Wespe-Class Armoured Gunboat: The Model 

Introductory Note

Scale

Materials

Cutting the layers on a powered fretsaw	Sanding the sides of each layer vertical on an improvised disc sander	The first layers	The barbette and pockets for the anchors cut out	Milling slots for the rubbing strakes	Improvised drum sander to work the inside of the barbette	Shaping the body on the new shop-made disc sander	Tube made from laminated Bristol board	Trimming tube on the lathe	Drilling the hawse pipe on the horizontal milling machine	Deckhouse partially clad in Pertinax

Progress in constructing the hull		Engraving plating and planking			Excerpts from contemporary drawings			Barbette	Toner-trasnfer printing of bulwark layout

The floor of the barbette, which apparently did not have any camber, was built up from two layers of Pertinax one representing the steel-plating and engraved accordingly, the second cut out and engraved to represent the wooden flooring. The construction of the various hatches is described below.

Bulwarks, hull- and deck-plating installed		Making and installing the hawse-pipes			Scraper for half-round profiles	Rails and rubbing strakes installed	Toilet evacuation pipes	Milling the steps of jacobs-ladders

May 2019 - The main-deck plating, which had already been prepared a long time ago from a piece of bakelite (see above). The holes for the various fittings where marked out over a drawing and then drilled. The translucent property of the bakelite is very helpful for marking out. Once glued on, the deck was carefully sanded to the contour of the hull.
I spent a lot of time deliberating the best way to make the plating of the hull and the bulwark. The shape is quite simple, as the sides are vertical from just below the waterline (probably to facilitate the production of the armour plating that needed to be curved in only one direction). The original idea was to cut the plating in one piece from brass shim stock. This would have resulted in near scale thickness of the bulwark plating. I considered this too flimsy, even if the handrail was soldered on. Another option would have been to use 0.13 mm styrene sheet. Again I considered it too soft. Bakelite sheet of 0.1 mm thickness would have been closer to scale, but rather brittle. For practical reasons I decided to use 0.2 mm bakelite sheet.
The layout of the freeing ports, the location of stanchions, the ash chutes, toilet drain pipes, and port-holes were drawn onto an expansion of the bulwark that was developed from the original drawings. The drawing then was laser-printed onto an overhead projection foil (remeber these ?). This foil was taped to a piece of bakelite sheet and the drawing ironed onto it, using what is called the toner-transfer method.
The plating was cemented to the MDF hull using cyanoacrylate glue (CA). I am not very fond of CA glue, but it forms secure bonds with bakelite.
On the prototype, the bulwark plating was attached to the hull by an angle iron (8 cm x 8 cm) running along the top of the hull. I simulated the vertical part with a 0.5 mm wide strip of self-adhesive aluminium sheet into which a row of rivets had been embossed. The horizontal part would disappear under a thick layer of tar-based paint that was mixed with sand and onto which sand was dusted to provide a non-slip deck.
The hawse pipes were made from some 2 mm x 0.5 mm brass tube. First the angle with the hull was cut and then an oval ring from 0.4 mm copper wire was soldered onto this surface. The part was then taken into a collet on the watchmakers lathe and drilled out to 1.7 mm ID. Finally, the funnel shape was formed with diamond burrs and polished with silicone burrs. The hawse-pioe then was cemented in place and the end above the deck ground down in situ flush with the deck. The cover on deck is an etched part I made already several years ago. It was cemented on using CA and then another funnel was shaped with diamond and silicone burrs.
Next step was to install at the bows the fairleads for mooring cables etc. These were milled and filed from 0.8 mm thick sheet of Plexiglas®.
Then the rails on the bulwark in the rear part of the ship were installed. The rail also serves as a rubbing strake and continues to the anchor-pocket at the bows. At first the bulwark and rail (0.4 mm x 1.7 mm on the model) caused some head-scratching and concerns for the stability of the arrangement. I though about cutting a longitudinal slot into some rectangular styrne, but finally decided to make it in two, with the half glued inside and outside to the bulwark that have been designed higher for the purpose. In this way a 0.4 mm x 0.7 mm styrene strip could be glued all the way to the outside of the hull. A similar strip was glued to the inside. The half-round profile was shaped using a scraper made from a piece of razor-blade and held in pin-vice. The profile was shaped after attaching it to the hull, because it was easier to clamp the rectangular styrene strip while glueing. The glueing was effected by infiltrating CA into the joint between the styrene strip and the bakelite bulwark.
Arrangements varied somewhat between the different boats of the WESPE-class, but there was a WC for the officers in the deckshouse on the starbord side and a WC and pissoir for the men and petty officers on the port side. Each had a half-round evacuation pipe rivetted to the outside of the hull. The pipes were protected against damage by a wooden fender. After a few years of service, a strong wale/rubbing strake was added to the boats that also widened to a kind of sponson at the stern to protect the screws. However, this did not exist at the time in which the model is represented.

