1:30 Scale Nax Fishing Vessel - NTKJ MODEL - Part 3

In Part Two of this mini series we managed to get the boat sanded, filled, painted and wired.  In this episode we finish the model

Fitting the Accessories

Replacing some of the awful laser cut accessories has been a primary goal and now we get to fit those to the deck.  In the photo below you can see the life preservers, anchors and vents which have all been painted and glued to their respective positions around the boat.

Some additional accessories were necessary though:

A deck winch - Cults 3D - This is apparently the upper deck crane winch for a Liberty Ship, but it looked suitably mechanical for my needs.

A light housing - Thing:6007577 - Not perfect but do you know how hard it is to find these sorts of objects from a description

Rigging the Mast

We are almost at the end of the build and this is where the quality of the instructions once again fails to clearly indicate what you are supposed to do.

I need a little bit more instruction given the limited amount of wood we have left.  So I spent an hour or so studying the other Naxos fishing boat model reference photos I had collected and drew myself out a rigging plan.

Given that I had used some of the thin length of dowel for my prop shaft, I did not have enough left to do both the Spar and the crane Jib.  I grabbed a BBQ skewer from the kitchen drawer and used that for the crane Jib.  I chucked both lengths into my drill and game them a sanding, adding a taper to both ends of the mast to ensure that it fitted into the deck hole and also that it came to a rounded point at the top.

With no hardware (I believe is the appropriate term chandlery?) attaching these together was going to reuire some ingenuity.  I grabbed the thin aluminium florist wire I use for pinning my miniatures and bent up a couple of hooks. I then drilled a hole into the mast and one into the end of the Jib supergluing the hooks so that they act as a rudimentary swivel.   

Four more hooks were also made.  Two fit into the gunwhales on either side of the mast and two in the rear corners of the transom.  

I then laminated some plasticard and created a trapezoid shape which would act as a place to anchor the Jib Pulley.

Talking about Pulleys, I could have used 3D Printed parts for these but the kit actually came with some wierd figure of 8 shaped pieces of wood which may have been for the deck winch that I didn't end up using.  These would do nicely as pulleys. 

Some thin "straps" were cut out of the plasticard to add a little believeability to my scratchbuilt fittings and it was time to glue in the mast.  I wish that I had spent a little more time on this as my mast ended up a bit cockeyed and listing to starboard.  I tried to rescue this with the mast rigging on the port side  but it was a little more adrift than the thin cotton thread could muster.  Chalk that up to experience.  

With the mast rigged it was a simple case of adding a length of thread to the end of the jib and looping it through a pulley and down the mast.  This is when I realised I needed to tie it off somewhere and so I drilled a second hole into the mast for a tiedown.  I left the end of the thread long so this can be the end of the rope used to raise and lower the jib.

The final part of the rigging was to add a length of thread between the the two aft hooks and wrapping it around the end of the jib.  All the threads were superglued in place to stop them from ever coming undone.

And with that it's done, or at least as done as it can be for now.  I will probably tidy up the paint and maybe add some more accessories some time in the future.

I was really impressed with what I was able to do given the limited nature of the materials and it was a real challenge of my modelling skills. 

I really enjoyed my nautical adventure and it has spurred me on to try another more historic vessel and another cheap Aliexpress wooden boat kit.

I wish I could be as creative as Hank

After a tough day in the office I often kick back and watch a little YouTube...

Hank is a powerhouse of creativity and yet he is still humble and understands the core of what it is to be a roleplayer. It's the thing that we all look forward to at the end of the week, when we can kick back with 5 or 6 friends and enjoy the collective experience of being someone else...

Jessie's Prints - Episode 40 - Kobold Slackers and The Fear Smith

This week, I are mostly been printing... Slackers

I have so many projects on the go at the moment and one big one which I have started painting.  However, when you come across a model that just begs to be printed then you have to push the other projects to the side for a minute.

Kobold Slackers - by MX4250 on Printables 

Being a big Jay and Silent Bob fan I couldn't resist this pair when I saw them pop up on the MZ4650 Patreon blog.

Also pictured is

The Fear Smith - MZ4560 on Printables

This guy just oozes nightmarish horror and would fit well in almost any game. 

1:30 Scale Nax Fishing Vessel - NTKJ MODEL - Part Two

In Part One we got the basic hull together 

Sanding and More Sanding

As I mentioned the hull is made of straight ply planks and there are a lot of gaps and seams which require filling with wood filler.  I bought a tub of 151 wood filler which I thought was going to do the trick and I was dissapointed that it was more like wall filler than anything else.  Still I persevered and ended up slapping on a ton of the stuff.  

In hindsight I would do this totally differently.  The filler oozed between the planks and ended up inside the boat hull trapped between the frames which then dried and fell off.  I have in effect created a boat shaped maraca.  

This necessitated opening up the deck under the wheelhouse in order to release the now rock hard filler.  This might sound like major surgery, but as the deck is so thin it was easily acomplished with a sharp craft knife and a steady hand.  I made sure to keep the offcut as I have plans for that later.

