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[David220747]

Notes of my build using the guidance of "Bluebird of Chelsea - my winter build

[David220747]

I have started building the 1:18 scale Bluebird of Chelsea, making heavy use of Jim Denver's posts. I cannot achieve such a detailed description, but instead will seek to add some footnotes to it. I have finished the keel and hull framework.  Although at times difficult to understand I am impressed by the manual - it is quite detailed and compares very favourably with the perfunctory manuals that came with two of my previous Dumas kits (the USS Crockett and the Dauntless), where again I drew heavily on good online forums and liked the resulting models very much.  The hull positioning plate on which the framework is built is very helpful.  Note that the piece "L13" should be positioned within the ribs before they are glued down.  To bevel the ribs, I used a spindle sander.  The 6x6mm paulownia "dragon ribs" would not easily bend to match the tight curve at the bow, so I used a steam wallpaper stripper to soften the wood and then bend it to shape.

[derekwarner]

G'day David...& welcome to MBM


Reading Jim Denvers previous work will assist greatly!


Keep us posted with images as the build progresses 


Derek

[David220747]

Photos of current planking progress.  So far all has been done with full length planks, bow to stern.  To complete it the planks now have to be cut to match the variable gaps, trickier!

[David220747]

Initial planking complete.  Main tools used are shown: clamps, spring clips, modellers' pins, weights and aliphatic resin.

[jpdenver]

JP Denver here -  I can only say how pleased I am that my work is appreciated.  It has been a while since I was active here and
I have been working on some larger land-based steam projects. 

I would be glad to answer any questions you may have.  I will say that I took a bit of "artistic license" on some of the
details on my build.    So I look forward to watching your builds. 

Regards to all.Jim Pope(JPDENVER)Denver, Colorado USA

[David220747]

Hi Jim


Thanks for the reply.  Stlll moving on.  Have sealed the inside and now face sanding, filling and glassing. The instructions suggest that the deck should be temporarily attached so that the whole thing can be sanded true, but this is intimidating.  I will look at the practicalities during the week.  Any advice?

[jpdenver]

David,
If I remember, I fitted the deck temporarily just to make sure it lined up.  Then I removed it. 
Then I planked it. I think you can see that I did not use the method of "caulking" they proposed which was to gluepieces vertically and then sand them down.
I bought the styrene caulk pieces and used those.  That caused the planking to be a bit wider, so then I cut the outside edges down to fit.
I also used a liberal amount of 1/16 x 1/16 inch mahogany as gunnels and trim all over the place. 
I waited to cut in the portholes and also chose not to use the ones provided I got more substantial metal pieces and fiddly bitsfrom RBModels.
In general I used a lot of brass trim from my own stock.  1/16" and 1/8" angle pieces.
Also note that the original Bluebird only had one rudder. 
Oh, and the motors provided with the kit were pretty bad, I replaced those.   

On the hull, I smeared wood filler all over it on the outside and then sanded and sanded and sanded.
When I was done I epoxied it, inside too.

Yours looks great so far.
Regards,
Jim

[jpdenver]

Another thought -
If you are going to light up the bow cabin, make sure you place the wires and lamps before youseal up the deck.  I also packed the bow with foam for buoyancy. I put white parchment behind the
portholes so you did not see the raw guts when the lights were on.
Later,Jim

[David220747]

Thanks Jim, it is over 35 degrees here this weekend, the opposite of your description, so I will not be doing much, except think through this step fairly carefully.  Like you I have rejected the accompanying motors and bought two MFA 385 low noise motors which I hope will work out ok. I think I will stick with two rudders although I am a bit dismayed about how they came in the kit, requiring the blades to be soldered to the shafts.


On the filler, I am currently planning to use car body filler which I have used on other boats but will make a final decision once I have worked out how much is needed after sanding.


I quite like the appearance/shape of the hull.


A long way to go ...............