Steps ready to be installed	Jacob-ladders		Fairlead for mooring hawser	Laser-cut lids for the freeing-ports	Installation of frames and lids	Laser-cut doors	Decks-house and back of the fore-deck with the doors installed

June 2019 - There are two jacob-ladders on each side of the hull, a wider one underneath the door in the bulwark and a narrower one a bit forward. The steps probably were made from wood and had slots towards the hull to prevent the water from collecting there and to prevent the wood from rotting. The steps are made from 0.8 mm thick Plexiglas® and the slots milled in. The sheet then was sanded down to the width of the steps and the ends rounded. Then individual steps of the right thickness were cut off on the lathe set-up with a mini saw-table. Unfortunately, the steps could only be cemented to the hull using cyanoacrylate glue, there being no positive locking. A bit of cellotape provided a guide for alignment. Nevertheless, the procedure was a bit nerve-racking.
Further, fairleads for the aft mooring hawser were installed. These were made from oval rings of copper-wire. The rings were formed over two 1 mm-drills taped together, cut off and closed by silver-soldering. The rings were sanded down to half their thickness and one each of these rings cemented to the inside and outside of the hull. The hole was drilled out and filed to shape.
February 2020 - Freeing Ports - Originally I had planned to surface-etch the lids and the frames on the inside of the bulwark. The drawings for the masks were ready, but I never got around to actually etch or have the parts etched. Since I now have the laser-cutter, these parts were cut from printer-paper (80 g/m2 = 0.1 mm thick). With a width of the frames of only 0.5 mm, the surface-etched rivets may not have come out anyway. The same for the rivets on the hinges of the lids. At least not with my somewhat primitve home-etching arrangement. If I had etched the parts from 0.1 mm nickel-brass, the overall thickness would have been reduced to a more correct 0.05 mm (= 8 mm for the prototype) The lids have no latches to lock them and the ports no bars across them to prevent items or people being washed over board. This makes their construction simpler.

Papers, even the smoothest ones, alway have a certain surface-roughness, at least compared to the bakelite of the bulwark. Therefore, the chosen paper was soaked in wood filler and spread to dry on a thick glass-plate that was covered in cling-film. The latter allowed to remove the paper without it rolling up. The surface was then smoothed with very fine steel-wool. The lids were cut from the thus prepared paper, but it needed several trials to find the right cutting parameters in order to arrive at parts of the correct dimensions. This is a disadvantage of such simple laser-cutters and their software. As the material is practically free, this is only a nuisance, but no other loss. Also the etching may not work out right in the first go, which may mean a considerable loss of money and time, if the process had been outsourced-
Unfortunately, it does not work for very small parts with the paper prepared as above. It turned out to better for the very small parts, including the frames, to cut them from unprepared paper. Perhaps I should switch to dark paper. Due to its lower albedo (reflectivity) it absorbs more energy from the laser. Unfortunately, all the coloured papers I have come by so far are quite rough on the surface.
I cheated somewhat for the freeing-ports. As I was afraid that I would not been able to cut them out cleanly and evenly, I abstained from it. Also, the bakelite-paper used for the bulwark for reasons of stability would have had a scale-thickness of 64 mm, when looked on from the side. Therefore, frames and lids were glued flat onto the inside and outside of the bulwark respectively. I hope one will not notice this too much, once the stanchions are in as well.
Frames and lids were glued on with zapon-lacquer. Little laser-cut rectangles of 0.3 mm x 0.5 mm were stuck onto lids to simulate the hinges.
Foredeck and decks-house were accessible through various doors. These were cut from 0.1 mm bakelite paper with the laser-cutter. The hinges were laser-cut from thin paper. In both cases various tries were needed with different cutting parameters and slightly altered drawings in order to arrive at the correct size. Die parts were assembled using zapon-lacquer. Zapon-lacquer was also used to glue the door into place.
On historical photographs I noticed that each door had a narrow step. These were represented by shaped and laser-cut tiny strips of paper.
Once the door were in place the hole for the bullseyes were drilled out. The laser-cut hole served as a guide. Once the boat is painted, the glazing will be installed in form of short lengths of 1 mm Plexiglas rods. The front of the rods will be faced and polished carefully on the lathe.
At a later moment also the door-knobs will be turned from brass and installed.

