USS New Jersey Engine Room #3 Model for Permanent Display Onboard Ship

[mmarcovitch]

I’m just about finished designing the main air extactor. The first thing I had to do was learn what an air extractor is and why is it there. There are three of these in the engine room; a large Main Air Extractor (MAE) and two auxiliary air extractors. The main is pulling vacuum from the main condenser and the auxiliaries are pulling vacuum from the turbogenerators condensers. They look the same except for their size. For steam turbines to function effectively, the exhaust steam must be drawn out of the machine into vacuum. The steam is depleted to a point where it would lose all forward momentum without the vacuum. There is some negative pressure created just by condensing the volume of steam to water in the condenser, but it’s not enough since there is leakage in the system.

The main air extractor works on Benoulli’s principle that pressure on a surface is reduced inversely proportional to the speed of a gas over the surface. 600psi steam is applied to a venturi where the suction line is attached to the gases in the condenser further reducing its internal pressure. Very high vacuums can be drawn this way. The MAE outputs the extracted air to atmosphere and any condensed feedwater is fed back to the main condenser hot well. Further feedwater prep is done in the firerooms and is not part of the model. There is also condenser coolant water in and out that is used in the internal condensers in the MAE. It’s really a complicated piece of equipment.

I am totally guessing exactly where the piping goes for this thing. Here’s the a picture showing why that is.

Given that, here’s a rendering showing it in place on the upper level. I don’t have any detailed drawings about the MAE or its foundation. I have four images inclduing these two.

I’ve got requests into Ryan asking for more information about this. Regardless, I’ll do something respectable.

I printed the lube hand wheels separately and applied them with 0.025" phos-bronze wire. Look much better than the partially deforemed ones that were printed on the part.

I removed all the tall angle supports from the MRG frame to accept the smaller version that is now printed integral with the Lube Pumps. After prepaing the surfaces I used the rubber-infused CA to adhere the electic lube pump. The modified (fixed) steam lube pump will be printed along with the MAE today or tomorrow. The electric motor came out beautifully with the cooling ribs perfectly defined.

While the steam pump print has some errors there were some spectacular print features that blew me away! This is an extreme closeup of a spring that I downloaded from the SketchUp 3D Warehouse. I reduced its size, but did nothing else to it when I determined it was printable. It has some loops at the end.

Here it is on the pump.

And if you look closely, the printer reproduced those loops. This isn’t supposed to happen… or at least it didn’t happen with previous versions of the LCD resin printers. With the naked eye, those parts are tiny. They’re 0.010" or less.

I printed more ladders. I found that the short ones were also with full treads and I needed a ladder with 9 rungs.

Getting good at making ladders. Till next time…

[mmarcovitch]

I got the aux air ejectors designed, but they’re kind of fictional. I have no drawings of them nor do images help very much. Here’s an image that “shows” the two aux air ejectors that produce vacuum for the turbo-generators. Can you see an air ejector hiding in that piping? I can’t. Therefore; I just shrunk the main ejector until it made a resonable size. Anyone visiting the engine rooms probably won’t see much of them either. They are on the right side of the image.

https://ww2aircraft.net/forum/attachments/tempimage4kixjk-png.824931/(image larger than 5 MB)

I have the foundation drawings for the aux units. They are brackets that attach to the bulkhead wall with stiffening on the fire room #4 side. I drew them sort of correctly, albeit simpilified. That said, I don’t have any drawing of the units themselves or the foundation of the main air ejctor. If it goes straight down to the 3rd skin like some of the heavier gear does, it won’t work becasue they would pass through the end bell of the main condenser. I chose to bracket it also.

Here are the two unpiped aux air ejectors. They are fatter than the real ones.

I’m running into a jam trying to get the clear acrylic bulkheads laser cut within a budget I can tolerate. I’m donating this model like the other two, and spending the best part of a year in its creation. As a result, I’m trying to mitigate out-of-pocket expenses as much as I can. That leads us to plan B; back to hand-cut styrene sheet. I’ve already bought the sheets for this eventuality and will make the end bulkheads and all the under-floor framing out of styrene. Styrene is much easier to glue togther (silver lining).

