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Cabinet

October 21, 2012 / efoeth

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Now, that speaker building project I was talking about earlier was a good exercise for building a presentation cabinet. Damage to models is rare on shows but I get incredibly nervous when people are shaking hands above my model; even a minor hit can mean irreparable damage. Our local IPMS SIG Warships leader builds his own glass cases and blackmailed me to come to a few shows in exchange for a glass cabinet built at cost. Today I made a wooden base for the model using some left-over planks from my bookcase. It should protect the model against shows, transportation, and dust.

The plank was milled to size and I cut a small ledge for the glass case. The glass is 3.0mm thick and has a bit of room to manoeuver (also in case the wood works). Although my cats aren’t an enemy of my hobby—they haven’t caused any damage to my model—today I just couldn’t get the tiny bastard out of the frame; he’d bounce back immediately after being thrown a great distance across the living room.

The model is bolted to the plank by three nuts and bolts. Recall that I started with the WEM resin hull that I fitted with fixing bolts before adding new decks. The glass case is 80 cm wide so that it fits in most book cases (I refuse to admit it is made to fit an Ikea Ivar bookcase) and is 25 cm wide and high. That’s a bit wider than strictly required, but this size will fit my next project too. A seascape will be added once I’ve thoroughly exercised making seascapes.

Yes, I assure you, cat, we are quite safe from your friends here.

Orion; introduction

September 16, 2012 / efoeth

Next to my love to reproduce tiny ship parts in excruciating detail I also have a serious audio addiction. I spend nearly all my free hours listening to music, either in the background or sitting between my 5 large speakers, enjoying a great performance. I am (was?) very happy with these speakers but I also made the mistake of listening to a pair large KEF reference-series speakers outperforming my then-current speakers by a very wide margin. Of course, I couldn’t afford 5 of those speakers at all, so do-it-yourself project would ‘have to do’.

I read (part of) Dickason’s book, studied plans and building descriptions of many models, and read reviews of kit speakers. The most important thing I learned is that building a really good speaker of your own design will take many years of trial and error, studying, changing and tinkering and continuous revising. I already have a time-consuming hobby, so what I needed was a very good off-the-shelf design. Which one to use?

Getting good advice was difficult at first. Most audio magazines seem to have no understanding of electronics, acoustics and psychoacoustics. They’ll give good review to speaker cables and products that have no influence of the sound whatsoever. One of the more interesting and polemic websites running in the opposite direction is The Audio Critic, by Peter Aczel, who has written a few very interesting columns among which the seminal paper “The ten biggest lies in audio” which should be required reading for and adulated by every audio journalist. His wonderful review of the Orions carried a bit more weight and once intrigued I started noticing they are appreciated very well by people who design and build their own speakers and amplifiers (i.e., people who know what they are doing). Of course, I did pass the Orion website a few times, but was always taken aback a bit by the looks of the speaker; it’s not particularly becoming of speakers of expensive pedigree—not what I was aiming for —but let’s summarize it by saying they are not particularly easy on the eye. After reading up a bit I decided to buy the Orion plan set anyway, directly from the designer, Siegfried Linkwitz.

Introduction
The plan
Design changes
Signal processing
The listening room
Production
Listening

Custom Photoetch Set Part V

July 1, 2012 / efoeth

I’ve recently bought a new airbrush and started to experiment with painting. I thought I had the proper wash/rinse/primer order figured out but the primer didn’t hold well and the UP launchers and cordage reels are now ruined. I blame the Vallejo primer that doesn’t adhere to the Alpaka (neusilber) nor to the resin I used. Vallejo primer doesn’t spray as well as basic Humbrol enamels that give better adherence and scratch resistance; why even use a primer? Back to the etch.

I copied the ruined parts to a new fret and made some modifications.

This time I was prepared for the correct Autocad-to-Illustrator sequence, working more with lines with a given thickness to create meshes, no filling in Autocad but only in Illustrator; this new set was only a few hours of work. The UP-launcher design was one of the oldest and was redesigned. As I’m now more comfortable with soldering, I decided to add new funnel grills and I wanted to solder the cordage reels anyway because the glue bond isn’t that good. Other parts are some wooden gratings for the bridge, an oar rack, some spare pompom sights (I’m quickly running out as they damage easily) and new railing; why not have railing in brass?

Flag Lockers

June 3, 2012 / efoeth

This is a nice image from the Seaman’s pocket book of a few flags used by the signalmen, reproduction of the 1943 version. I thought it would be a nice idea to add some colours to the flag lockers.

Here’s a pic I took of HMS Belfast’s flag locker. The text on the top row is hidden in this image but reads P1 to P9 plus P0 for a few naval pendants. Most ships carried several of these lockers and images of HMS Hood before her final reconstruction show as many as 6 flag lockers, afterwards at least 4. The HMS Hood site even shows a flag locker in the wreckage but of a different type, which I cannot trace to any location at the moment. I did find images of the four flag lockers of the standard type as on HMS Belfast.

These are the small models. Note the larger openings on the one-but-lowest row. They worked out quite nicely (which isn’t a surprise as these are the second version after ironing out a few minor design errors).

Here you can see what flag goes what cell of the locker. As each cell is about 0.3 by 0.3 mm there is no room to paint anything but solid colour.

So I made a small colour map with the dominant colour. Yellow & red flags become orange, green & white light green, blue & white light blue, blue & yellow become green. Red & white may become pink so I decided they are folded such that only one colour shows. If adjacent colours are the same the flag will be ‘folded’ differently as well to keep the appearance of variation; the flags with more than two colours allowed for some variation.

I prepared some styrene strip (Plastruct) and added some colour. Here you can see blue, red, and black ‘flags’. These are for the one-but-lowest row, wide openings. For the other flags I painted the tip of the strips. These were cut to size with the chopper and inserted with tweezers. Sometimes they didn’t fit and had to be removed. Sometimes they could only be removed by drilling them in with a 0.3mm drill and carefully removing what’s left. I had one drill broken and the tip couln’t be removed; the end of that flag locker. As the strip/rod of Plastruct or Evergeen is never exactly constant in its dimensions, some strips fit better than others so they were fixed with a drop of varnish. More strips lie on the floor than fit in the lockers. T His was a good reason to stop my attempt to add some striping to the ‘flags’ to add even more detail.

The flag lockers were taped with their backs to styrene sheet and filled carefully. Minor damage to the base coat of the lockers is visible but I like the result. These will be added to the model after general painting to avoid embarrassing errors with masking…