Practical masting ruled my day, but only if 'ruling' means driving me so far round the bend that I met myself coming back the other way. Honestly, some days I'm quite clever but other times...
I planned the rigging of the various hanging blocks, starting with the one coloured blue. I filled my tiny desk with the equipment and tools for rigging. Then I realised that I would have to paint that section of the mast first.
It's supposed to be black from the cap down to the rigging stop that I put on last night. My brush painting has not been a great success and I was resolved to paint the mast with my airbrush. I dragged out my airbrushing toolbox but without putting the rigging stuff away. Did I mention that I have a tiny desk? The desk was now as crowded and chaotic as the inside of my tiny mind.
I masked off the area that was not going to be painted and reached for the sanding sealer. Then, realising that I needed to seal the entire mast, whether or not it was to be painted, I took the masking off again.
I applied two coats of sanding sealer each followed by a bit of a rub down with OOOO steel wool. Smooooth!
While the sealer coats were drying I returned to the rigging of the topsail yard standing tie block. (A rope running through that non-moving block will support the yard that holds the topsail.) The block is quite small at 3mm end to end before sanding to shape.
Here's an idea, thinks I. I'll make it easier to find on my hopelessly cluttered workspace by threading a piece of brass wire through it. (A better idea would have been to tidy up but the brass did help a little.)
At last, a year after receiving this seizing-serving machine custom designed and made by one of my sons mostly with his 3D printer, I got to use it for real. You'll probably have noticed that I'm not a great fan of complicated machinery but this WAS a gift. And I was using it in manual mode (it's only electrified for serving purposes).
Could I have done the job without it. Not quickly and certainly not today, when I've dropped everything that I've touched then dropped it again while trying to pick it up and then fallen over!
Could I have done it at all? No, to be honest, I couldn't. It's very handy but also very unfamiliar so this was another drag on my allotted time today.
The idea of a seizing machine is that I don't have to use knots. Real sailors didn't because a knot reduces the strength of a rope by about half. They would join two ends by splicing, weaving the strands around each other so the rope became a loop with no loss of strength if done correctly.
Then seizing would be wrapped around the loop at appropriate points to hold it all together by friction rather than the knotting process - which also uses friction but lots of bending too. Am I making sense here? Well I can't splice sewing thread and never will so my 'splicing consists of gluing the ends together with CA which lasts long enough for me to seize over the top of the join.
The picture above shows the first stage and the photo of the machine shows how it was done.
Here’s a close up.
I drew the thread around a 0.9mm drill bit and wrapped a black thread (so you can see it) around the two lines as close to the drill bit as possible. The machine rotated both of the croc clips in the same direction so that I could feed the seizing line into place.
A seizing is tied off by pulling its small lines back underneath the spirally wound part. I can't do that on a 1mm seizing so it was CA to the rescue once again.
I inserted the block into the crotch of the two ends and glued them to the grooves with a dab of CA. I measured the size of the loop that would be required to go over the cap. I constructed a loop on the block to be the same size, joining the ends ('splicing') at a point that would be under the next seizing.
Unfortunately somewhere along the line I lost a millimetre or two. When I tried the finished item for size the block resisted going over the mast cap on the way to its final resting place. This annoyed me slightly
and I gave it a bit of a push thinking that I was going to have to start again if it broke and I was gonna have to start again if it wouldn’t pass so it didn’t matter which.
The application of brute force and ignorance stretched the thread and it DID go over the cap, unfortunately there was no way it was going to go back. Back over that mast cap. That
as-yet-unpainted mast cap.
I applied the seizing above the block to tighten it up and make it lie right and shellacked the whole thing so that it would appear to be bearing a heavy weight. As I did that I reflected that all of this work will be obscured by the black paint that was soon to go over the top of it. Add it to the list of 'unseen when finished' items we slave over.
I’d been neglecting to take decent photos all day but I was taking some on the phone to send to my son the machinist so they will have to do.
Like a dog playing a violin, the wonder isn't that it's done well, but that it's done at all!
It's far from perfect but all things considered, especially that this is the first time on that machine, it's a reasonable beginning.
It's all painted black now so It doesn't really matter anyway.
Despite all the tiny annoyances if the day, I'm damned pleased with this block and its strop. It's a pity that it took about three hours to do but remember half of that was due to my miniscule desk and the problems it caused.
I masked off the mast again and assembled airbrush, compressor and extractor booth and prepared to spray paint.
I had hoped when I took up wooden modelling that I'd be able to avoid the faff of airbrushing with the irritating half hour of masking and half hour of cleaning up sandwiching the twenty seconds of spraying, not to mention getting all the gear out of the cupboard and putting it all away again. Did I mention that my desk is very small?
However, it turned out that spraying on wood is as much of a game-changer as spraying on plastic was. I laid down a coat of paint so thin and even that it looks like, well paint. Paint at 1/64 scale. It's painted but it's clearly still wood underneath.
A second shot because I was so pleased with the result.
That sheave entry looks perfect now, doesn't it? And the cleat looks like it grew there.
This is actually the Stynylrez primer. I was going to spray Tamiya acrylic over the top but really, why bother when this dark grey is a perfect match with the wales and it's tougher than Tamiya anyway. I will be edge highlighting as I did on the rails etc and with a bit of luck I'll take a photo of that and show you tomorrow.
