Todays Boating

[ashley needhamParticipant @ashleyneedham69188]

Not that I ever used “ordinary” bulbs, but LED is the way to go. Fit and forget. I always used to look at boats with a mast full of grainofwheat bulbs and shudder!

Yes it’s too cold to do much building. I have bought a couple more toy castles and have a number of repairs to do and a bit of touching up, but even then the bits have to come inside to get the pva to dry The HSS has stalled as the next step is a test (too cold) and then painting/spraying (also too cold)

The craft acrylic is really good for touching-in as it looks age-weathered if diluted a bit. These old toys had a slapdash one coat of not very carefully applied paint and that was that….its difficult to get even a close match let alone a good match.

Thankfully the topsides paint on the big HMS  Diamond was in good order, as it would have needed a complete repaint…matching the odd aged  blue-grey was never going to happen. I did paint the hull of course but that doesn’t touch the upper works and so a very slight mismatch was OK (it’s quite close). Speaking of which. I need to fibreglass the bottom as the breadnbutter is splitting as I feared it might.

Ashley

[Richard Simpson]

On Richard Simpson Said:

Hattons closing!, financial or retirement??

 

Taken from thier website:

“The company is NOT insolvent. The company is being wound down in an orderly fashion, leaving no outstanding debts.

Changing market conditions have had a large impact on the business, we have seen this in declining customer numbers, changing customer demographics and supply chain disruption.

Increased cost of compliance has become a large factor. Brexit, GST and other operational costs of running an international business have all increased dramatically over the past few years.”

 

An interesting aside, Hattons have a massive advert in all the model railway magazines every month, at least four full pages, frequently more, so this is also a big blow to the major Model Railway magazines.

 

Well worth checking out if anyone is in the market for glues, materials, paints etc.  and Model Railway items, although there is already little stock available of many things.

And just to prove that we are in turbulent times the Warley club have announced that they will not be at the NEC in 2024 for their premier model railways show.

[Tim CooperParticipant @timcooper90034]

Sorry Ashley but I seem to be replying to your post but it seems to disappear.

Tim

[ashley needhamParticipant @ashleyneedham69188]

Ah..doom and gloom all round!.

There is something called silver plating in a tube…sort of paste that deposits a very thin layer of silver on brass or copper. Comes like metal polish and you rub it on then buff it off. Seen several you tube tests and it appears to work. Obviously it’s not depositing much silver, but it would colour up brass pulpit rails. Varnish after…easy to strip and re-do later on. Worth a try?

Have entry form for Royal Egham show 24/25 August. Good show. Big model boat tent. Bushy park boaters (unlikely to win best stand award!).

Ashley

[Richard SimpsonParticipant @richardsimpson88330]

There are a number of similar products Ashley, some in paste form and some in liquid form.  I have never tried them as the reviews seem to be very mixed with the best saying there is a noticeable effect but it wears off easily.  I’d be happy to experiment if it wasn’t so expensive!

This is a fairly typical one:

Liquid Silver

[Colin BishopModerator @colinbishop34627]

As Richard says, some of these products can look very effective but rub off easily. Lacquering tends to dull the shine.

The plastic modellers use them as their models don’t undergo wear and tear through use.

Chromium plating seems to be one of the few durable methods and that can be expensive.

Colin

[ashley needhamParticipant @ashleyneedham69188]

What to do, eh? The expense is as Richard says the main issue for this product. I am sure it would last ok for the use a boat gets (and you don’t pick up the boat by the railings!) and is easily reapplied.

nickel plated wire carefully soldered perhaps?   Bright tin plating is not too dear and is a bright silver, however a plater is unlikely to want to do one pulpit rail….

The small trim on the Larsen Aerocar was all chrome or polished alloy, and I simply left these tiny bits off as impossible to reproduce, or at least, look effective.

Ashley

[Keith LongParticipant @keithlong89920]

I think nickel silver wire would be a good material to simulate stainless steel or chrome plated handrails. It is basically a form of brass but has a silver colour that when polished up looks very much like silver. Polished a bit less it should look like stainless steel. It is also known as “German silver”. It is readily available from the usual places that we can buy the small metal sections that we use in our masterpieces. It will solder with normal equipment but you would probably want a silver loaded soft solder for that, so that the joints stay bright as well, rather than going to the grey that normal solder will give. The solder should be available from jewellery supplies stockist. They can also supply silver plated copper wire that is used for making costume jewellery so a bit of internet trawling should come up with something suitable.

Note the solder is SOFT solder with a silver content NOT silver solder which is an entirely different material.

I used the silver loaded soft solder a long time ago in my paid career to solder connections to the gold leads on strain gauges, ordinary lead / tin soft solder dissolved the gold!

[Tim CooperParticipant @timcooper90034]

I now seem to be getting an EMail when someone posts here.

Tim

[Colin BishopModerator @colinbishop34627]

There is a tick box bottom left of reply box. Make sure it is unchecked.

Colin

[Stephen GarradParticipant @stephengarrad28964]

On The Repair Shop, Brenton, the chappy who does metal work repaired something, I think it was a trophy and then silver plated it using a car battery for power. There’s  loads on U tube. Silver would tarnish I suppose, perhaps nickel would be better.

Stephen

[Richard SimpsonParticipant @richardsimpson88330]

That’s electrolysis.  It can only be done on metal though.  It is a proper metal coating though as opposed to deposited particles like the pastes and liquids are.

[ashley needhamParticipant @ashleyneedham69188]

Amazed by the instant silver plating using electrolysis.

Cost again…doing loads of work, fine, a couple of tiny bits?

