Making odds and ends....

[Red_Hamish]

Thank you Eddy, I'm touched. (but then you probably knew that already!)

Remember the sunscreen and the wide brimmed Panama hat or the parasol for when doing the Orca impressions 

cheers

Jim

[Mercury]

Stuart,

I've read your article on the stairs with great interest - just the kind of helpful hints and tips I need to take my modelling to the next level. I've even printed it off and put it into my useful stuff folder!!

Many thanks for the time and effort you put into writing it up and I hope you will do some more.

Mercury

[djcf]

Hi Stuart,
I can also say that I find your solutions very helpful & interesting...the mast tapering & companionway methods I will certainly use soon, hopefully I can do justice to your methods!!
Its the little details that can make a model in my opinion, and I wonder if you have any advice on making the open-mouthed cowl ventilators seen on a lot of steamers?
The ready made ones are always the wrong size!!

regards

Clark

[hucksdad]

Stuart:  To quote a fellow American in time of doubt, "Don't give up the ship!"  I too have printed off your modeling solutions and placed them in a file for future reference.  Tonight is my first chance all week to actually sit down and respond and not just quickly scan the forum and move on to other duties and obligations.   One project I have wondered about but don't have a use for at this particular moment is a grating.  As in "Make that man fast to the grating to receive punishment!"  All of your tips and techniques are greatly appreciated and your generosity in sharing the same deserves a round of applause!       

David

[Stuart Badger]

Thanks very much everyone. I'm glad that the articles are appreciated. I think it's very important that knowledge and experience is passed on - and forums like Paddleducks (thanks Eddy!) are a way that we can all exchange hints, tips and experiences with each other. Ours is a dying art as more and more items are produced mechanically or digitally. I'm amongst the first to use modern methods if a better finished article is the result - but if we forget the more traditional craft methods then a great source of skills will be lost forever, and if something isn't available commercially then people will simply assume it can't be produced.

Cowl ventilators

Ship's ventilators come in a bewilderingly large variety of shapes and sizes - once I have my workshop up and running I will attempt an article - for the time being here are some general tips.
The common type of ventilator with the parallel sided vertical pipe and hemispherical cowl can be relatively easily produced. A piece of appropriate sixed dowel or plastic/metal tube can form the upright pipe and the top can be made from a myriad of items. I usually scour the shops for things like half-round measuring spoons, balls that can be cut in half (ie cat's toys), the little 'egg' that Kinder toys come in, for tiny ventilators the 'press out' packets for pills, the top of deoderant bottles etc. Once assembled, filled and painted they look VERY professional and you'd never know what they were made from!

For the more unusually shaped ventilators it's often a case of really looking hard at 'found' objects and seeing if a part or all of them can be adapted. I made the ventilators for my 'Old Trafford' from sawn-up plumbing elbows and copper pipe soldered together - by cutting sections of the elbows that had the right curve on them and soldering them together you can achieve the older fashioned more elliptically shaped ventilator(phot below). For really complicated 'bell-mouthed' ventilators, an old method was to make a master and then press both sides of this as many times as required into a tray full of Plasticene or soft wax. Papier mache was then used in the half moulds, the two halves glued together then varnished and painted.

Gratings

Before the advent of commercially available gratings like these; http://www.modellingtimbers.co.uk/7.html I have to say that these items were the bain of my life!

When I was making models professionally I was invited for an interview at a now defunct model making company in Chiswick, London. They did a lot of restoration work on museum Admiralty ship models. They had a hand operated saw/jig for making grating strips - it was temperamental, antiquated and very complicated (due to the varying sizes of gratings needed) and was operated by a 70 year old guy, the only one who knew how to use it - he'd 'acquired' it from his days at the model making shop at Cammel Lairds and freely admited he should have lobbed it into the docks when he left!. There are methods of producing gratings by hand BUT they all require a fairly complicated jig and I have to say are best produced using a miniature bench saw and slotting jig. I will try to show you various methods at some time in the future. You will require a large swear box, vast quantities of wood, the patience of a saint and preferably a good quantity of alchohol!

all the best

Stuart

[djcf]

Hi Stuart,
Thanks for the advice regarding cowl vents. I will get the sizes I require & keep my eyes open for suitable globes to butcher!

