and a special welcome to my first and only reader from Great Britain, whoever you are. I get a kick out of seeing from what countries the blog gets hits from. I'm still missing hits from South America so if any of you have any contacts down there, feel free to forward them a link to the blog.
Also, I'm sorry I lost your e-mail but to the gentleman from Somalia inquiring about purchasing 10 of these ships, please e-mail me again. But let me be clear, these are defintely not sea-worthy so I do not know why you were asking about clamps for outboard motors. And as for your question regarding purchasing additonal ammunition for the cannons??? These cannons only shoot water, and not at a very high pressure. You basically attach a garden hose to these, that's the extent of their "power". Anyways, do e-mail me if you were actually looking for a "playset".
Now back to the build. It hit me yesterday that I haven't been sharing as many tips and tricks lately so last night when I was doing some more prep work in the workshop, I snapped some pics.
I was procrastinating, I guess, on working on the portholes but since it's dark out early now and I only got home at 8, only thing I could really do was work in the workshop. I had 5 "frames" cut for some portholes but I hadn't done anything else to them yet. Plan was to use plexiglass or I think the real term for what I have a sheet of is polycarbonate, instead of glass for the panes.
So, once again I got to pull out a tool I hadn't used yet on this project, my router table.
Fortunately by backing up the guides on it as far as they could go, it basically gave me the perfect jig to route just a small strip on the inside of my frame.
I did have to adjust the height of the bit as well as use a scrap of 1/4 inch plywood to give me the right depth that would match the thickness of the polycarbonate. Take a look, I'm rather pleased at how this worked out and it only took me 15 minutes to set up and maybe 5 minutes to run all 5 frames.
So I then got my sheet of ploycarbonate and and pulled out my multi-tool. Unfotunately, Canadian Tire doesn't offer this specific tool anymore. Tood bad as I've used this one A LOT and it is AMAZEBALLS. It's one of those tools where at first you may only think of one use for, but once you start using it you find all types of jobs for it. I use it a lot with the plunger router attachement as it comes with a collar for standard router bits. It's a little under-powered for big routing jobs but a quick setup for those quick jobs. Here is is with various "Dremmel" type bits I use.
Now you'll notice I've got it laid out on a scrap piece of styrofoam insulation. Styrofoam insulation is (I've found at least) perfect when you need to work on material that you want to cut but also need consistant support underneath while you're making your cuts. If the material you're cutting is brittle, thin or just plain fragile, lay it out on some scrap styrofoam. Make sure though, that if you're cutting material that's 1/4 inch thick and you're using let's say a circular saw with a cut depth of 2 and a half inches, that you either use 2 and a half inches of styrofoam or if adjustable, reduce your cut depth.
The idea here is to cut through the material while your blade or bit slices effortlessly through the soft styrofoam underneath. Now don't start heralding me as a genius for this, you can for other stuff but in this case, I did not invent this technique as I'm sure I saw it on some TV show or read it in an article, somewhere.
So I end up with a nice porthole pane made of "kid friendly" and "kid resistant", pretty much shatter proof material.
Take the protective coating off of it and VOILÀ!
Now I'm going to gluegun (yes, I've just invented a new verb. THAT just happened!), these panes into the frames and at some point during this weekend the pirate ship will have some portholes. They already look "ok" but I still need to do some sanding on the frames and for the aft of the captain's quarters / cannon room, I'm going to try and do something a little fancier than round portholes.
Probably no new updates for a few days but this weekend, weather permitting, you can look forward to seeing the aft mast completed with the horizontal boom and pullies (basically a crane) and hopefully some of these portholes installed.
Until then, as always, thanks for dropping by.
No comments:
Post a Comment