The way to tackle this is to use the old superglue and baking soda trick to fill up the gaps.  This of course only works if you are painting the hull.  If you are going for the natural wood finish then you are going to have to get better at laying the planks. 

Painting

Painting the boat in sections is unavoidable at this stage.  I carefully masked off the deck and gave the now smooth (ish) hull a spray coat of white primer followed by a couple of coats of white gloss.

The airbrush then came in handy for painting the decks with a Vallejo Burnt Umber wash.

The remaining wooden pieces for the wheelhouse, deck covers and the gunwhales were then extracted from their boards and sprayed with the same Vallejo Burnt Umber wash. 

Adding Some Colour

I imagined the boat a sort of tri-tone with a red top stripe white hull and black or red hull bottom.  In the end I just gave it a stripe of red on the sheerstrake plank and continuing around the transom.  Masking this off was a tricky exercise as I only had some really nasty cheap painters masking tape.  I will have to come back and do some tidying up by hand later.

Trial fitting the wheel house accents and deck hatches really makes the boat come alive.

You might beable to see in the photo above that I managed to glaze all the windows with some clear acetate from some recycled packaging.  I glued this in using my now favourite hobby glue UV Resin which I picked up in my Wish Hobby Products 2024 experiment.  This stuff is amazing.

Adding the Lights

Last year I picked up some micro LED lights for another project (which I have yet to start).  These are incredibly tiny and come pre-soldered onto super thin magnet wire.  I quickly soldered a couple of these together with a CR2032 coin cell battery holder and a latching push button and stuffed it into the hole.

I will probably tidy this up with a piece of perfboard at a later date as the circuit is tiddly. I am also undecided if I will add any navigation lights.  For the uninitiated this mean a RED LED for the left (Port) side of the boat and a GREEN LED for the right (Starboard) side.  I have some 3mm LEDs from another side project but these might be too large, we will have to see.  Adding them to the circuit should be no problem and might even add some much needed resistance to bring down the brightness.  

The LEDs were then routed up through the floor of the front wheelhouse and up one corner.  One LED illuminates the interior and is bonded to the roof with the UV Resin and the other goes outside in front of the cabin as an exterior deck light.  I will need to find an appropriately nautical shroud for this exterior light as they are suprisingly bright for their size.

Oh did I forget to mention that I added a salty seadog to steer this fine boat across the treacherous seas? 

He is one of the many 3D Printed accessories I covered in part one of this mini series.  A fine free model although he is now sealed in his cabin for all eternity as I have glued on the roof and floor.  

In the next, and final part of this mini series we will add all the accessories masts and rigging.

Jessie's Prints - Episode 39 - Index Card RPG Card Back Stamps

This week, I are mostly been printing... Stamps!!

ICRPG CARD BACK STAMPS - Thing 6545499

My recent foray into the Index Card RPG system (ICRPG) involved a lot of DIY card making, which I love.

However, during play this presented a problem in that all my card backs where blank and indistinguishable from each other.  What I needed was a simple stamp which I could apply to my card backs.  

I find it useful to categorise my cards into one of 4 types:

• People - NPCs, Villains, Bio-forms
  
• Places - Locations, buildings, Landscapes 
  
• Objects - Things, weapons, loot, traps and trinkets
  
• Monsters - Stuff that wants to kill you
  

This would help me to keep my ICRPG cards organized and reduce seek times to a minimum and thereby make me look like a great DM.

Tinker Cad to the Rescue

My experiments making a plaque for my Cowboy Bebop Swordfish II model taught me that this was going to be easily achieved.  

Step 1 - Make a black and white image in GIMP where black is what you want stamped and white is what you don't want to stamp.  This image is then reversed and saved as a JPG or PNG.

Step 2 - Use convertio.co to convert your JPG or PNG into an SVG which can then be imported into Tinkercad.

Step 3 - Import your SVG into Tinkercad and scale it to fit inside your stamp pad.  Make sure that the stamp is at least 4mm high and that you create a backing plate at least 1mm high to connect all the pieces of your stamp together.  Position the stamp so that it intersects with the backing plate and then group the objects together.  Export this as an STL for your 3D printer.  

Step 4 - Make a wooden backing plate and handle for each of your stamps.  If you get into ICRPG you are going to be making a lot of cards and doing a lot of stamping so this step is essential for long lasting stamps.  I made mine out of some scraps of hardboard I had laying around and I glued some pieces of old broom handle onto the backing plates before supergluing my stamps together.  

You could of course model the whole thing in Tinkercad.

 

Step 5 - Stamp Away!! - I bought some cheap stamp pads from AliExpress less than £1.50 each and they have lots of different colours to choose from so you can have a different colour for each card type.

 

Buy Me a Coffee

I have shared the stamp patterns on Thingiverse, so if you like them, download them and print your own card backs.  Support the channel and please leave a tip in the jar or use the paypal tip link.