Best available image of the bow scrollwork and name-plate (S.M.S. SCORPION)	Only available image of the stern scrollwork (S.M.S. NATTER)	Artwork for the bow scrollwork	Some examples of  (unused) laser-cut scrollwork and the name-plates	Scrollwork and name-plate in place	Stern scrollwork in place

June 2020 - Scrollwork and name-plates - As I had tried laser-engraving on cardboard for the gun-layer stand, I wanted to try out this technique also for the scrollwork and the name-plates. Originally, I had foreseen to develop the scrollwork by printing the design onto a decal-sheet and then build it up by sculpting it over the printed lines with acrylic gel. The name-plates could have been surface-etched in brass. One could have etched, of course also the scrollwork in brass and then complete it with acrylic gel.
It is not very clear what the scrollwork looked like when new and from what material it was made. The fact that it seems to have persisted intact over the whole life of these ships may indicate that it was actually cast in some metal, rather than carved in wood.
There are no close-up photographs of sufficient resolution in the black-white-yellow paint-scheme. Closer photographs are only available from a later period, when everything was painted over in grey and some of scrollwork may have been picked out in a darker grey. Originally it was probably painted in yellow-ochre with parts of gilded. In any case, available photographs are not clear enough to truly reconstract the scrollwork, so some interpretation was necessary.
In addition to the scrollwork per se, there was a shallow sculpture of the animal after which the ship was named, for SMS WESPE, of course, a wasp. Existing photographs only give a vague idea what these sculptures really looked like. In any case not for SMS WESPE.
There has also been some scrollwork at the stern, but pictorial evidence for this is rather scarce. There is only one known photograph that gives a full view of the stern of this class of ships and this was taken at the very end of their service life. Available copies of this photograph are not clear enough to really discern what the scrollwork actually looked like, so a fair amount of imagination is needed to recreate it.
Creating the basic artwork for the decoration was a multiple-step process. First a photograph of the respective section of the model as built was taken in order to give the necessary proportions. In the next step the best available photograph with the least perspective distortions was chosen and fitted over the model photograph. In another layer of the graphics software (Graphic for iPad) the scrolls were drawn free-hand (with the iPen) using the paintbrush-function and a good amount of smoothing. This artwork was saved as a JPEG. On the Internet I found a nice drawing of a wasp and turned this into a pure b/w image with a good bit of editing in Photoshop. Both, the scrollwork and the wasp were saved as transparent GIF. In my favourite CAD-program (EazyDraw), the parts were mounted together. This could have been done also in Photoshop, but I did have a scaled drawing of the bow-section in EazyDraw to which I exactly fitted the artwork. There were also some addtional parts to be cut.
The scrollwork was cut/engraved with the laser-cutter using the ‘half-tone’ function, which means that the laser is modulated to emit less power when a grey pixel is encountered and full power, when a black pixel is encountered. I had to play in several iterations with the settings of the laser-cutter in order to arrive at a satisfactory result.
In a first try the name-boards were made in the same way, but the half-depth engraving around the letters resulted in a somewhat fuzzy apearance of the letters. I, therefore, tried out a different idea. From previous trials it was know that the laser had no effect on transparent materials and very limited effect on translucent materials. Hence, I covered some cardboard with a thin layer of Pleximon 192 (essentially liquid, light-hardening Plexiglas). A thorough curing this sandwich was sanded flat and presented to the laser-cutter. The laser removes all the cardboard, but leaves the acrylic virtually untouched, with the exception of some light surface roughness. One ends up with a piece of thin acrylic sheet to which the letters and the scrollwork of the name-board are attached. Within the limits of the resolution (0.05 mm) of the laser-cutter the lettering turned out reasonably clear, perhaps not as crisp, as when photoetched though.
The scrollwork elements were attached to the hull using fast-drying varnish. The actual painting and guilding will be done, once the hull has been painted.

