Still at it, but slowly.

I'm still here. Slow progress on the model building front, but modelling takes a back seat to Real Life. My main focus right now is on the Blue Toon, the Peterhead pilot boat. In my last post I'd just attached the keel. Planking has started now, and I had a good few days to work on the boat with hardly any interruptions for hockey and such. That came to a grinding halt on Sunday when I ran out of planks, so the order of work for this week is to make more. I plan on doing that Tuesday night.

Here's what Blue Toon looks like now:

Whoa, 3 months without a post. Where has the time gone? Work, Christmas, and hockey mostly. I've been busy busy busy, with not much time for model work.

The last post was on the MTB. Nothing has been done to that recently. Over Christmas I did some work around the house, and have re-purposed (Lordy I hate that word) a room in the house. What used to be a room full of hockey gear, is now only partly full of hockey gear, and room was made for a new desk I managed to score just before Christmas. It's very nice, almost 7 feet long, and perhaps a bit over 2 feet wide. It has two nice big drawers for holding folded plans, notepads and such, and is a nice surface for model making. The MTB has been moved there and I hope to get some work done on it soon.

What I've been working on lately is the Blue Toon. If you've read this blog before, you'll know that I spent 50 hours making a nice fully framed hull for the boat. Just as it was being made ready to be planked, the damn thing warped, so badly it couldn't be saved. 50 hours of work down the tubes. On Christmas day it went in the fireplace, and it burned real good. Not for 50 hours though.

Anyway, I started over, but this time with bulkheads instead of frames. I cut all the bulkheads out of 1/8" plywood, cut the keel out of 1/8" ply as well, slotted the bulkheads, built a building board, set in the bulkheads, slotted the keel, glued everything together, and in about 5 hours I was back to where I was with the first attempt. Here are some pictures, first of the building board I made, then some shots of the bulkheads and keel being put in place.

The building board, by the way, can be used again with a different boat. I just need to remove the cross pieces and move them to wherever they need to be, then fasten them down again. I'm working on a new similar board that will have two slots running lengthwise, with each cross piece being held down with bolts. That way, I can simply slide the cross piece to where it needs to be.

More later.

Okay, MTB update. Not an awful lot of progress, due to the aforementioned vacation. Also, on return from vacation, I only had a short time before hockey tryouts started for my sons. That was a huge time sink, and I haven't had much free time to speak of in weeks.

However, the MTB hull is done, shafts installed, rudders installed, servo tray installed (servo is just sitting there for the moment), battery tray installed (battery just sitting there), motor mounts and motors in place, and rudder linkages are being hooked up. I have an ESC, and next payday will pick up a radio receiver.

In the first picture below, the wheelhouse, which is just started, is just sitting in the spot where it will soon be glued down.

Wow, almost three months since my last post. I am still alive, it's just that I went on vacation shortly after my last post, and when I came back I sort of forgot I had this blog. I've been doing a bit of model building of late, so I'll post a picture or two tonight. Assuming I remember.

Slow month

I'm still around, and still modelling. I know it's been 5 weeks since my last post, but I haven't forgotten the blog. The weather is the problem, mostly. Summer tends to be so short here that I get home from a day in the office and have no desire to sit inside working on models. I want to be outside. I will occasionally take a model outside and work on it while sitting on the front porch, but in general, not much has been done lately.

Well, as I had feared, the Blue Toon is toast. John said that the hull can be saved, but it will need a lot of work. He had told me when we started this project that this hull didn't really suit itself well to a full-frame build, but he wanted to go ahead anyway so he could teach me the technique.

So, the hull is twisted, and could conceivably be saved, but the faster solution is to start again, but using plywood bulkheads rather than by building frames. The work will be faster and it won't warp. Tomorrow I'll make copies of the hull lines, and start cutting out the templates for the bulkheads, which I can start working on this weekend using some 1/8" plywood that I have in the basement.

In MTB news, the hull painting is finished. There was just a very small amount of bleeding of the light gray paint onto the black of the lower hull, so that will be easy to touch up. Portholes are installed, and now it's time to get back to work on the wheelhouse.

Supplies

I took a couple hours off work this morning so I could go to the local hobby shop. I picked up a few supplies for the MTB:

- a piece of flat brass, 1/4" wide, to make P-brackets for the prop shafts;
- a package of 1/16" brass rod, for all kinds of things;
- some 5/8" brass tube, for torpedo tubes;
- some 3/32" tube to make stanchions;
- assorted other crap to make other stuff.

We are very lucky here in Halifax to have an excellent hobby shop - Maritime Hobbies and Crafts - owned by two guys who do a lot of scratch-building. Because they scratch-build, they put a lot of effort into making sure their store is stocked with everything you might want for your projects. If they weren't here I'm sure I'd be placing a lot more online orders than I do now.

What they're less good at, which is why I place orders with Cornwall Model Boats, is stocking such things as props, shafts, motors, couplings etc. The R/C model ship community here is fairly small, and I think it's largely the model railroad community that drives the need for scratch-building supplies.