I’m calling this approach, “the Swiss Cheese cutaway method”. The stiffeners on the fire room sides will add structural integrity to make the bulkheds work. There would be part of the boiler supports on the other side. Stiffeners are mentioned on the plans.

Here’s the fore bulkhead:

And the aft bulkhead. It’s important that they support the propshaft pass thrus. The tongue sticking up is supporting the entry ladder. I think I’m going to make a bit of ceiling there to model the entry hatch into the engine room. It’s an important feature. There’s also a small hatch in the fore bulkhead to enter the #3 fire room.

I printed out full-size plans for all the styrene parts in prep to handcut them. I’m still waiting for another quote for laser cutting acrylic, but I’m not very optimistic about the outcome. I still have to design the control panels and electrical cabinets. After that paint and assembly will begin.

[mmarcovitch]

I’ve piped the aux air ejectors. This is not prototypical, but it’s reasonably functional. This is just the primary lines. I’m not attempting to include any secondary lines. I may attempt to print this as a complete assembly… would help in alignment. Ryan gave his approval on the “Swiss Cheese” approach. I will have a lot of styrene cutting to do.

[tuna1957]

Fantastic progress.

[mmarcovitch]

Thank you!

While still doing more design, I started on the styrene parts. I printed full-size plans for all of the parts using PostRazr to help convert bigger-than-letter-sized drawings to mulitple page prints since my version of CorelDraw doesn’t play well with the latest version of Mac OS. I’d have to pay another $300 to upgrade CorelDraw… which I’m not going to do. You export the big drawing as PNG to PostRazr (free online app) then it converts it to a tiled PDF output that can be printed in mutiple, overlapping pages by Adobe Reader. Convuluted, but free.

I started cutting the pieces with the front bulkhead. Maybe I should have started with some of inner pieces to perfect the cutting… nope. I used the Lord Nelson method, “I went straight at em’”. Might have been a mistake. I mis-drilled one of the lightening holes in the lower frame portion. This will show!

I cut the holes for the prop shaft seals. These go in at an angle so a little siop in the fit is tolerable. To cut these I used my dividers-with-a-chisel-blade method, where I just twirl it around and score the plastic. I cut radial slots to the center and break out the piece leaving a reasonably-sized hole. Some light Dremel sanding work cleaned up rough edges. The shaft seals fit okay.

I used the same method for the steam pipe opening at the top. For the oval hole for the condenser inlet scoop I used the "drill-a-zillion-little-holes-around-the-perimeter method and used a #11 blade to cut between them, breaking out the center. Again, Dremel sanding finished it up. I chose to drill all the rest of the holes and radii. I didn’t have a plastic-ground drill of the right size so i had to grind one. I have a commercial plastic bit that I used as a guide. To drill soft plastic like styrene you need a sharper point angle. Standard drills are 118º and need to be something around 90º. Also the drills need less rake angle under the cutting lip. If you don’t do these things, the drills will tear and grab the plastic creating more of a mess than a hole. The grind worked.

I used a small pilot drill to locate the centers of the frame holes and drilled them all successfully except for the hole 3rd from the right in the picture. I am really annoyed by this! I so annoyed that I may plug it and re-drill. I’ll think about it. For all the rest of the holes in all the frames, I’m going to temporarily glue them together and drill as a batch including the back bulkhead. I’m also going to drill the upper end of the cross-lap slots instead of working about cutting a square edge. it won’t matter.

To cut the remaining free-form shapes i’m thinking about using a jig or jewelers saw. I did the first cuts by scribing with a #11 blade and breaking out the pieces, but occasionally the knife slipped and cut into good stock that will leave a mark requiring post-finishing. Using the saw would be more controllaable and leave smoother edges.