Bright nickel/whatever home plating might be cheaper but again, a faff for one bit.

Like nickel silver wire, might be best. UNLESS a few close (geographical, that is!) Persons bought a tube of the stuff and shared or decanted into small tins/whatever to split. Even a squeeze into a small ziploc bag would be enough??

Ashley

[Len Morris 2Participant @lenmorris2]

Hi Ashley,

Electrolysis simply describes the physics of an electric current passing through a metal solution or a metal in it’s molten state.  Phew, let’s get that term out of the way and talk about electroplating.

Angus books published an excellent series of workshop practice books.  No11 in the series is “Electroplating by J. Poyner”.  It covers plating Zink, Copper, Nickle, Chrome, etc.  Easily found on the web and not expensive.  Very practical and the set ups range from yogurt pots with a dry cell for small one off bits to car batteries/variable voltage supplies for big lumps.

It’s not hard to do at all.  I plate many bits I make for old machines and engines.   The problem these days is getting hold of the chemicals needed for certain metals.  Plating kits are available but most seem to come from the USA and end up being expensive.  In the UK try HD Chemicals based in Plymouth. 🙂

Len

[Stephen GarradParticipant @stephengarrad28964]

Quote:

Angus books published an excellent series of workshop practice books.  No11 in the series is “Electroplating by J. Poyner”.

Loads on ebay from £6-49 free p&p or ABE Books £7-95 free p&p

[Len Morris 2]

On Len Morris 2 Said:

Electrolysis simply describes the physics of an electric current passing through a metal solution or a metal in it’s molten state.

 

Oops! Apologies, brain fart time.  Of course its electro-plating.

[ashley needhamParticipant @ashleyneedham69188]

I appear to have received a new mb mag yesterday but there’s no mention of February mag on the website! Shock horror!!!

Has it all fallen apart???

I think the issue with plating is the small volume of use for the cost rather than the difficulty. There is a bake on chrome finish powdercoat sort of stuff which looks very good and I think used a lot for custom cars. It’s not quite as bright as chrome, but close to, and the cost nowadays to chrome a bumper etc is eye watering. I think you can bake the stuff on simply with infra red heaters, but again, for a Fairy pulpit rail, buying a Kg of powder would not be cheap.

Still waiting for some ebay corrugated card purchased 8th Jan…how hard is it to post an A4 envelope?? Card is to plate the HSS funnels wot are slat covered. Said boat is in the freezing cold shed awaiting some worm weather, although I can stick the card on indoors.

Moan moan…its jolly cold..moan moan.

Ashley

[Kevin BeallParticipant @kevinbeall91525]

Please Ashley don’t mention that Fairey pulpit rail…been driving me mad trying to get it right! Might have to leave it until I’m in the right frame of mind. Rest of the kit is going well…although the colour scheme is not really traditional. Also it does end up being quite heavy and that’s without the motor and battery yet.

[Colin BishopModerator @colinbishop34627]

When building my Fairey SLEC kits I cheated with the Pulpit rails as follows:

The only remaining tricky item is the distinctive pulpit rail assembly. An accurate jig and drawing is provided for this but full size practice is to butt weld the supports to the handrail. Ideally this requires silver soldering or brazing on a model as soft soldering is unlikely to be sufficiently robust. As with my Huntsman kit I ‘cheated’ and used thin brass tube with split pins at one end and inserted pins at the other to make the supports as shown in the photo The result is very strong and still looks pretty neat.

[Chris FellowsParticipant @chrisfellows72943]

Looking really good Kevin. Is that the big 43″ kit?

Chris

[Kevin BeallParticipant @kevinbeall91525]

Looks like a good solution, as said soft solder does not look very sturdy and I suspect the slightest bank bump will cause a failure…food for thought, thanks.

Hi Chris, thanks. I think (probably wrongly) SLEC only do the Huntress in one size and it’s about 35″ ish. I was thinking of doing a spoof “Alfa Romeo Racing” version as a sort of rival for the Ford Racing Team original, I might still get the stickers and see how it looks…just to be different.

[Chris FellowsParticipant @chrisfellows72943]

Oh yes, 34″, I was relying on memory which is always dangerous! Sarik have the drawings (and laser cut timber kit) for the 1:12, 23″ version, the drawings which I based my Huntress and the River Cruiser on, the latter having a greater freeboard.

[ashley needhamParticipant @ashleyneedham69188]

Went to use the small bandsaw to cut a drawbridge (yes really) but it went bang. Oh no I thought, blade broke…but it’s a fairly new one…and then I noticed some plastic stuff sticking out the body of the thing. I recognised i straight away as being the rubber ring that the blade runs on, on the wheels.

i have has it since 2008, and the ring has simply age hardened and broke. It looks more like aclearish plastic but the spares page says rubber. Clarke spares line closed until Monday, so will order two then.

the only thing that has gone wrong with it so far has been the on-off switch, replaced with an inexpensive spare part some years ago.

the large DeWalt  has had a centre bearing change in the top wheel but otherwise has been ok…perhaps a few years younger, but not by much.

tomorrow boating…going to be nippy so just Mintanic again….ice a possibility??

Ashley

[Colin BishopModerator @colinbishop34627]

Maybe wind tomorrow Ashley.

Colin

[ashley needhamParticipant @ashleyneedham69188]

No wind…but ice! About an inch of it. Well thick.

Pond covered in detritus…logs stones small boys..do not feed the ducks sign….shopping trolley on the Heron pond…??? Its miles to the nearest supermarket??

Went for a walk.

Ashley

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