The aft part of a WESPE-Class-Boat (Lavverenz, 1900)	Etched and soldered together stanchions (they are about 5.5 mm high)	The bulwark-stanchions in place	Recessed slide and anchor release gear	Recessed slide with Inglefied-anchor put temporarily in place	View of the bow with the anchor stowage	Plexiglas plugs ready for insertion	Glazed portholes	Glazed portholes

December 2020 - bulwark stanchions - The bulwark in the aft part of the hull is supported by a number of stanchions that were cut from sheet metal and rivetted together. The looks for these stanchions is reasonably well documented on a number of photographs. The stanchions I had drawn already years ago and depicted the rivetting by surface-etching. The material is 0.1 mm thick nickel silver. They were made in double as mirror images and soft-soldered together in pairs with soldering paste so that the rivetting appears on both sides. The location of the stanchions was marked on the bulwark before this was put into place by thermo-transfer of a drawing, i.e. a laserprinter printout was ironed on. The stanchions were cemented in place with fast-dryining varnish.
Already a short while ago I had fashioned the boiler-ash chutes by milling to shape little blocks of acrylic glass. They were cemented to the bulwark inside and outside at this stage too.
January 2021 - Anchor stowage and release gear - The Inglefield-anchors are stored on sort of recessed slides and released by a traditional form of gear. This gear consists of a rotatable iron bar with a couple of thumbs welded on over which the securing chains are hooked. The chains go around the anchor and the other end is shackled to the wall of the recess. The bar is prevented from rotating by lever that is also welded to it. The lever in turn is locked by a rotating claw at the end of a second lever. I suspected this mechanism from the available drawings, but wasn’t shure about it – a German colleague had better eyes than me an could confirm this indeed on the not very clear photographs.
The slide is protected by three T-rails on each from the weight of the heavy anchors.
The release gear was fabricated from 0.3 mm diameter tinned copper wire and assembled using varnish. The rails in turn are fabricated from laser-cut strips of Canson-paper that was soaked in varnish. They also function as bearing for the bar of the release gear. I suspect the bearings were a bit more elaborate on the prototype, but I don’t have more detailed information. The locking claw is also a microscopic laser-cut piece. As usual, I had to experiment with different variants of the drawings and settings of the laser-cutter until I managed to produce reasonably clean parts.
December 2021 - Porthole Glazing - Following the discussion on ways to make the porthole glazing further up, I looked over all available photographs and came to the conclusion that one does not actually seem to see the bronze frame from the outside. On the other hand, most photographs or their scans do not have sufficient resolution to really see such detail.
In order to make my life simpler, I decided to go for solid Plexiglas plugs. I did have 1 mm Plexiglas rod in stock and short sections were cut from this to make 2 mm long plugs. The plugs have to be a bit longer than their diameter, so that they can be inserted straight. The front face was turned flat on the lathe and the back-end was given a bit of a chamfer for easy entry into the pre-drilled holes after which it was painted black using a black permanent marker pen. The pieces were then transferred to the micro-mill for polishing the front face with a silicon rubber polishing bit.
In order ensure that the porthole plugs are set at equal depth, a little ‘tool’ was made, a punch with a recess of 0.3 mm depth around the rim.

The 30.5 cm Rk/l22 gun

February 2007 - There are some fixtures for the gun that need to go into their place in the barbette early during the construction, including the races for the gun carriage and the semi-circular toothed rack that is part of the gun-training machinery. I decided to make these from steel, even though ferrous metals in model construction are frowned upon by museums. My justifications were that it is difficult to represent cast iron or steel by paint and that there hundreds of models in museums around the world that contain iron. I have used steel it in models some twenty years ago and presumably due to the lacquering shows no signs of rust.
Cutting thin disks from round stock of sizeable diameter is a pain I wanted to avoid. Against my better knowledge I picked a suitably sized steel washer as starting material. Unfortunately, the steel used does not cut very well at all and lot effort was spent to avoid chatter marks while turning and to obtain a reasonably good finish. The various types of wheel collets available for the watchmaking lathe come into good use for working on inside and outside diameters of the disks.
I set up the hand-shaper for cutting the rack teeth, but had to throw away the first two attempts because of the poor material and because - again against better knowledge - I did not lock the traverse slide when cutting. The table was removed from the shaper and the home-made dividing head bolted on instead. For lack of a proper tool grinder (another project) I hand-ground a cutter for the rack tooth (0.1 mm at the bottom) from a rod of high-speed steel. For holding this tool-bit in the shaper, the old lantern-style tool holder from the watch lathe came very handy. The unwanted parts of the ring were cut away on the shaper using ordinary left and right hand lathe tools. Finally the necessary sections were trimmed off with a fine saw blade on the lathe's sawing table.

