Many thanks for that Alan, my own endoscope has been ordered from the Far East now so I'll have more playing around with that when it arrives, but as you said, surprisingly good quality imaging for something so cheap!

Hi again to all and as promised, back to those crew figures!

In the last crew instalment we finished up with the five initial figures glued to a long base composed of a length of model kit sprue (MkIV Battle Tank probably!) The first task after that was to take another three sections of that same sprue to produce the casting frame. Unlike my previous figure casting experiments I was turning this one literally on its head and gravity flowing the molten metal down through the figures rather than up through the base/legs. This entailed adding a series of round sprue pieces from the top of the head to the upper sprue and also adding two end uprights before finally gluing the plastic frame to a section of square wooden strip. You can see these parts in the various mould photos but most clearly at the end in the final comparison group photo.
Once the frame was complete I made up the pre-constructed Perspex mould box, all the four sides being held together and to the base with cheapo masking tape. In Photo 1 the first 100ml (or 100gm) of silicon moulding rubber has been mixed in with the seventy five drops of catalyst (should really be eighty drops but I found that five less gives me enough time to get everything in place before the rubber begins to cure – much longer in fact!) After pouring in the rubber, the figures on their frame were carefully lowered in by long nosed tweezers with the wooden block sliding down the face of the Perspex into the rubber solution. As the frame began to sink into the rubber the wood block was gripped tight against the far side using spring grip tweezers. Also visible here are the pair of plastic grips which are holding a further two sections of square wood strip in place against the end walls. You’ll see why in a moment!
Photo 2 was taken about 48 hours later after the rubber block had fully cured. The four sides of the box have been carefully folded flat after the corner bits of masking tape were removed. This is a fairly delicate operation with the Perspex sides being literally ‘peeled’ away from the grip of the cured rubber. The two end wood strips are still in position here.
As you can see in Photo 3, the liquid rubber has flowed over parts of the figures before curing. The excess rubber now needs to be trimmed back in order to provide a true ‘half mould’ before the second half can be added on top. This was done with the corner of a nice sharp safety razor blade and at the same time the corners were cut back to produce a ‘shelf’ in each one. This can be seen in Photo 4 along with the reason the wooden strips were also set in the rubber at the beginning! In this photo they have been removed to leave two rectangular spaces, one at each end of the block. When the second half of the mould is poured on top, it will flow into these two holes along with the corner shelves to make locating pegs, which will keep the two halves together in the right alignment during the casting. Without these pegs or lugs, the two halves could move out of position causing a misshaped casting. At this time, the ‘meniscus’ or raised lip around the edges of the block were trimmed away with a pair of sharp scissors. There was no actual need to do that, but it just looks neater!
The shot in Photo 5 looks almost identical, but if you look closely at the rubber block you can just make out a ‘greasy’ looking film over it. This is the mould release agent or “Silikonformen-Trenncreme" as the label describes it (guess where that is made!) Called a silicone separating paste in the GB part of the label, it is in fact a form of high grade Vaseline by the texture of it. This was applied with a cotton bud to leave a thin skin over the rubber face of the block, not forgetting the locating lug holes of course. The effect of the skin is to prevent the two halves of the rubber mould from bonding to each other. During one of the mould making sessions on Messines I forgot to add this on and only remembered it whilst watching the second half curing away! Fortunately, I did get the two halves apart with the help of a sharp craft knife! I think I might need to start making tick off box check lists!
There was no photo of the second half of the mould in the box, I was tempted but all you can see is a rust red rectangular block in a Perspex box! So in Photo 6 we have the two cured halves of the mould with the original plastic and wood former removed and in between the blocks. There is one final task to perform on the mould before the first casting attempt, which is shown in Photo 7. The dusty appearance of the casting face is caused by applying a thin coat of a special talcum powder which is designed to improve the flowing of the molten white metal into and through the mould. In the very early days of home casting the Prince August instructions said just to use common or garden talcum for this process but nowadays there is a special product just for the purpose (and much more expensive of course!)