Meanwhile, I’m about to finish the last drawing challeges, including all the electrical, control panels and diamond plate flooring for the lower level. The diamond plate I drew for the 5" proiject, while scale-sized was too fine to see well in 1:48. I’m going to enlarge the bumps a bit and then print.

The complex nature of the project at this point is mind-blowing, even for me, and I’m the guy doing all the drawing. Notice the large column in the center of the image. That’s a prominent feature in the ER. It required me to change the routing of the main steam pipe to clear it. Also note that the upper mezanine platform is ready to receive the electrical equipment after I draw it.

All of the platforms and catwalks will require handrails before they’re fully done. I’m probably going to make them out of soldered phos-bronze wire to reduce opportunities for breakage. I’m still working out how all the floor panels will be supported, especially since there’s not a full bulkhead in the fore or aft from which to hang them.

[mmarcovitch]

I tried using the jewelers saw, but it wasn’t worth the trouble. Went back and did it by scoring the lines and snapping. Took my time and the results were good. I cleaned up the holes and curves with the Dremel with the smaller sanding drum, and did deburring and it’s ready for the slotting. I’m going to slot all the frames glued together so regardless of their specific precision to holding the lines, they will all be equal. I cut one mid-frame out of the 0.040" sheet, but stopped at that one. I was concerned about running out of the thicker stock for the rear bulkhead. I can get away with the 0.030" stock for the cross-frames.

I attached the Aft BH to the styrene and began cutting it out. This image shows closeup of how to do a scored diameter hole in styrene. After scoring with multiple passes with the dividiers, I scribed cross-line all the way through which provides a place to grab with some pliers to snap out the pieces. The hole requires a little sanding drum work to clean up the edges and do final fit on the shaft seal.

The print of the Main Air Extractor came out beautifully. The pictue shows two of them. I only need one. One is a better than other slightly, and I’ll use that and put the other in the surplus pile.

In the same run I printed the four remaining tubes from the TG condenser to the heat exchanger. There were two on each TG and are slightly different. The valve bodies and their handles came out really nicely.

I re-drew and improved the diamond plate I used for the 5". This was originally downloaded from the SketchUp 3D Warehouse. The original size of bumps was too big for 1:48 and I shrunk them. For this application I shrunk them a bit too small. That said, the orginal artist didn’t group or convert the bumps to Components. With SU Components, if I change the configuration of one bump, all of the bumps change regardless of where they are or how many plates were drawn. I’m printing the flooring in 2’ X 4’ pieces. I made them pretty thin and adding some cross reinforcement to help mitigate warping. I’m printing out 20 of them and it’s going on the Machine tomorrow.

[mmarcovitch]

The Steam powered lube pump printed correctly this time, but I broke a pipe in cleanup. Picture will come after I fix it. I also got good prints on the aux air ejectors and the 9 step ladder needed for the entry stairs that come down from Broadway into the engine room.

I got the aft bulkhead and finished up ready for drilling. Unlike the fore BH, I held off drilling this and waited until all the frames so I could temporarily glue them all togther. Using the #11 to scribe all the curves really worked out well in the end. Had to change blades frequently.

I then cut the individual frames out. I used MicroMark pressure sensitive adhesive.to temporarily hold the patterns to the styrene. Occasionally, some cement stayed behind that was easily removed with Goo Gone.

I did not drill or slot any of them.

I then temporarily glued the stack to the aft BH in readiness for drilling all at the same time.

Before gluing the stack to the BH, I clamped them together and trued up the ends so they were all the same size on the 1" belt sander. I used little dolleps of Testor’s tube cement to hold the stack together. The holes were located on the BH with a smalll 1/16" drill that will center the big drill. I wish I hadn’t drilled the first BH yesterday. After I drill these, I will cut out the cross frames and do the same thing to them. I will cut all the slots while the frames are still stacked guarenteeing that all them are in the same place. Actually, since the floors will cover all but the outer edges of all this framing, I really don’t need to include all the cross-frames. I probaly will use them because, I’m a) going to cut them anyway, and b) the entire model is being fastened to this floor (as in the real ship) and having it solid and stable will not hurt. It will not, however, have to protect against topedo attack.

