Thanks again to the Alans! Greatly appreciated.
Here's another of my money saving schemes for impoverished modellers!
First of all a quick update on the hammock frames. I’ve completed the replacement waist barricade frame and also soldered up and painted the first of the long thin frames for the quarter deck bulwarks. The little frame clamp worked as well as I’d hoped and taught me two things, firstly the little clamp works! And secondly, there’s no way I’m going to be mass producing these things!
One at a time with some other jobs in between will be far more enjoyable. So with that in mind, here’s a little ‘Helpful Hints/Tutorial’ entitled
“Any Old Iron”The Victory (and almost all other period ships) are liberally festooned with iron ring bolts screwed into the hull and decks onto which are fastened ropes, blocks and various other interesting rigging type objects and this is one way to achieve an authentic ‘rusty iron’ effect to produce those bolts.
Although quite a simple operation, describing the actual procedure is a little complicated so this tutorial is necessarily heavy in images (twenty of them in fact), and to see
what the text is describing means a lot of scrolling up and down for which I apologise! Anyway, here it is.
The first photo shows the collection of tools used in the project. There are two mini vices, there would have been three but my Saturday trip into town failed to obtain a third from the local “Tool Shed” shop – “Oh you mean those ones we had in the £1 section? They’re long gone now!”
Also shown is a pair of matching electronic snips and long nosed pliers, a fairly coarse grade steel wool pad, a coil of 0.5mm brass wire (came with the DelPrado kit) and one of those useful little pots from “The Works” to keep the finished articles in. As the photo mentions, not shown is the chemical Blacken-It and the fresh water neutralising bath.
The first task is to remove any surface layers which might impede the action of the Blacken-It. This is done quite easily by forming the steel wool into a ‘V’ shaped pad, unreeling about six to eight inches of the wire and squeezing the wire between the steel wool several times with a fair amount of pressure on the wool. After several passes the wire should be a beautiful shiny brass colour. Once this is done, try not to hold the wire too tightly with bare fingers. Unless you wear rubber gloves there is no way NOT to touch it at some point but a light touch doesn’t seem to affect the chemical reaction to any great degree.
Photo 1 shows the creation of the brass rings, which will be fitted into the bolts. This is exactly the same method as used to make the cannon tackle rings much earlier in the diary. The brass wire is simply wound around a drill bit held in one of the vices and when about half a dozen coils have been formed the pliers (or a pair of tweezers as I have also used) are used to lightly grip the drill bit above the coils and then slid down compressing the coils into a uniform size.
Once done, the snips are used to gently cut up through the coil, a layer at a time producing the basic rings shown in
Photo 2. At this point, the rings are still crooked due to being cut from a spiral coil so the next stage is to place them one at a time between the jaws of the pliers and squash them level (
Photo 4). This completes the basic rings for the time being.
In
Photo 5 we begin the forming of the actual ring bolt. The first stage is to bend the wire around the drill bit by gripping the end with the pliers and literally pulling it around the bit to the point as seen in
Photo 5. (From here on, the yellow disk represents the drill bit as seen from above.) With the partially bent wire still pressed against the bit, use the long nosed pliers to gently squeeze the end of the wire around the bit, closing up the gap until just short of touching the wire together as seen in
Photo 7.
The next stage is to change the squeezing action to the opposite side of the bolt and using just the tips of the pliers, squeeze the other side in to meet the tip of the wire (
Photo 8). This produces the closed ring bolt, but may be slightly ‘lop-sided’ so give the shaft of the bolt a squeeze with the flat of the pliers jaws (like the way the ring was flattened) to level it out resulting in the finished bolt as seen in
Photos 9 and
10. (To be completely honest, that finished bolt should have had its shaft bent a little more to the left!
The finished bolt is then placed in the jaws of the mini vice ready to receive it’s ring, (
Photo 11) after the next small adjustment.