David

[David220747]

Further limited progress.
I planned like Jim to buy a tender rather than construct it, but my favoured source, the marketplace on Shapeways, has gone, so I have built it from the kit. It is small and the structure is delicate causing lots of difficulties for older, bigger hands. The result is, shall we say, average so later I make look for a more presentable option.
I have pretty much completed sanding the hull, with one more careful check needed to make sure that all roughness has been ironed out.  According to the plan, I should now slash through the hull to make spaces for the two stabilizers ("anti-sway fins"). But I would hate to do that and looking over the hull and keel I am convinced it will be stable without these additions.  So, like Jim, I will exercise some licence and leave them out.  I hope this does not prove to be a mistake.
So next will be the fiberglass.
I have had some difficulties with the kit. I agree with Jim's overview that what is supplied is of really good quality and the whole thing is very impressive in its detail, although of course this does make quite high demands on the builder. The kit I received seemed to omit some bits and in communication with the sender I have received some replacements.  But I have also chosen to buy other materials locally (there is a superb model boat shop nearby called Float a Boat, don't know what I would do without it).  It is actually quite difficult to check whether the kit is complete when it is opened.  There is so much to check, and the really very comprehensive instructions and list of parts are not all that easy to understand - for example, the instructions cover both scales of kit and some parts have been re-engineered from the original version.

[Hellboy Paul]

How about this for the tender.


https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/285397219612


Paul..

[David220747]

Thanks Paul.  Looks the part and is a lot cheaper than a local purchase.
David

[David220747]

I have finally glassed the hull using 3 or 4 coats of Z-poxy finishing resin. Next is final sanding and then using a primer/filler and yet more sanding to prepare it for painting.  It is a bit too cold to attempt priming so will probably wait until the Spring.
In the meantime, I have been working on the furniture.  Very demanding.  Locating the pieces is challenging.  They are not numbered on the wood sheets and identifying them from the instructions is also difficult because the pictures of the sheets are not an exact match. Sorting through the hundreds of pieces is very much like doing a jigsaw.  It is made doubly difficult by the fragility of the very thin wooden sheets.
The etched metal parts are amazing, but some are far too tiny for me to work with, so I took short-cuts! In particular, I have not included the brass studs around some of the furniture but have ordered some very thin brass nails which should be easier to install. I also could not find the gimballed plastic compass, so made a substitute out of wood.
The skylight is a good example of the difficulties. All the wood is very fragile so gluing it together has to be done carefully, or it will break into small pieces. In printing off the instruction manual, I had put a couple of pages in the wrong order and missed the etched rectangles covering the top of the skylight so, of course, the various cut-outs did not match the wood frame which I had made!  But I did finally make it fit.
So making these small pieces of furniture takes quite a time but, on the other hand, the result is quite pleasing - the varnished wood coming up very well.
The next blocks of work are:
- continuing with the furniture and superstructure, during our winter
- finishing the hull
- preparing the mechanics: prop shafts, motors and rudders, which requires soldering the rudders to the rudder shafts and soldering the prop shaft supports which are attached under the hull at the stern; not looking forward to this!

[David220747]

I have continued doing stuff inside the house during winter, building more of the furniture and varnishing some of it.  I have also started the components of the cabin/wheelhouse.  The challenge will be joining all these pieces together so that they are both strong and symmetrical, ideally the joining edges need to be sanded uniformly at the required angle. I do not think that it will be particularly straightforward. There is also the decision as to whether to varnish before assembling or after!
The rudders had to be soldered to the shafts and this seemed to work ok using silver solder and a blow torch.  I may use car filler to get a smooth finish. Far more difficult were the stern propeller shaft supports, each comprising 4 small pieces of brass each. For me, it was a nightmare, as perhaps you can see.  When I come to install the propulsion set up then I will find out just how badly put together these are!
The last photo shows some ballast for the boat.  I have a spreadsheet which I use to calculate the distribution of buoyancy and weight for my boats and infer the required ballast.  At this stage, the figures are just an estimate, but the spreadsheet does indicate the need for some ballast.  I use lead shot held together by resin.  Some of the weights have been set in the boat directly and follow the hull shape between frames, while others are set in aluminum channels which seems quite a neat solution.