Started drawing the electrical equipment on the upper mezzanine deck. I finished the lighting tranformers that have louvered surfaces. Had to figure a way to draw reasonable louvers and think I got it.

I’m now drawing the electrical console. I have a good image of it, but not it’s sizes.

[liamk887]

Top work, was great to follow the turrets and now this. It’s on my to-do list to print my own cutaway later this year as a project.

[mmarcovitch]

Go for it! Inspiring others inspires me in return.

Here’s the “better” steam-driven lube pump. It’s not attached yet to the MRG foundation, just sitting there being photographed.

I still have put on it’s valve handwheel.

I drew the electrical distribution console. It’s ready to go to the slicer and then printing. I detaled all those little handles with the hope that they’ll print. With the recent success making tiny detais, they may just work out. As for the gauge dials… making 1:48 individual gauge face decals using inkjet decal paper has not worked out so well. The decal print is over-coated with some form of laquer to keep the water-soluble ink from running, but with samll decals, it happens anyway and the resolution gets destroyed. I will try. Ryan’s going to get me some good images of them.

Another view as if you were standing next to one of the turbo-generators.

Now for some more sobering stuff. I may be a fabulous, amazing modeler, but I can still screw up. Today I did.

I was so excited about getting the stack drilling of all the frames done, that I drilled the first two large holes in the entirely wrong place. I had drilled 1/16" holes at the ends of each of the slot positions and drilled the same as pilot holes for the big holes down lower. I drilled the two smaller holes on the extended slots at each end and then proceeded to drill the big holes in the tiny hole at the top of the first two slots, completely screwing up all the pieces in the entire stack. This error will not be seen in any but the two end bulkheads, but that’s bad enough.

I have two choices to fix… well actually three. I can fill the two errant holes in the bulkheads and with putty and craftiness, make them invisible. Or I can add one more correctly drilled non-bulkhead frame one bay in from of each end, showing a bit of the 3rd skin in each fire room space. Lastly, I could remake the bulkheads. The problem with #3 is I don’t have enough 0.040" stock left to make them and it’s expensive. I also don’t relish doing all that handwork needed to create them. I’m going to go for the patch first. If it works, I’m done. If it doesn’t I can go to Plan B and still make a respectable model. Choice 3 would be the last resort. Unlike remaking 3D printed parts where the Machine does most of the heavy lifting, doing hand-crafted parts over involves labor and I’m basically lazy.

[tuna1957]

Just keeps getting better and better. Keep on keeping on.

[mmarcovitch]

Thanks all…

No work on the weekend, but I have an SU question. Whenever I go to move an object and want to constrain in on a specific axis, the object shoots off in the direction I chose and is completely out of control. It’s like hitting a moving target in a shooting gallery. When I don’t chose a direction it moves in a much more controlled fashion, but I can’t lock it into an axis. This occurred in the last two versions of SU. I thought 2025 would address it, but it’s not. Is it my computer or is it a bug?

BTW: cutting the slots in the frame stack has been a pain. The razor saw is not following the line as closely as I would like and the slots are coming out either too large or slghtly askew. I’d love to use the Dremel with router, but the styrene melts instantly and clogs the cutting edges.

[slbaumgartner]

The strange movement sounds like maybe there is glue to going on. When a component instance is glued to a surface and you apply the move tool it can go a surprising distance because it is projecting the mouse position onto that surface.

[ateliernab]

@mmarcovitch

cutting the slots in the frame stack has been a pain. The razor saw is not following the line as closely as I would like and the slots are coming out either too large or slghtly askew. I’d love to use the Dremel with router, but the styrene melts instantly and clogs the cutting edges

check piercing (or jeweler) saws. you have various blades, steel, diamond coated… some work in one direction, some work in many directions. all you need is a small hole to begin with.