Photo 12 shows that large sewing needle mentioned at the beginning and is also the reason why I really wanted three of those mini vices; one for the drill bit, one for the finished bolt and the third for this needle! In
Photo 12 the previously made and flattened ring is inserted on to the tip of the needle, then, using either the long nosed pliers or a pair of tweezers again, the ring is slid up the needle shaft until it reaches the eye of the needle, the rear part of which is gripped tightly in the vice. Slowly and gently, the ring is pushed up over the eye, the increase in diameter of the needle pushing the ring open. Don’t go too far over the eye, just enough to prise the ring apart wide enough to fit into the bolt, too far and one end of the ring always gets jammed into the needle’s eye and believe me, it’s a right job getting it back out again! Once the ring is spread sufficiently, slide it back off the needle as seen in
Photo 13.
The open ring can now be threaded into the bolt and the long nosed pliers used to close up the gap, permanently fixing the ring onto the bolt. I found it best to keep the pliers flat along the top surface of the vice with the ring gripped in their jaws about two thirds of the way back towards the handle. It is very important to ensure that the ring is exactly symmetrical in the bolt during this operation (ie, half of it sticking out each side of the bolt) if it is lop sided, the ring will close up in an oval shape instead of completely round, once this happens it takes a lot of effort to get it back into shape again!
After closing up the ring, we have a finished ring bolt as shown in
Photos 14 and
15.
To all those building their vessels in varnished wood and shiny brass,
this is where you finish. All you need to do is to give the ring-bolt assembly a coat of varnish or lacquer to keep it bright and shiny.
Those like me however, building and painting their ships, the bolts will need to be either painted or chemically blackened to represent the iron construction of the original item. In this instance I am blackening the brass with a chemical concoction called “
Blacken-it” which has appeared in many other build diaries. The ring bolts attached to the decks would be regularly re-painted with the same lead-based black paint as employed on the cannon barrels so for them, probably painting them with the Admiralty Metal Black is the most authentic method of all. For those ring bolts situated down the sides of the hull however, re-painting them was a difficult business and was mainly done only when the vessel was in dock for refitting. The slightly rusty appearance of the blackened-it bolts, are perfect for those locations.
In
Photo 16 the Ring-bolt is seen sitting in its bath of Blacken-it. The huge looking tub is in fact a 35mm film canister that the film rolls used to come in (remember film in cameras?)
. In order to work properly, the item placed in the solution needs to be moved around the bath every now and then to prevent a build up of oxides on the surface of the brass, which can result in a ‘lumpy’ uneven appearance. The easiest way to do this is with a cheap bristle brush as shown in
Photo 17, this was one of a set of brushes I bought from the Plymouth branch of “The Works” primarily for dry-brushing. This photo also shows the other use of these brushes, picking up the bolt to remove it from the bath and moving it to the fresh water neutralising bath to stop the chemical reaction from completely dissolving the brass! NOTE that in reality its best to dip a half dozen or more bolts at a time rather than just the one as shown here.
Photo 18 is the same example bolt in the water bath and finally, in
Photo 19 you can see the final effect: an iron bolt with its ring attached ready to insert into the hull. There was a
Photo 20 originally which showed a pair of these bolts fitted into the bow but it was taken with such a high magnification that the beautifully straight demarcation line between the dull black and yellow ochre looked like it had been slapped on by a drunken Yardie at 4.30 on a Friday afternoon! No way was I posting THAT up!
So that’s how I get my ring-bolts. This method will give a much smaller item than the stock bolts sold in the model shops and works out much cheaper than the photo etched versions also available. A £4.00 or £5.00 roll of brass wire from an on-line supplier would provide hundreds if not more of these things so they work out really cheap to produce and despite all the written instructions above, are actually very easy to make.
Best of Luck to All.
Robin
Plymouth57 attached the following image(s):
First wooden ship:
The Grimsby 12 Gun 'Frigate' by Constructo Second:
Bounty DelPrado Part Works Third:
HMS Victory DelPrado Part Works 1/100 scale
Diorama of the Battle of the Brandywine from the American Revolutionary War Diorama of the Battle of New Falkland (unfinished sci-fi), Great War Centenary Diorama of the Messines Ridge Assault
Index for the Victory diary is on page 1
US
