Good to see you back working on this one Robin.

Its stood the test of the years pretty well from what you say.

That lamp you have sounds like a real bargain and looks very versatile.

Tony

Nice to see you back on this one Robin

Mark

Very well done - I might try this casting method next time.

Well here we are again at last (and I wasn’t expecting it to be anywhere near this long a time!) Not only is the Ferrari completed, apart from the display base that is (and an unexpected extra to finish it off – more on that to come in the Ferrari build diary later), but there have also been a couple of extra models built in the mean time as well. One of them, the Mars Lander has a build diary already started, but neglected for some time due to family medical tragedies, as has the memorial diary to my younger brother Andy with his DelPrado Bounty model. There is another diary to come soon with a third model now completed featuring a dog in his red aeroplane (and it’s NOT Snoopy!) .
Anyway, the old girl has at long last made it back to the workbench along with some new tools and gizmos to make her passage a lot easier! Now I’m a pensioner I can afford some luxuries!!!
As forecast all those years ago, the next section is indeed the Forechannels, which were last seen (minus the notches for the deadeyes) as shown in Photo 1. Both the channels had been cut to size and the ends shaped with the groove for the decorative edging also ground in. There was one last piece of shaping to complete however – as shown in Photo 2, the back edge which fits against the hull is not actually straight – it has a concave curve in it to fit the curvature of the hull as it begins to swing in towards the bow. The pre-curved channel is seen at the top, at the bottom is a thin card template created after using one of those multi pin contour thingies used for skirting boards and similar – plus a bit of trial and error until it fitted just right. In the centre is a 1mm plasticard second template with that curve pencilled in from the card template ready to be ground down with the rotary tool and its sanding drum. Photos 3 and 4 are really reversed in order. Photo 3 shows the port side channel with the curve sanded down by the same drum and with the deadeye notches laboriously filed out with the diamond dust flat file. The second channel (although in actual fact it became the third) would prove to be far easier with one of those new tools I mentioned! The little pencilled ‘T’s are marking where the tiny ring bolts have to go in. Photo 4 shows how that curve was created with the plasticard template tightly pressed against the wooden channel in the mini vice. The excess wood was then sanded away via the drum until it matched up with the template. The first test fitting onto the hull is shown in Photo 5. Two holes were drilled into the rear of the channel and a pair of 0.5mm brass rods superglued into them. Corresponding holes were then drilled into the (extremely thin) square moulding which runs just above the gun port lids (easier said than done!). This was the point where I discovered a ‘slight’ problem! The size of the channel and the placement of the deadeye strops had been worked out from the drawings in the excellent Alan McGowan book on the Victory and her restoration. Doing that of course relied on the actual placement of the gun ports themselves being just as accurate – as it turned out, that was not exactly what I got. The actual kit parts for the forechannels are slightly bigger than my replacements with the cut outs also a little different. The result was that a couple of the cut outs were bang in the centre of the gun ports. The ones towards the aft were ‘do-able’ as the slope in the chains would carry them clear of the gun barrel but the more vertical ones up forward would be a real problem. I had a go at trying to move the cut outs by filling in the bad ones and re-cutting new ones but as you’ll see in a later photo it didn’t quite work, if the new cut out was going into part of the old one the glued in filler simply flew out again. In the end there was only one other option – the starboard channel was re-assigned to the port and I had to make up a replacement one for the starboard. With the new cut outs filed out it was time to make up the ring bolts which sit inboard of the deadeyes. Incidently, the term ‘Deadeyes’ was, I’d always thought, because the three holes looked like a face with staring dead eyes. Not so in fact! I recently got a really useful little book on the Victory full of lovely clear photos and it appears that the deadeyes are so termed because the rigging ropes which connect the upper one to the lower are tied off in a knot before running up and down and then tied off on the shroud rope. Because the rigging cannot move without being adjusted by hand it is termed ‘dead’. Just a bit of useless information for those interested!