[slbaumgartner]

One kind I have been happy with is made by Knew Concepts https://www.knewconcepts.com/
(not cheap, but very stiff and able to put high tension on the blade).

[fxcutting]

[quote=“mmarcovitch, post:92, topic:295938”]
The razor saw is not following the line as closely as I would like and the slots are coming out either too large or slghtly askew. I’d love to use the Dremel with router, but the styrene melts instantly and clogs the cutting edges.
Haven’t used styrene in a long time (mostly in vacuforming prototypes), but could you use a sharp chisel and just push down cutting on the line? Since you’ve drilled the hole at the end of the line it should prevent it from splitting the styrene?? Any way just a thought. love your work.

[mmarcovitch]

I bought some larger toothed jeweler saw blades from RioGrande in Albuquerque. The ones I have were too fine and jammed quickly. I will try them, but as you’ll read in this post, I may not end up using that method.

Thanks Fellas!

Design work and printing continue. I’m almost at the end of the design phase. I’m kind of in the punch list arena now.

Work also continues on cutting the main framing that supports the whole thing. I went the “patching route” in plugging the errant holes in the fore bulkhead.

I filled them with Tamiya filler and will sand the first coat on Monday. Today’s my wife’s 80 birthday (I married an older women since my 80th is at the end of July) and promised I wouldn’t be in the shop today. The rest of the filler is patching the deepest surface scratches that resulted from over-aggressive sanding of plastic cement remnants that I used to hold the stack of frames together for cutting and drilling. I was amazed at just how difficult it was to slice them apart. I’m going to try a different method to do the same on all the cross longitudinal frames. I’m also not going to attempt to cut the slots by sawing. They just wavered too much. I’m having to recut them all with a #11 blade anyway, might as well cut them that way from the start. And I’m using a square to keep them nice and vertical.

The evaporators are printed and trimmed waiting, along with a ton more stuff, for some paint. I printed them hollowed out to reduce the resin quantity. I also included plugs left over from the hole-drilling task in the slicer. The plugs are a press-fit back in the holes and needing no glue. A quick sanding and the holes disappear. I use a large syringe to wash the resin out of the interiors with IPA.

Front view. I chose to simplify the plumbing on these, since I couldn’t make any sense of it. Ryan thinks they look great.

The entry catwalk is hung from the ceiling! It is not fastened to the main reduction gear that lies below. To replicate this, I’m creating a faux ceiling to support it. It will also support the entry hatch which is a feature I didn’t want to leave out (not yet designed). All of these frames are sliced and ready to print. None of the framing is a 1:1 replication and asserts a lot of “modele’s license”. The ceiling structure is more varied than how I’m depicting it, but viewers will understand. I taking advantage of the accurate main support pole in holding up the ceiling structure.

I also lined out the flooring supports for the main control board and the main air ejectors. Both of these are at the fore end of the engine room. Had to fuss a lot to get the support poles to clear all the apparatus below. Again, the flooring is not truly accurate with much of the support would hung on the cutaway fore bulkhed. This is the Air Ejector flooring bracing. Also note the added support on the flooring system running into the picture that holding up the catwalks next to the turbogenerators and electrical decking.

And here’s the port side floor system.

Lastly, here is the flooring system and electrical console on the slicer and ready for print. This file and the other floor bracing file has been transmitted to the printer and will be print next week. The only reason the main control board’s not ready for print is lack of information. I’m waiting on Ryan to send more pictures of it. It such an important feature that I want to make it right. I’m hoping that all the switches and levers on the electrical console print correctly.

I’ve ordered and received most of the electrical materials for the lighting. I’m using surface mount LEDs again, but in this installation, I’ve gone to cool white to replicate the florescent lighting used in the 1:1 space. I was able to get 200 LED chips for $6.35 plus KY Sales tax from Amazon. That’s $.03 a piece. Ridiculous! And they are very, very bright. I redesigned the electrical console with space for the LEDs and their wiring. Lighting is going to fun and challenging. It’s also going to add life to all the underneath details.

