Ship Model Talk in North Reading, MA

Ages of Sail just posted this announcement of ship modeler Frank Moda’s upcoming talk in North Reading, Massachusetts on Tuesday, November 14th, 2017. He’s built some very fine looking models. If you’re in the area, I highly recommend checking it out this event.

Ages of Sail

Those of you living in Massachusetts might be interested in attending a ship modeling talk given by the very talented ship modeler Frank Moda. He’ll be speaking at the Flynt Memorial Library in North Reading, MA, on Tuesday, November 14th at 7pm.

You might recall Mr. Moda’s beautiful Wasa model that we featured in a recent post (click here for the story).

Flynt Memorial Library is located at 147 Park Street in North Reading, MA. The event is free, but the library staff is requesting that those interested in attending please register for the event. You may either call them at 978-664-4942, or visit the event page on their website – Click Here

Mr. Moda will be displaying some of his works and talk about the art of ship modeling, followed by a Q & A session. Ω

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HMS Mercury Paper Model – The Build, Part 5

HMS Mercury’s Cannons

Before I can put too much of the interior detail into place, I really need to add the cannon carriages and probably the gun tackle too. The main reason is that if I am going to add any amount of gun tackle, I need some room to add ringbolts and blocks and such in the tight confines of the model’s interior. This will be more difficult if I try to do this after adding other interior furnishings.

NRG Conference this Week in St. Petersburg, Florida

For those who weren’t aware, if you happen to be in the area of St. Petersburg, Florida this week, you should consider checking out the NRG Conference, which is being held at the Hilton St. Petersburg Bayfront hotel.

The annual conference is an international gathering of ship modelers that will take place from Thursday, October 26th through Saturday, October 28th. Local tours of interest take place on Thursday, while Technical sessions and symposiums, plus the annual membership meeting and banquet, take place on Saturday.

Updates to the Site

For those of you who have are familiar with this site, I want to apologize for messing you up here. I’ve decided to make some changes, as I described on my Welcome page. I’ll repeat a bit of that here.

Basically, I’m looking at increasing my build log posts, but I don’t want those to overwhelm my general news posts. So, I’m trying to separate things a bit more here. That’s required me to work within the specific features of the WordPress site, requiring a bit of creative thinking in order to figure out how to make this work the way I want it. This is not so much a limitation of WordPress, which I love by the way, rather, it’s a bit of a limitation on my knowledge of the WordPress interface and software.

I think I’m getting things figured out, but things may change on you a bit if you are visiting this week. Hopefully, this won’t drive you away from the site. In the long run, I hope you’ll find the changes make sense and that you’ll be able to find what you’re looking for easily, logically.

Please feel free to send comments if you feel it’s harder to find what you’re looking for. Just used the comment box below. Mostly, I don’t publish comments unless they are general unless it’s something I feel that other people really need to read, but I often reply directly to those with questions. Ω

HMS Mercury Paper Model – The Build, Part 4

The 1/96-scale HMS Mercury paper model continues. Since my last posting on the subject, I’ve been considering posting a little more regularly to the build logs on this site. I’ve traditionally posted in more regularly on major ship modeling forums and posted larger summaries here. But, for various reasons, I think it makes more sense for me to post more details here.

We’ll see how it goes. It would mean more frequent, probably shorter posts. I just don’t want to overwhelm my blog here with a lot of small posts that aren’t of particular interest to all visitors. I may have to reorganize this site a little, so that build log posts aren’t part of the main stream of posts on this site. Everything is a work in progress…

HMS Mercury’s Stove

Having some interior detail is one of the interesting aspects of these Shipyard brand kits. I don’t know if I’ll be using all of the interior furnishings, but certainly want to include the major ones, even though these will be extremely difficult to ever see inside the completed model.

I built the stove straight from the kit, with a few modifications. I don’t know how the stoves external gear functions, but there is a what looks like a chain driven mechanism, apparently for turning a spit. The chain drive was printed on paper, two gears and the connecting chain, and it was just too hard to cut out as a single piece. So, instead, I cut the gears out and then just added wire to represent the chain. I also used a heavier piece of wire for the external axle.

Waiting in Anticipation for the Queen Anne Style Barge

Syren Ship Model Company, who brings us some of the finest blocks and rigging line available, plus a host of other products, is preparing to release their first complete kit, the Queen Anne Style Barge, c. 1708.

Chuck Passaro’s latest work. Soon to be available as a kit.

As you might recall, Chuck Passaro, is the designer of Model Shipway’s 18th Century English Longboat and 21ft. English Pinnace kits, among others. He also created a set of plans and sells them, along with fittings kits and bulkheads sets of the English cutter Cheerful, 1806.

Found! Renesans Paints for Shipyard Kits

Several months ago, you may recall that I’d written a post about a brand of paints that the Polish card model manufacturer Shipyard includes in their boxed kits. The brand is a Polish brand of matte artist’s acrylics called Renesans. Ever since I discovered these paints more than a year ago, I’ve really liked how well they work on paper models.

Here’s a link to my previous post: http://wp.me/p32ONi-U5

I used these paints on my 1/96-scale HMS Alert model and amusing them on my 1/96-scale HMS Mercury model as well. I have enough paint remaining from these and some left over from a lighthouse kit I built, that my supply is okay. But, it has bothered me that other people couldn’t try them out, as Shipyard stopped selling these paints on their website. They still include small jars of them in their boxed kits, but you can’t get refills.

Renesans actually has at least four lines of paints. The paint in question is called Renesans Colours. I contacted Shipyard and while it was nice of them to respond, and though they said they contacted the paint manufacturer, they didn’t provide anything useful.