Roughing out the metal disk with the backing of a wooden disk	Grooving the races with a specially ground bit	Cutting out the inside of the large, backward ring	Trimming the outside of the small, forward ring	Shaper set-up for cutting the toothed rack	Cutting the toothed rack with a specially ground tool	Cutting away the unwanted part of the ring with an ordinary tool	The set-up showing the finished rack	The races and the toothed rack ready to be trimmed to correct length of arc	Base-plate and rails for upper carriage laser-cut from Canson-paper	The basic frame of the lower carriage from the rear

February 2020 - The lower carriage of the gun was a rather complex construction from rolled L-profiles and thick steel sheet. Unfortunately only the drawings in GALSTER (1885) and the coloured synoptic drawing from the Admiralty have come to us. Many construction details are superimposed onto each other with dashed lines, so that the interpretation of the drawings is rather difficult in places. As aids to interpretation with have one close-up photograph, the large demonstration model in the navy museum in Copenhagen, and the preserved guns of Suomenlinna Fortress off Helsinki. The carriage for the Danish iron-clad HELGOLAND, however, differs from that of SMS WESPE in some details, being actually a turret-carriage. The carriages in Suomenlinna are Russian copies of Krupp fortress carriages, but they allow to verify certain construction details that are not clear from the drawings.

The basic frame of the lower carriage from the rear	The basic frame of the lower carriage from underneath with the housing for the training gears	The basis frame of the lower carriage with the upper carriage and the gun put temporarily in place		Working drawing for the parts of the hydraulic brake	The individual parts of the hydraulic recoil-brake	Dry-fitting of the recoil-brake into the lower carriage frame		Buffer beams on the lower carriage	One buffer dry-mounted

Buffers and fastening nuts	Buffers and fastening nuts – the buffer have a diameter of 1 mm	Safety claw, pivot plate and drive shaft	Milling the loading crane	Fork for pulley	Milling the pinion and cog-wheel for the winding mechanisms			Part-assembled loading crane

Drawing for laser-cutting - gun-layer stand	First Version with engraved surfaces of the platform for the gun-layer	Final Version of the platform for the gun-layer	Tea-bag fabric	The collection of gratings and steps	Caster wheels prepared for assembly	Caster wheels in place

Stiffening brackets added over the caster-rollers	Supporting brackets and rods for working the training gears	Rollers in brackets to lead the running-in tackle	The lower carriage with the gratings installed				Lower carriage temporarily placed into the barbette

Races and rack provisionally in their place inside the barbette	Facing and centring a piece of steel rod for the gun barrel	Rough drilling of the gun barrel	Turning the barrel using the automatic fine feed	Taper-turning with off-set slide rest	Rounding the 'rings' using a hand turning rest	Boring the barrel using a micro boring tool	Set-up showing for milling the seat for the lock

Close-up of the milling operation in the dividing head with support	Working drawing and files used to finish the lock seat	Milling the square part of the trunnions	Milling the seat for the trunnions	Trying the trunnion	Milling the concave transition between trunnion and barrel	Milling the seat for the sights	Drilling the seats for the sights	Round- milling  the lock piece	Cutting off the finished lock piece

Milling square and hexagonal bolts	Facing the locking screw in special protective brass collet	The (almost) finished gun barrel with its lock			Part view of the drawings for the photo-etched upper carriage frames	Surface etched frames for the upper carriage	Filler and covering pieces laid out for soldering	Assembled side pieces and ties laid out

Assembled carriage from the rear	Assmbled carriage from the front	Carriage with the barrel in place. Note the trunnion bearings cover (not yet trimmed to lenght)		Added the rollers plus the sockets aft for the lever that is used to turn the excentric bearings of the rear rollers

Cutting the gears for the gun elevating mechanism using different division plates				Cut-off wheels before further machining	The elevating gear train in GALSTER (1885)	The elevating gears on the instruction model in Copenhagen	Krupp factory photograph (TU Berlin)	The step-wise forming of the dished handwheel

There is a friction-brake on the axle of the last large wheel of the gear train, which is worked with a cross handle. How this functions is not clear, but it presumably just pull the gear onto the frame via a short thread that is cut onto the end of the axle. On the starboard side of the gun there is a brass disc and an indicator lever that somehow shows the degree of elevation and presumably the range of the gun with different kinds of projectiles and charges. Again, how this indicator disc is coupled to the elevating gears is not clear, as I do not have any suitable photographs. In any case, the respective gear train will not be really visible on the model.