[Anssi]

@mmarcovitch

Lighting is going to fun and challenging. It’s also going to add life to all the underneath details.

This got me thinking. The space and the equipment inside form an incredibly complex whole, and the model you make will be just as complex. Is the model intended to be used to explain to the visitors how the whole and all the subsystems crammed into the space worked? The technology used (steam) will be about as foreign to most of the visitors as that on a 18th century sailing man-of-war. Could the lighting be used to clarify all this? Will there be color coding?

[mmarcovitch]

Interesting question. I’m cutting away some of the equipment to show their insides which they’ll never see, and I’m going to 3D print numbers on little stalks that will be identied in key that will be posted on the case. I idealy, a docent should be explaining what’s going on. I’m going to include decals on the piping showing where the steams is going and it’s pressure. The model will be lit in all the places that will be in shadow, further showing things they won’t normally see. And it is very complex and some of the beauty of the model is just representing that with the full realization that 18 year olds ran all this stuff.

Missed yesterday’s post so today will be a twofer.

First up… thought it would interesting to see the vast number of parts already created for this project. We’re at the 95% level. I finished printing the smaller flooring frames and they’re waiting for trimming and sanding. I’ve also uploaded the file to print the remaining large floor frames. I’ve almsot finished drawing the various electrical cabinets, and Ryan has promised that he’ll take pictures of the main gauge board, which is the last piece to be finished. In those plastic boxes are all the floor gratings ladders and diamond plate pieces. All of this and no instructions! I’ve received all the electrical materials and am going to do some experimentation of soldering on copper foil attached to resin. Resin doesn’t melt per ce, but it can burn. If I can it would simplify attaching the surface mount LEDs. The large curvy pipe at the top is the new main steam pipe that has clearance built in to clear that large central pole (resembles a rocket in the foreground).

I printed the tiny hand wheels for the auxiliary air ejectors. I chose to mount them with 0.015" phos-bronze wire. I had to drill the parts with a 0.016" carbide bit. I got through almost all of them before breaking one. I attmpted to attach the even tinier smaller valve wheel using wire, but it proved ridiculous. I ended up putting them on with CA.

First image shows the valve hand wheel attached to the wire. Note the fine-tipped tweezers for scale.

And the finished parts: Pins are also installed in the pipe ends to faciliate gettimg them attached to the ma

I took some time off to rebuild additional lighting on my workbench. I had two of these puck lights left over from an under-cabinet project and used them for a couple of years. The voltage adjuster died rendering them dead. Another under-cabinet job gave me two more surplus LEDs pucks that I added to the one remaining. They’re 12vdc units and require no current management circuits. They just need a 12vdc power sorce. I needed another LED power supply for the engine room project so I bought two. I wired them up in parallel and added a toggle switch to activate them. Lots of needed light.

The circuitry isn’t pretty, but it’s solid and safe. That circuit strip needs some craft work to parallel the contacts, but jumpering them. The strips came from when I built my first railroad at our house in Düsseldorf, which explains why their “Euro-style”. I used them all over my model railroad and I’m finally running out them. When I decided to build my railroad in our German house, the head of the technical training department at Henkel provided me with an enormous amount of electrical hardware to make it all happen. It was when I learned about crimped ferrules on the ends of wires that are used along with these knds of terminals.

I printed the electrical control panel in the same run with the miscellaneous floor frames. The frames came out perfectly, but the panel was a failure.

The failure was not the printer’s fault. It was the draftsman… me. The drawing was flawed. There was a layer underneath the slant panels. The printer/slicer was confused by this inner layer and tried printing both. You can see this inner panel in the centeral area where another slant panel was supposed to go. I went back and fixed all the drawing errors. I printed it again solo, and the results are perfect. It’s draining on the printer and I’ll finish it up tomorrow. While it’s hard to see with all that excess resin covering it, the control knobs and switches did resolve.

