Back at it

Welp, back to work, and we're back on watches.

        The HQ is in the shipyard, so we're on board my company's oldest, most rotten barge, with living quarters that are... well, like everyone's granny said, 'If you don't have anything nice to say..."



  Gonna be a challenge to be my usual ray of fucking sunshine. So it goes. Good to be earning a paycheck, anyhow.

      I got some work done on my little model boat while I was home, too. I'm enjoying trying to downscale my woodworking skills, although hand-shaping complex curves in wood is a cast-iron bitch when you're working in such small increments. You can get away with a lot more with larger work, that's for damn sure. 


 The rudder is just two notched lengths of brass rod stock and some sheet brass that I rounded over using a dime as a radius. I pulled out my soldering gun and soldered it, much like you'd sweat a length of copper pipe.

 

 Soldering is one of those skills that I thought would be instinctual, you know, inborn expertise to nerds, like how Salmon can find their birth river or how baby sea turtles know to run for the sea. Turns out, no. Luckily, I learned that a long time ago, and, while it's been 15 years since I picked up a soldering gun, I still can do the work.



The little rounded frames and the windowed piece were covered in extruded PVC, which is like a glueable formica that takes paint well.  This piece will eventually be the wheelhouse.

I pulled out the soldering gun and some 1/8 and 1/16th brass rod stock, and soldered the handrails. Bending them to a uniform shape is a pain in the balls with such small, fine stock, and since I turned my hands into handsburger when I was a kid, fine work like even writing my own name is uncomfortable. Luckily, non-repetitive work like sitting with a 3rd hand and a soldering gun doesn't hurt so much as I have a short timeline to get things into place before my hands start shaking from the effort.

  I made the windows out of an old transparency sheet for an overhead projector. Just painted one side in black, and the unpainted side becomes a nice glossy dark window that I could cut to shape. The window frames were 1/16" strips of PVC superglued in place. The sidelights are just cast pot metal, and their boxes are painted pieces of 1/32 ply shaped and glued to pieces of leftover brass rod stock from the handrails.  The horn is cast metal and the searchlight is cast polyurethane with a perspex lens. Roof of the house is vacuum-formed PVC that I cut and sanded to shape, but that came as a mostly-finished piece, thankfully.

 I made the windows out of an old transparency sheet for an overhead projector. Just painted one side in black, and the unpainted side becomes a nice glossy dark window that I could cut to shape. The window frames were 1/16" strips of PVC superglued in place.

 I was really disappointed in how the trimwork in blue came out on the platform for the stairs. The piece itself is just sanded 1/8th basswood plywood, but the edges were terrible end-grain splintery.  I soaked them in superglue, resanded and shaped them, but they took the paint weird, causing it to absorb unevenly. My fault, I should have sealed the wood with epoxy and puttied it. End result is that it looks like I had a seizure while painting. Next time I'm home I'll glue a piece of 1/8" PVC strip to the edge, and paint that, and it'll look nice again.

 It'll be a while before I go home again, however. Just got back.