In Photo 8 you can finally see something that I left out of all the preceeding instalments on white metal casting – the Lee Melting Pot. This is the middle of the range version, which I bought from Hobby’s some years ago. It cost about £70 back then but is now over the £100 mark! I looked on the Hobby’s website a couple of days ago to find that out but they now have a smaller one on sale for about the same price I paid for this one. It’s no smaller in diameter though, if you imagine this one cut in half through the middle, that’s the smaller version! To be honest, I’ve hardly ever had mine anywhere near half full so the smaller one would be just as good and cheaper to run too! The actual heating element is built into the bottom of the pot and strangely there is no on-off switch, plug it in to the mains and its on! Just visible on the top of the metal box behind the pot is a black thermostat knob to control the temperature of the melted metal whilst the handle sticking out forwards with the thicker grip is the release to let the molten metal flow out of the ‘tap’ underneath the pot at the front. Lifting the handle simply raises the solid steel plug to allow the metal out.
Photo 9 illustrates what the inside of the melting pot looks like once it has cooled down after a few castings. The orange looking surface is composed of a powdery waste, which from the colour is something to do with the oxidisation that takes place during the heating process. This can be loosened with a penknife blade and shaken out. I found out recently that once the pot heats up, this ‘slag’ is another inch or so deep and can be carefully ‘shovelled out’ with an old teaspoon which is worth doing to remove as much of the contaminated waste as possible. Eventually, after dozens of castings the metal needs to be topped up with a new fresh supply. I think I’m getting near that time myself now so I’ll be saving up my pennies for another three bars from Hobby’s soon! Until then however we continue recycling as much as possible and in Photo 10 the last spares from the collection of re-useables is seen going back into the melting pot (literally in this case!) The ‘stepped’ blocks seen here are the runners from the Messines MkIV tank track Spuds.
In Photo 11, the mould is ready for the first pouring attempt. The two halves are held together by a couple of Prince August spring clips with two sections of hardboard placed in between the clips and the rubber to even out the gripping pressure, without those plates the mould could be squashed out of shape. The mould itself is resting on an upturned biscuit tin lid, any drips can be swept off back into the pot once solidified. Photo 12 is one I was quite pleased to get, my camera is right hand only and I had to operate that with my right hand and lift the pouring handle with my left so everything was a.. I mean back to front! The photo shows the molten white metal streaming out of the melting pot tap and into the Prince August ladle. Whilst a better quality of metal would flow into the mould if it came direct from the tap, it is simply not accurate enough to aim the stream into the narrow pouring trough. If a tiny bit of slag gets in the way the stream can shoot off at any angle so the metal is transferred from the ladle to the mould just as soon as there is enough in it.
The first pouring attempt is shown in Photo 13. As soon as I took this shot, I already knew that the casting would not be perfect. If you look at the rapidly cooling slab of white metal you can see that the ends are rounded as are the long side edges too. This indicates that the metal cooled down too quickly, this is often the case, especially on the first pouring, which is going into a cold block of rubber.
As you can see in Photo 14, the suspicion was right! The metal had flowed down through most of the mould but a couple had missing parts to their legs and none had any arms at all. The final large photo illustrates the results of the first three casts. As you can see, as the mould itself was warming up with each pouring, the metal was penetrating further and further into the recesses of the mould. This is especially noticeable on the musket casting on the right, from almost nothing, the second and third pourings each went further up the stock whilst the figures were beginning to get at least parts of their arms coming out. This was as far as I got on this occasion, white metal casting, to me at least, is still more of an art than a science and the relationship between the temperature of the metal and the mould and the actual condition of the metal mixture is critical to success.
I have since cut some small channels from the ends of the arms to the base bar with a little more success but it’s still those arms, which are proving the most difficult. Commercial white metal castings have the huge advantage of being cast in a centrifugal mould which forces the liquid metal down those pesky small bits whilst I’m relying on good old fashioned gravity. I’m toying with the idea now of maybe making a small mould with just a variety of separate arms, and design the next group of figures as armless . Anyhow, I’ve now added a couple of plastic arms onto one of the Marine figures just to try it out and I’ll get him painted up for the next instalment.

