The lumber hooker part 3

The rigging and railings were a labor of love - but the love affair has waned, and its time to move on to tracklaying and landscaping.

 

 

"Get a move on!"

After installing the backdrop, I spent the weekend continuing work on the freighter and a number of other small projects. The Forney brought the owner down to the smelter in his private car this afternoon to check out the work. He clearly doesn't feel I am making sufficient progress!

Let there be sky

The backdrop I ordered from the UK arrived today. I couldn't resist unrolling and temporarily taping it to the wall behind the smelter module. I took a quick run to the Big Box this evening and purchased a couple of sheets of luan so I can install it this weekend.

More ingots

After a full. evening casting and painting, the dock is filling up. Time to get back to working on the boat.

More ingots

I cast and painted another 30 copper ingot layers tonight and glued them up into 3-tier stacks. I have now completed somewhere between a half and one third of the ingot stacks required to effectively fill the dock and provide the impression that the output of the smelter is sufficient to warrant its existence.

  

Below are the three molds that I created and used in casting the ingot stacks. The first step was to make the single ingot mold at the left. I used this mold to cast four ingots which I then glued together to create the mold in the middle. Finally, I made four castings of this second mold to create the third mold. I considered making a mold of one of the three layer stacks, but felt that there would be too much under-cutting on the sides which would damage the mold when the castings were removed, so decided not to go that extra step.

Ingots I got

The whole reason for my Michigan Upper Peninsula copper smelter was to take the ore mined thousands of feet below the surface and smelt it into ingots for shipment to the industries down the lakes. Needing ingots to show being transported from the furnaces to the warehouse, stacked in the warehouse, on the dock and in the hold of the freighter, I started-out by carving a single ingot in styrene. I then made a mold and cast four duplicates in this mold and glued them together. I then made a second mold of this group of four and started casting them. Since I will need around a hundred of these sets, tonight I made a mold which produces four of sets at a time. Production will be ongoing for the next couple of evenings!

The photo below shows the standard manner in which the ingots will be stacked in the warehouse and on the docks. When finished, the dock will be covered with these stacks awaiting shipment.

 

 

In the photo below, we are looking into one of the open holds on the vessel which is tied up at the dock. You can see this hold is stacked high with ingots. Thankfully, since I am only modeling the vessel from the waterline up, I only needed two layers to make the hold appear as though it was stacked up to just below the deck.

The lumber hooker - part 2

The pilot house is just about complete on the vessel tied up at the dock on my copper smelter module. Now onto the main aft cabin! The whole kit is resin with the exception of some chain and the window material. Those handrail stanchions were fun to de-flash and drill! While a faithful replica of a vessel named RANGELL BOYS which worked the western Great Lakes, I have selected a different color scheme for my model and have named her in honor of my daughter.

As seen below, the pilot house has yet to be glued to the deck as I still need to install a couple of upper deck support posts, navigation lights and a railing across the back, which I hope to finish tomorrow evening.

The interior of the main pilot house is detailed with a wheel, binnacle and Chadburn. Realizing that these details would be virtually invisible once the roof was glued in place, I thought I would snap a photo for posterity!

Sky

Not being much of a classical "artist," I consider painting a decent backdrop to be beyond my abilities, so decided to do some digging to see what I could come up with. I ended up ordering this 10' long by 15" high backdrop from the UK for $43.00 including shipping. The wall on which the copper smelter module and its planned neighbor are hanging is 9 1/2 feet long, so this backdrop will work for the entire wall. I plan on heading into town this weekend to pick up the support brackets needed for the full wall a sheet of luan from which to make the backdrop mounting board. In that way, I can have the complete run of mounting board ready for the arrival of the backdrop in about ten days.

The lumber hooker - part 1

Needing a break from structure building, today I decided do some work on the freighter that will be loading copper ingots at the dock on my copper smelter module. She is a Sylvan Models resin kit of the RANGELL BOYS.

The RANGELL BOYS was a “lumber hooker” built in Marine City, Michigan in 1890. Named for their primary use in transporting huge loads of lumber as seen in the photo of the vessel below. In reality, these vessels were the water-born “semi trucks” of their day, and were called into service for carrying just about anything they could cram into their holds and on their decks. As such, it would have been a common sight to see such a vessel loading copper at one of the smelters in Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula - the area I am modeling.

 

While the locations of all hull openings for anchors chains and lines were cast in place, they required opening-up with a rasp in the Dremel and needle files. It was also necessary to drill a line of ten scupper drain holes on half-inch centers along each side of the main deck. I found this masking tape with inch markings in the paint department at Walmart a few months ago, and picked up a roll because I knew it was a solution looking for a problem. That problem reared its head today when I needed to mark the horizontal locations for these scuppers. To ascertain the vertical orientation, I rested a small piece of 1/8”styrene on the rub rail and marked the location for each hole on the appropriate verticals.

I then used a very sharp awl to center punch each scupper location and then drilled the holes through with an 1/8” bit in my regular drill. Below, you can see the ten holes after they were drilled.

 

After giving the castings a good scrubbing with a 3M pad and dish washing detergent, I masked off the lower section of the hull along the lower rub rail and shot the upper part of the hull and the interior with flat white Rustoleum. After this dried, I removed the masking and then re-masked the upper section and interior and shot the lower part of the hull with flat black.

While the hull was drying, I primed the three deck sections with Rustoleum sand colored camo primer, and then followed-up with a couple of light coats of a custom mix of cocoa, burnt sienna and pewter gray acrylic craft paints watered diluted with retarder and water shot with a cheap single-action airbrush. Thus far, I have had pretty good success applying craft paints I this manner. However, I find that a thorough cleaning is vital as the stuff hardens in the nozzle pretty quickly.