The ringbolts are shown during construction in Photo 6, those heavy duty jaws in the photo are actually two of the eyebrow tweezers from the set I got to help bend the parts of the Mars Lander. Photo 7 illustrates the same bolt after snipping off the 0.4mm brass wire and having been bathed in my new blackening solution. The main problem I’ve found with chemical blackening is getting the brass to go black after it has been soldered. The old ‘Blacken It’ solution used to work great but the company producing it went out of business some years ago. My Phillips Cold Blue for gun barrels only works on steel but not brass (or solder) and the other one I tried, the American Birchwood Brass Black works great on brass (and also copper and bronze) but won’t touch the solder. I finally found the one shown in Photo 8 on ebay, called ‘Novacan Black Patina’, this was designed to be used on lead profiles used in stained glass windows and such like and will happily blacken both lead based solder and brass at the same time. As you can see from Photo 7, it does a good job creating a real ‘wrought iron’ effect on brass. The other part of the deadeye is, of course, the wooden deadeye itself. To turn these bare wood parts black as well I used a tin of Rustins Ebony Wood Dye as seen in Photo 9. This is a spirit based dye which won’t raise the grain in wooden items unlike water based dyes, and to colour the deadeyes I simply pour enough of the dye to cover the deadeyes in one of the little plastic resin mixing cups and leave them overnight before draining the dye off and back into the tin, leaving the now black deadeyes to dry off on a piece of toilet tissue. The before and after can be seen in Photo 10. Next came the manufacturing of the iron strops. Photo 11 shows one of the new tools I acquired to make the job a little easier. These special pliers are designed to impart a nice curve onto straight wire which saves having to bend it around a suitable rod or cylinder (just getting lazy now!) A few rough guesses finds the exact point on the plier jaws to create the exact fit, mark that with a permanent marker pen and its easy from there on. My old deadeye jig is still going strong, just a deadeye permanently nailed into a base with another nail at the point where the strop makes a ring for the chain to hitch onto. Photos 12 to 14 illustrate the procedure: hook the curved wire over the deadeye groove, then using long nosed pliers crimp the two sides of the wire below the deadeye and then loop one end of the wire around the bottom nail and crimp it in tight before snipping off the excess where the yellow line is shown. Photo 15 shows the entire procedure along with the long nosed pliers used to effect the crimping. Having got it all nice and tight, you then have to gently prise it apart again to insert a wooden deadeye in the big loop and then insert the strop and deadeye into a mini vice as seen in Photo 16 and gently squeeze it until the two ends meet up again at which point they can be soldered together. The finished items are shown in Photo 17, the soldered joins having been filed down flat, the one on the right having also been blackened in the Novacan Black. That then left just the smaller (or tiny) little deadeyes to do. I forget what size these are, its either 2mm or 2.5mm, either way, the procedure is the same, just much more fiddly . The original wooden jig for these smaller ones was rapidly wearing out as the pliers were gouging out the softwood base so I bought a block of good old English Oak and made this the first jig to go on it as shown in Photo 18. Instead of having a small deadeye nailed down as before I drilled and inserted a piece of brass rod the same diameter as the groove on the deadeye. The small strops can be seen in the photo with the bigger ones in the cup above, they were all kept under a layer of isopropyl alcohol until needed to clean off any oily residue before soldering. Photo 19 will give you a sense of the scale of these little so and so’s, (more than one of them had to be hunted for on the workroom floor!) The full family of deadeyes is shown glued into the black painted channel in the final Photo 20, they are just awaiting the copper decorative edging to be fitted on (which comes in the next instalment). In the insert is that repair job on the first channel I mentioned earlier. The slot in the middle isn’t new, it was just the only one that was in the right place!
So in the following instalment the replacement channel is produced using another new gizmo which is proving very useful, and the metal chains and brackets are begun to complete this section.
Until then, Happy Modelling to you All!

Robin.