Until then, Happy Modelling to you all!


Robin.

Many thanks to Kev and Alan for those kind words!

Since I lost my full time job, time is something I do have! Unfortunately, it's the money that I don't!! (Which is why I do so much scratch building with 'throw away' materials!

Kev, you're right about the sand moulding technique, that is more normally used for larger castings, you'd need a sand like talcum powder to get detail on a 1/100 scale figure! I think they still produce engine blocks by that method even today, and the sand method dates back centuries!
Two part silicone IS more usually known for making resin casts, (something I'd like to try one day!) but the red silicone I use here is a special high temperature version specifically designed for white metal casting.
If you have a look on the Hobby's website (www.hobby.uk.com) and check out the Moulding section (at least that's what it comes under in the Hobby's catalogue), you'll find two kinds of Silicone Rubber:
Silicone Rubber Mould Making Compound and White Silicone Rubber Mould Making Compound. The SRMMC is the red one called RTV/HB (Room Temperature Vulcanising). This one can also be used for resins and plaster but will withstand temperatures of 330c. The White SRMMC is a much softer and more flexible compound for use with low temperature liquids ie, resin.
The beauty of the white metal casting is that there is absolutely no waste other than the oxidation on the surface of the melted metal. Unlike the resin sprues which are waste material, the white metal sprues get melted back down to re-use.
Although I now use the super-duper melting pot which took a lot of saving up for! I began casting with an old saucepan on a camping gas cooker stove (remember the old things with a blue cylinder and a collapsable cooking pot rest!)
I would definately recommend having a go at it if you can - it's a very useful way to make lots of identical parts for models!!

Robin

Hi again to All and many belated thanks for the comments above! Its been a long time since I posted the last installment although I have actually been pottering along on the old girl since the Scramble diorama was completed all those weeks back. I'm still working on that diary though which has been taking up my time as well.
I have done a few more crew figures since last time, these are however trying out some simple conversion work on the basic plastic figures just to see how they compare with the cast ones. I hope to get some pics of them up as soon as I've painted them.
Anyway, here's the update on the Victory with the first part of the Mizzen Chainwales or Channels.

Using both the McKay and McGowan books for reference, the dimensions of the Mizzen Chainwales were worked out for 1/100 scale and came to 60mm by 12mm, which, for once did actually correspond exactly with the DelPrado parts supplied on the channel plywood fret! Two lengths of this size were then cut from the 1m length of 15mm by 2mm Sapele strip from CMB. As before on the little mini Mizzen chainwales, the ends of the ‘plank’ were shaped with a slight rounded indent using a sanding drum on the rotary tool as can be seen in Photo 1. The positions of the deadeyes were then marked onto one of the lengths and the two were then clamped together in the mini vice. The single marks were then extended across both pieces and the slots were filed out using the flat diamond dust rat tail file as also shown in this photo. Photos 2 and 3 illustrates the slots completed, both in the vice and separated out.
