioned more than once that he had replaced the kit 2mm grating material with 1mm to achieve a better result. 2mm grating? 1mm grating? I then got hold of my steel rule and measured my Constructo pack grating – 2mm! 2mm?, then you can get grating packs in ONE MM? The penny suddenly dropped. After all these years of modelling it had never occurred to me that there were finer grating strips available than the ones I had bought in the local model shop! Despite all the references in the various diaries on here I had never looked at gratings on the CMB website. I now realised how Sparks had got a much smaller grid using wooden strip than I was going to get! As I looked at the beginnings of my plastic creation I decided rats to it! In the words of Magnus Magnusson “I’ve started so I’ll finish!”
Photo 8 shows the size of these little spacers. Actually, as the grid progressed it became easier and easier to judge the actual size required for the next piece to fit in and, if it was just oversized I just kept it back for the next row, every bit would fit somewhere, even if it wasn’t where initially intended! Although as I said, the longitudinal bars were slightly displaced by the spacers, it was only apparent when looking straight at the grid lying flat on the bench, once it was upright and the point of view was from further above, it wasn’t noticeable at all.
Photo 9 is the completed first locker front standing up approximately in the correct spot, as I said, any irregularity in the grid isn’t that noticeable, (well, it doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb anyway!).
Now came the reason why I had to wait until my weekly trip into Plymouth last weekend. I had plenty of plastic strip material in my packet to make the grids but I didn’t have the plasticard sheet to make up the rest of the locker body. In actual fact, that’s not exactly true, I do have quite a lot of plasticard in various thicknesses! Unfortunately, all my store is located in my old workroom which was built onto the back of the family garage. There is only one door in and out of that room and to get to it would mean organising a week long expedition to fight my way back through mopeds, garden tools and God knows what else – far easier to wait until Saturday! I was pleasantly surprised at the cost of the sheet though, whilst nearly everything else in the modelling world seems to have gone through the roof since my youth, the 0.8mm A4 sheet was £1.50 from the local Antics. (Talking of going through the roof, the roof of my old workroom is screwed down ‘wriggly tin’ and yes, I did consider it!).
Finally armed with my plasticard, work could resume and the first parts to be added were the side panels as can be seen in Photos 10 and 11. These were carefully shaped not only to fit the curve of the transom but also to slightly slope down back towards the stern. Two reasons for that, firstly the McKay drawing does seem to show a slight slope (so there!) and secondly, the actual front plastic grid was a mm or so higher than intended (I probably didn’t add the thickness of the bottom frame in when I calculated it, but it was far too late by then!) if the locker went back straight and level it would be a little proud of the transom in the outer corners. That little slope took care of that.
The next job was to add the top of the locker on. This was made oversized depth-wise, from the same cut strip as the sides came from as can be seen in Photo 12. Also in that photo is a piece of thin plywood, which has nothing to do with the lockers as such. I think this is the sheet I used to scratch build the internal decks for the stern cabins, the curve on it was cut to match the internal curve of the plywood kit part which the metal decorative stern plate glued onto. That curve exactly matched the inner transom curve (which is probably not surprising as it’s the same piece of wood after all!) The two pencil marks indicate the ends of the locker against the stern so it became a ready made stencil to mark the plastic roof for trimming as you can see.
In Photo 12 both the lockers are made up and resting in position. As you might have noticed in photos 10 and 11, the port locker looks a little incomplete but there’s a very good reason for that as can be seen in the next two photos.
Photos 14 and 15 illustrate the creation of the canvas covers which, during normal sailing conditions covered up the flag lockers to protect the pennants inside. The covers were formed from the Decra-Led strip which I have been using throughout this build. The strip itself is about 8mm in width which is just slightly too thin for the covers. This was rectified by a simple bashing with a flat headed hammer on a piece of steel which not only makes the strip wider by making it thinner (more to a scale thickness in fact) but also imparts a rough texture to the lead which is a pretty good approximation of scale canvas.
Two covers were cut from the flattened strip, the one for the port locker was cut to size and the cut out for the knee removed. The cover for the starboard locker was only cut for width, the ‘drop’ didn’t matter as this was going to be the opened locker and the cover would be rolled up on top. This is why I didn’t bother to finish all the spacers in the port locker; apart from a few on the left side, all the others were going to be obscured under the canvas. I might be obsessed with details but if nobody’s going to see all that work then (EXPLETIVE DELETED) it! The lead sheet was formed around a largish sewing needle held in the modeller's vice as can be seen in Photo 14. The partially opened sheet was wound around the needle until just the finished cubicles were on view, the other one was wound up completely except for a thin ‘tail’ which was flattened out with the safety razor blade, it would be this flap which would be glued to the top of the locker. On the partially opened canvas, the sheet wasn’t quite wide enough to form the flap so a separate piece of lead was cut and painted and stuck along the top, the actual cover was simply glued to the front of the locker.
The last piece of the plastic locker body is shown in Photo 16. I’d noticed that when peering into the lockers once in position, I could just make out the transom and knees inside which, if the cubicles had gone all the way back as in real life, wouldn’t be possible. There were two possible solutions, paint the inside of the transom and the deck matt black or build a ‘blind’ of some sort to block off the inside. Painting the stern and deck would have been ok, but one little slip of the brush and there would have been loads of quick clean up work to do so I went for option two. I just cut a simple slanting inner wall which runs from the bottom cubicle to just inside the knee position at the top, painted the inside matt black and glued it in. Done!
All that remained then was to give the locker bodies a coat of matt black followed when dry by Admiralty Dull Black so the lockers would match up to the other black items on deck, paint the canvas covers with an undercoat of Admiralty White followed by a couple of coats of ‘off-white’ (Admiralty White plus a tiny drop of Yellow Ochre) to simulate the weathered canvas which was finished off with a little touch of that Humbrol Dark Brown enamel wash for the shadows and a dry-brushing of white to complete. The final result can be seen in Photo 17 in isolation and Photo 18 in position on the deck. They are not glued down yet though, I need to drill the transom for the various cleats and also to add the iron Horse to the middle knees.
I quite enjoyed this little project, despite all the fiddly work, tweezer sprung spacers flying into orbit and the hammering the hell out of my lead sheet! All in all though, I like them a lot!

Happy building to All and my apologies to the two Alans for not reading their diaries close enough. Doh!
Robin