Here is a pic: I know, I know. Lou's gonna flip, but it was underway before we talked, but still secret This is one of Greg's kits, modified to suit the fast-gun environment. Still a lot to do, but it'll be fun. Wife says this one must last at least 2 years. Before anyone says anything about counting hulls in the shop, I've given away 2 in the past month. And traded away one more.
RE: Tug's battleship Where there were little shelves for the bottom of the armor (for big gun sheeting), I sanded these smooth. Easy and fast and fine for fast gun purposes. Going to commit further blasphemy by filling in the dimples in the ribs (bottom of armor belt) so that it's easier to sheet. going with two stringers, at the top end of the armor belt.
RE: Tug's battleship This is my clamped-up hull where I put in the wood that the stern gun deck will rest on. You can see the 1/32" ply that the hull is sitting on that is the bottom planking. It is getting bent up and epoxied a section at a time, and then sanded smooth. The big lead-acid batteries are most useful for weighting the hull down as it gets built so that it will be flat on the table as the epoxy cures. Some of the hull looks shiny because when I am epoxying the various parts, I use up the 'waste' by waterproofing the wood as I go. Saves a lot of epoxy over the course of the build! Since I didn't address it yet, Greg did a bang-up job on these kits. Mark and Greg are my heroes I have both of their kits and ships built from both will be coming with me to Nats next year. Maybe 2 Nats, depending on how froggy I feel.
I have found that it is most satisfying to work on Roma while listening to an album by Little V which is called 'Metal Effect', a metal rendition of the music of Mass Effect That way, the wood will be infused with the metal, enhancing its fighting spirit.
For the record, you two just increased your awesomeness score by over 50 points. I've totally got to install EDI in my next ship.
As a side note for interested parties, the London Philharmonic is going to follow its highly successful album of music from video games (the Halo one is awesome) with an album of Mass Effect music. Going to ROCK. For a philharmonic I will resume actual boat-building posts tonight or tomorrow. The goal is to have Roma seaworthy by the early-December Region 3 battle.
Got a bunch done today, still uploading pics. Also resheeted Lil Scharnie so she'll be ready for fun OCT 6-7. Also started on the Tug-pump 2.0 in beautiful quarter-inch acrylic. Hard to cut (kept melting behind the blade until I turned the blade speed down way low), but as a bonus, it has a 10-year limited warranty against yellowing! But my motor (brushless, of course) is mounted to the baseplate and I've got the impeller parts laid out on the brass. Gonna be a triple bladed 40mm impeller 15mm high. A little slower than a Titan motor standard pump, but that lets me raise the diameter without the blade tip speed getting high enough that cavitation will be a major factor. And if it sucks, I'll make a new one More posts to follow after I get the pics in and get showered!
So roughly 1/3 of the port side is planked with 1/32" ply. I've started planking the center section of the stbd side as well. I also put in the ledges that the deck pieces sit on, except for the stern deck (the part that covers the rudder servo and other stuff back there). It doesn't stick in very far from the edges, just enough to hold them and get a decent seal. As always, used the excess epoxy to paint bare wood for waterproofing. That way, none of my West System epoxy gets wasted. I got some plywood epoxied against the bow to shape up the nose of the ship into something properly shippy looking. My most radical departure from my previous ships is using rotating turrets in the forward turrets, one gun in each. The 3" PVC couplers fit inside the wood barbettes with 1/8" to spare all around. The PVC is joined to one of the wood barbette sections (which is not glued to the rest of the barbette), and hangs from that. I haven't put in the bearings but they're coming. Most likely fabbing up something from thin teflon sheet. We'll see. You can see in the pic below how much room there is under the 'B' turret. The gun is also effectively armored by the PVC; a bit of unintended armor plating as a fringe benefit. The little pieces of 1/8" ply sticking up around the gun breech are the shims that held the PVC in place in the rotating barbette ring (the top one). They've been sawed flush and the PVC is epoxied in place, after the pic was taken. Below is a view of the B turret from the stern. In this pic the barbette is not epoxied together, just posed for a photo op. This last photo will probably cause chuckles, chortling, outright laughter, and/or spewing of beverages upon the screen. OR the more *ahem* uptight may find it offensive. My sainted wife rolled her eyes but was amused. It is Boatbuilding Widget 8008135, a tool used to align the propshafts outside the boat, under the stern. The circles are 1.5" diameter (for the props' diameter) and the projection below is to give the builder something to hold on to while working. The holes in the center of the circles are where the aft end of the propshafts are held at the proper distance from one another. And that's all for today! Thank you, you've been a wonderful audience!
I think my wife's eye-roll came when she asked 'Why #8008135?' and I told her where the number came from.