As well as the six deadeyes on each channel, there are also a set of four diminutive ring bolts and rings set into the top surface behind the deadeyes. Up to now, I have made the various ringbolts set into the hull sides out of 0.5mm brass wire but for these tiny little things, even that is too large a diameter! I eventually bought a reel of 0.3mm copper wire on Ebay to fashion these out of. This wire is almost ridiculously cheap - £1.75 for (I think) twenty five metres. The only problem which I found out later was that the copper is unaffected by the Blacken-it chemical bath so whilst the iron rings were done that way, the copper ring bolts had to be painted the old fashioned way with Admiralty Metal Black. The method for making up the ring bolts is really simple, the only tools required are a length of brass rod of the inside diameter of the ring, a mini vice (although you could just use pliers) and a smallish pin vice. With the brass rod clamped in the mini vice, bend a short length of the copper wire around it to form a loop and then clamp that loop in the chuck of the pin vice as shown in Photo 4. Then simply pass the loop over the brass rod in the vice as in Photo 5 and twist the pin vice around and around (either direction is fine) until the copper wire is tightened onto the rod as seen in Photo 6. The loop can then be slid off the rod to leave a perfect ringbolt. The ‘spiral’ part doesn’t matter as this is all hidden away inside the wood when it gets glued in place! Photo 7 illustrates the finished ringbolts, painted with the Admiralty Metal Black, each with a 0.5mm blackened brass ring inserted in through the ring and squeezed shut (see what I mean about the size up against the penny! ) A bolt with a freshly formed brass ring is shown in Photo 8 before being dunked in the chemical bath.
Before the ringbolts and deadeyes could be glued in place, the edge of the channel had to be grooved in order to fit in the decorative beading as shown in Photo 9. The beading is formed with 0.5mm copper wire. On the mini channels I was able to create the grooves using the rotary tool with a diamond dust router bit by hand. On these longer channels however (and the even bigger mainmast and foremast channels to come) I needed a more controllable method. I’ll try and photograph the process when I get to the larger channels but essentially what I managed to do was to put the router bit in the rotary tool and then clamp the tool upside down in my old mini drill bench stand, setting the height of the drill so that the router bit was just proud of the stand base. Then with the tool running I was able to slowly pass the wooden channel past the router, allowing it to grind a shallow groove along the thickness of the wood to take the copper wire. It’s a sort of upside down mini router, still a little hit and miss with the control of the wood but I might try and make a ‘proper’ work surface to allow the work-piece to be fed along against a runner or something similar to improve the control (and stop it spinning away from my hands!) Anyway, it worked in the end! In this photo the copper beading has been super glued in place, the excess at the ends snipped off and the ‘nub’ ground back flush with the wood using a diamond dust abrasive wheel in the rotary.
If you look closely at the deadeyes however, you might be able to see one slight mistake! The forth one in from the left had swivelled around in the strop as it was being super glued into place in the slot. Unfortunately, some glue had managed to wick it’s way into the strop and the deadeye was fixed firmly in place. Left like that it was going to completely muck up the rigging joining it to the deadeye above so something was going to have to be done. I tried using pliers to break the grip of the glue and rotate the deadeye around but no joy so the only alternative was to fill in the three original holes and try and re-drill another three in the correct orientation. Before I tried anything, I first did a test fit of the channel on the hull. Two tiny holes were drilled into the decorative square strip to match the twin brass rods and the channel, after painting the copper beading was gently push fitted into place as seen in Photo 10. It’s a really nice tight fit and after checking the position against the drawings I wriggled it out again to try and fix that deadeye. In Photo 11 the deadeye has been given a filling with some wood filler ready to be sanded down and re-drilled. In the next instalment you’ll be able to see how successful the attempt was and also find out that there was a much easier way to do it than the wood filler (courtesy of Gandale’s SOTS (or actually POTS)!