Clark

[mjt60a]

Sorry not to have commented or requested anything yet but I have to say this is one of my favourite threads on Paddleducks, I always look forward to reading about the solutions to making parts (which are so often difficult or impossible to buy), please keep up the good work 
By the way, I'm sure we're all thinking it so I'll ask.....
any ideas on how to make 3-ball, wood capped railings, like waverley has?

[Stuart Badger]

Hi Mick!

thanks for the comments.

To produce wood capped railings the technique is to split the top rail horizontally to accomodate the top of the stanchion.

So first obtain stanchions (in this case 4 hole ones) of the right overall height. Before you think of fitting and rigging them make the top wooden rail. This needs to be made as an upper and lower half. So if the rail is a scale 3mm in depth you will need two pieces of 1.5mm thick material. Obviously where the rail is curved you will need to cut it over the plan or the completed deck edges having marked its position. When you have the two halves completed use double sided tape to hold the top and bottom half together and sand to the required profile.

Separate the two halves and mark the position of the stanchions on the lower half. Take the stanchions for that section of rail and carefully file off the top half of the ball (down to the hole in fact).

Then lay the bottom half of the marked rail in the correct position on the deck and use this as your guide to drill the holes through the bottom rail half into the deck (these hole need to be the diameter of the BOTTOM of the stanchions).

When you have completed this step then take a larger drill (the diameter of the ball) and open out the holes in the lower half of the rail.

Glue the two rail halves together, rig the wire in the stanchions and mount them and finally position your glued together wooden rail on the top of the stanchions (I usually use epoxy for this) You will find that because you used the top rail as your drilling guide everything will line up perfectly!

Hope this helps

Stuart

[mjt60a]

Brilliant! I should've thought of that, thanks 

[djcf]

Yes thats great, I will be doing some rails soon I hope

[R.G.Y.]

I have been away and may have missed somthing but, the formula for stairs when I was making them by hand many years ago was, twice the rise plus the going should be between 25 and 28 inches the length of a normal stride. So a companionway of only 1 inch going between steps = 12 inch too 13.5 inches rise. Or a normal domestic stair around 8 inch rise by 9 inch going. With ajustments to match the hight between floors or decks. Uesually 13 steps.

[R.G.Y.]

Cowl vents, I have used the handle from plastic milk containers, They come in differant shapes and sizes.

[Eddy Matthews]

Stuart,

Since your building another paddler yourself, I'd be very interested in seeing how you go about building your own paddlewheels, so when you get to that stage, please try and give a detailed account of what you do.....

Many thanks
Eddy

[djcf]

Stuart,
I would be very interested also, maybe any ideas you may have for the wheel "hubs", as I dont have machining facilities to turn them up?

Clark

[Stuart Badger]

Hi All,
I will certainly give a step by step account of building 'Connaught's' paddle wheels. The only thing I will point out though is that they will obviously be to scale - and therefore very inefficient!

The wheels have 14 floats with a curved stroudly spoke - stacks of bracing between the rims and a horribly complicated hub/axle arrangment - but the basic principles will hold true. Having fretted 'Old Trafford's' wheels from solid brass sheet, I am determined this time to make the wheel spokes and rims in plasticard with brass for the various bearings on the paddle floats/arms etc. The paddle floats will be boxwood and I hope at 1/32 scale (which gives a wheel diameter of 321mm, or just over 1 foot) I can make as exact a replica to scale as possible. The reason for choosing such a large scale is that I am convinced that they just wont work at any smaller scale with that many floats.

I hope to make a start on them FAIRLY soon - but at the moment I am painting and fitting out the workshop in 100 degree heat! Which I have enlarged slightly so as to accomodate the model!

As for hubs clark - well I was looking at some baby's buggies in the town yesterday and some of the wheel centres look very useful to me - in fact many of the small Greek children here may be learning to walk sooner than they think!
All the best

Stuart