Back to the main floor framing. Oh boy! I wish I could have had it all laser cut. It’s been well over a week and I’m still cutting away. I keep refining the process, but it’s a lot of heavy duty hand work.

After scribing and snapping all the long cuts, I used the Northwest Short Line Duplicutter 2 to gang scribe the cross-cut length.

To make the stack of the fore and aft beams, I used Scotch Double-sided “permanent” tape. It held the stack well enought and came off with no residue or sanding. Using plastic cement was more trouble than it worked.

I used a prick punch to locate all the holes and then pilot drilled the with 1/16". it was a bit too small for the big holes, but was perfect for the tops of the cross-lap cuts.

The big drill was okay… just okay. It wandered on a couple of holes meaning the some of the slots are not parallel to the part edges. Annoying? Yes! Show stopper? No! It’s all at the very bottom of the model and recessed from view. Won’t be seen much except by me. These holes drilled much better than the ones I did on the abaft ship frames. Part of that was due to holding the stack more firmly with a drill press clamp in additionl to my fingers.

I started cutting the scrap between the holes with the #11. I didn’t like how it performed. I switched to a single-edged razor to start the cuts. Worked better, but still not so hot. Finally I used my 90º corner chisel. This worked well. I don’t have any straight wood chisels. A 1/4" inch chisel would have been perfect.

I started doing trial fits with satisfactory results. There is another, 2nd skin mid-point in the framing. I’m going to add this only in the outer spaces since the inner ones would be invisible. The triple bottom was only used under the hull areas included in the armored citidel.

You are now all up to date.

[mmarcovitch]

The electrical control panel exceeded my expectations. The elevated switches on the panel resolved with the levers in the various positions. Now all I have to do is paint the darn thing which could be a lot of fun (or not). The problems were entirely with the drawing. Fix the drawing… fix the part. As close as I could tell from the photographs, the controls are as they are on the real thing, even to their disposition.

​Work continues slowly on the under-framing. I keep developing better techniques. By the time I finish all of them I’ll have it all figured out. I did find a chisel narrow enough to chip out the material between the circles. Even with that, I had to refine how I was chipping it out. Instead of making three separate hacks at it, I found that if I slid the blade down a pre-scribed line (from a #11 blade and straight edge), the removed part had cleaner edges and leaving me with much less cleanup of the openings.

​While assembling the array for trial I realized an error was cropping up. The abaft main frames taper from the middle to the edges as the real floor does to let any water to flow towards the bilge wells at the outer corners and be pumped overboard. I, foolishly, wanted to faithfully represent this slant and built it into all of the cross-frames. That meant that all the fore and aft frames, depending on their location, would have differing heights. I built this into the patterns. But… I chose to cut them all from one template meaning they were all the same height. My mom used to say that "G_d protects fools, drunks and little children. In this case he protected the fool. Luckily, the template I chose was the tall middle one. At least I could remove the excess stock on the ones that are shorter out at the edge. It could have happened in reverse and I would have all the middle floors not reaching the tops of the main frames. As i progressed today, I took individual caliper readings and used the digital caliper as a height gauge scribing the correct height so I could shave off the excess.

​Putting the frames together was a little like herding cats, so I decided to tack glue some selected joints to stabilize it. One of them was on the “front” bulkhead. Later, as I added more fore and aft frames and then more main frames I found that I had hung the rear bulkhead where the front should go. Again, lucky that I only had one flimsy glue joint to break to make the exchange. I’m glad I’m doing all these trial fits.

Here it is with correct rear frame at the rear. It’s going to be a challenge to ensure everything is square. Also, liquid cement is not sufficient to hold the cross laps due to their slop. I will go back and use tube cemnet after everything is tacked in place. The flooring itsellf will be 0.030" styrene sheeting and that will made the whole thing very strong.

We’re heading out of town on Thursday so reports will have to wait until next week.

[TDahl]

Fantastic!