[David220747]

Some photos of making the decking.  I used the supplied deck parts including the 'grouting' strips.  At first it seemed impossible, there being so many planks and grouting strips, but I found that the process was made easier by the decking planks being grouped on sheets and by retaining the grouping it became possible to do the planking quite quickly.  Typically, I did groups of 5-8 planks in one go by applying the glue to the underlying base then laying the planks down and adding the previously cut grouting strips.  Slow drying aliphatic resin gave me time to align the pieces.  The catch is that the grouting strips are only held in place by the glue on their edges so instead of varnishing the decks I used Z-poxy finishing resin which glued everything solidly together before the final sanding.

[David220747]

With continuing bad weather I returned to the wheelhouse.  As mentioned before I had built the individual walls, and now have planked the wheelhouse deck.  So the question was what sequence to adopt for putting the whole thing together.  My sequence was different to Jim's but I am unsure whether it was ideal:
1. Z-poxy the floor
2. Glue bronze channels on the walls as conduits for the lights; drill holes in floor for the light cabling.  Insert the lights (navigation and internal wheelhouse) and cabling. I decided that I wanted these lights to be self-contained in the wheelhouse unit so that it could be removed easily.  As you can see in one of the photos, I used a 3v button battery in a switchable case attached underneath the wheelhouse floor and all the light cables attach there.
3 Glue bronze channels to carry the sliding doors and cover with wood strips (like Jim).
4. Test fit the walls with tape to see whether it would all fit together and to work out how the walls should best connect (by chamfering the edges or simply abutting them).  This was very important.
5. Glue the walls together and to the floor. This is very tricky and I did it in 3 steps rather than trying to do all the walls at once.
6. Varnish the walls inside and out.
7.  Insert the window perspex. Absolutely a nightmare. I got most of them in but the windows are a bit mucky.  The stem wall windows were impossible and instead I used some thin Perspex glued to the inside of the wall, much easier as I did not need to cut the window to exactly fit the holes.
8. Finally build and add the roof, again using bronze channels for the sunroof.  Obviously, this was a nightmare too, as the tops of the wheelhouse walls were not precisely the right dimensions - I could not see a way of controlling this while I was gluing the walls together).  So the wood framework supporting the roof did not fit the gap and turned out also to be very fragile so I chucked it away and made my own framework, tuning it to the space available.  This worked ok and is much stronger.  On of the photos below illustrates the roof panels and the new frames.
Finally I varnished the roof.

[David220747]

The next step was to build the rear cabin.  I put the wood surround on last and I also made sure to build the rectangular piece which is glued to the main deck and on which the cabin is fitted.  This enables the cabin to be easily removed for access. As Jim points out there is no mention of this in the instructions.

[David220747]

Next was to install the rudder guides and propeller shafts.  The rudders were quite straightforward, but the propeller shafts need to align with the motors and the shaft supports under the hull at the transom. For these latter supports I did in the end silver solder the parts supplied in the kit - not very well but their thin brass was easy to bend to fit the required alignment. The motors came with L-shaped supports which were helpful and the kit includes rigid connectors for linking the motor shafts to the propeller shafts.  While I am unlikely to use them in the final model, they made aligning everything a fairly practical proposition.

[David220747]

I have now sanded the hull and the last step before painting was to drill the portholes.  Not so straightforward - a 1/2" drill would shatter the hull planks.  After discussion with the experts in the club I used a small drill, some conical and cylindrical sanders to widen the holes appropriately.  All went well thankfully. I put plastic tubing in the holes for the painting, and the final photo shows the primed hull (using a car primer/filler).

[Colin Bishop]

Nice work, I am building a revised version of Vic Smeed's Silver Mist motor yacht and faced the same issue with the portholes. I have bought some brass glazed ones which need a 8mm hole. I found a range of diamond coated conical burrs on Amazon which could be purchased individually and which included the 8mm size. I initially drilled and enlarged a pilot hole and then applied the burr until it went through the hull whilst keeping my toes crossed! It penetrated easily giving a smooth hole which only needed a touch with a fileto clean up. It did leave some wood 'whiskers' on the inside but they were sliced off with a scalpel.

Colin