Until then, Happy Modelling to you All!


Robin

Ah,
After posting above reply, pics appeared perhaps forum is on a go slow
Looking good mate
Regards
Alan

Hi mate,
Yes
Didn't realise there had been an update
I havnt posted anything in ages

Great to see you back working on the old girl Robin, i'll be hooked on your progress till the very end.... Great work and looking fab....

Regards

Alan

Hi again to Dave, Alan and Martyn, it's nice to be slowly getting back into the diary again! Just waiting at the moment to go up to the local Tesco to price up their SD cards, after the Victory diary up to date, the Brandywine and Messines, not to mention the Scramble diaries, my 2Gb card has just announced it's full!
I've been going back through the card and deleting any blurred photos to get some space back but I don't trust leaving everything just on the computer hard drive, I've been caught like that before! I like to leave the card as another back-up with all the 'raw' photos on. Thankfully of course, the rest of the Scramble diary pics are all on the card waiting to be copied off. Anyway, back to the old girl!

OK then, carrying on from the last pics, with the wood filler given overnight to dry, I tried to re-drill the deadeye holes in the correct orientation. This worked fine with the top two holes and sort of worked well with the bottom one. To be exact, the new hole was drilled through ok, but it was so close to the filled in one that the filler came away! This was where I remembered Gandales excellent section on his Sovereign of the Seas when for a short time she became the Porcupine of the Seas due to the hundreds of cocktail sticks glued into her hull for trenails! I suddenly realised that was what I should have done in the first place here – forget the wood filler, just bung in (sorry, carefully glue into place) a cocktail stick into the old hole in the deadeye – should have done all three that way, far easier as shown in Photo 1. In Photo 2 the glued stick has been snipped off and sanded down to the deadeye face. A coat of Admiralty Black and you wouldn’t even know it was there! I didn’t take a ‘family portrait’ of the port channel, but here’s its twin for the starboard side in Photo 3 showing everything required except the copper beading – wooden channel with brass rod locating pins, dyed black wooden deadeyes, copper eyebolts with brass rings and a set of brass deadeye strops already blackened. One handy technique which I didn’t mention earlier is to bend some thin wire (I used the 3mm copper here) and pass it up through two of the eyebolt holes to make a simple handle, this way you can paint both sides of the channel and the edges at the same time! (Photo 4)
Once the channels had been painted and fitted into the hull it was time to look at another part of the channel, which doesn’t always appear in some manufacturers kits – the iron support brackets. The DelPrado basic kit doesn’t even mention them of course, even the Issue 1 publicity poster (which I use as a bookmark in the instructions folder) which shows far more bits and pieces on the prototype model than the kit ever had, doesn’t show them either! The basic plan of these brackets is shown in Diagram 5. I had thought that the main and fore channels had this type of bracket and the mizzen channel had a much simpler type, more like a modern shelf bracket but checking up on various sources revealed that all three sets of channels have the same type – a flat ‘Z’ shaped vertical support probably welded onto a horizontal bar which is chamfered off towards each end. I toyed with the idea of making these out of plasticard but decided in the end to go for brass strip, mainly because bending that ‘Z’ shape would be easier in the pliable brass. Unfortunately I had some strip that was too small and some more that was too thick so an order to Eileen’s Emporium for a length of 1.0 x 0.5mm x 25cm and two lengths of 1.0 x 0.3mm x 25cm had to go off. Brass strip was far cheaper in my youth I must say!
The first task was to cut a thin strip of white card which was slid up tight against the hull, butting up against the end of the previously glued on channel. Using the underside of the channel a pencil line was drawn onto the card which gave the correct angle between the hull and the channel. Cutting off the top of the card at this angle and fitting the card back under the channel again, the positions of the decorative beading below and the raised wale below that were marked in and cut away with a sharp knife leaving a tight fitting guide or template. The outer edge of the channel was then added and the excess card beyond cut away to leave the final shape as shown in Photo 6. Onto this guide the shape of the bracket was drawn on as also seen here. Now it was time for another jiggy thing! Using the card template and scrap wood, a three dimensional copy of the hull and channel was glued together as depicted in Photos 7 and 8. With this I could now start to fashion the brackets out of the brass strip and test fit each one against the jig with a fair chance they would also fit straight onto the ship! In Photo 9 you can see the two parts of the first bracket alongside the measuring line drawn onto the jig base. The line in the middle designates where to file a groove in the base strip which you can just make out in the photo. The thinner ‘Z’ support ‘clicks’ into this groove prior to soldering. As you can see in Photo 10, the first bracket was held together in the helping hands crocodile clips (sorry about the focussing, all that shiny metal plays havoc with the auto setting!). This worked well on the first one which was obviously down to sheer luck as the remainder were so difficult to get into position that I developed a far easier method as you’ll see shortly! The first soldered bracket is shown in Photo 11 before I got to work on the chamfering of the base. In Photo 12, we’re into the mass production phase (well to be honest, eight is about as many as I can work on without going insane!) Here we have six of the base plates underway, if you look at the one still on the strip you’ll see that I started placing a small groove on the end of the strip, as well as in the centre part, I found this made it much easier to cut the strips to the same length, all you have to do is slide the snips up until the jaws ‘click’ into the groove and then squeeze. In this scale, trying to position the jaws over a pencil line which is actually below the top of the jaw, is not easy!
Photo 13 illustrates that better method of gripping the two parts of the bracket for soldering. I’m now only using one of the crocodile clips on the helping hands, the base plate is now held lightly (but firmly) in the mini vice, this makes manoeuvring the support into place much easier. The only change I made to this shot was to grip the support from the other side which then made it easier to position the soldering iron under the joint to heat up the brass and then apply solder to the top either side of the joint. Photo 14 shows all eight of the supports soldered together with one of them having been given a bath in the Blacken-it. This one is also shown in Photo 15 having a test fit on the jig. The iron effect was very nice but I just couldn’t get the Blacken-it to work as well on the solder joints as you can probably see in this shot. In the end, after much deliberating (and after I’d blackened all eight of the things) I decided to scrape away the iron effect back to the bare brass, give them all a coat of grey primer and hand paint them with the Admiralty Metal Black instead as shown in Photo 16. Finally, in Photo 17 Ooops, AND 18 the port side mizzen channel is finally supported by it’s four brackets. I can only assume the two gun crews behind the channel were really careful where they aimed those cannon!
In the next installment, adding the iron chains to the channel deadeyes.

Until then, Happy Modelling to you All!


Robin.

Great update Robin looking brilliant

Rgd Martyn