The dished handwheel started life as parts photoetched from 0.2 mm brass. In order be able to bend each spoke into the dished shape, a former was turned from some round steel and set up on the watchmakers ‘staking tool’. The spokes were pre-bend by hand and then finally pulled to shape using a hollow punch. The parts then were chemically tinned and soldered together with the aid of some flux.

The remaining parts, such as the axles, are simple parts turned from steel rod for strength, as they are quite long compared to the diameter.

August 2020 - The gear segment for the elevating mechanism of the barrel was produced by turning a short piece of copper pipe that I happened to have in stock to the correct inside and outside diameters. The teeth then were cut on the micro milling-machine using the dividing head in a horizontal position. Then slots were sawn at the angular distance required and then a slice of the required thickness parted off. The ends of the segments were finally filed to shape. The copper then was tinned in self-tinning solution to resemble steel. For the brackets with which the gear segment was attached to the reenforcement ring of the gun barrel a piece of brass rod was turned out to the correct inside diameter. On the mikro-mill with the dividing attachment in upright position the other faces were milled to shape. Finally, the individual bracket were sawn off with a circular saw at the correct thickness. The parts, which are just over 1 mm long, were chemically tinned to adapt them somewhat to the steel colour of the barrel. As they will not have to withstand any mechanical forces, they were glued to the reenforcement ring with zapon lacquer.
There were still a few details missing on the upper carriage, for instance the indicator disc for the elevating mechanism. How this indicator is coupled to the elevating mechanism I was not able to find out. It is not shown on the drawings, it is not visible on the model in Copenhagen, and the respective parts are missing from the guns in the Suomenlinna fortress. There was probably a gear train on the inside of the carriage. For this indicator disc a piece of 2 mm brass rod was faced off and a mock gradation engraved with a toolbit turned onto its side in 6° steps. There is a steel indictor lever (the function of which is not clear to me, either the disc turned or this lever, probably the former). For this a steel disc was turned with a short arbor and transferred to the micro-mill, where the shape of the lever was milled out. This indicator disc seems to have been fitted only to the starbord side of the carriage.
Furthermore the brake-handels for the elevating mechanism were missing. A short piece of 0.25 mm diametre copper wire was flattend in the middle with a 0.8 mm diametre punch in the watchmaker’s staking tool. The resulting round flat part was soldered to a short distancing bushing and turned cap glued on from the other side.

Progress in homeopathic doses: I realised that I forgot the the two steps at the end of the upper carriage. So, the parts for the frame were laser-cut, pieces of tea-bag mesh inserted and the assembly attached to the carriage with lacquer.

(Almost) all the parts of the elevating gear laid out	The elevanting gear provisionally assembled			Engraving the indicator disc for the elevating mechanism on the lathe	Steps for the gun-layer

The gun carriage will be painted green, as evidenced by some contemporary builders’ models and a somewhat later instruction manual. The hue of the green is another issue. It was probably based on chrome oxide green.
The barrel of these breech-loading guns was scraped clean, then wiped with vinegar until a brownish oxide layer developed. The process was repeated several times and any loose ‘rust’ wiped off. Finally, the barrel was rub down with lineseed oil, effectively producing in situ a paint with ferric oxihyroxide and ferric acetate as pigment. The resulting colour would be something like caput mortuum. This is the way the barrel of the demonstration model in Copenhagen seems to have been treated. Moving parts and mechanically relevant surfaces were keept clean carefully, of course. I will, therefore, lightly spray the barrel in Schmincke caput mortuum.
All parts temporarily assembled had to be taken apart for painting first. After selecting a green for the carriage, all the parts were given several light coats with the airbrush until a uniform colour and sheen was achieved. Not so easy on some of the complex parts. After letting it thoroughly dry, the paint was scraped off from those parts that are meant to be bare metal, but could not be masked off, due to being difficult to access.

The assembly then proceeded from the inside out on the lower carriage. First the parts for the hydraulic recoil brake were installed. I decided to deviate from the prototype and not to install the protective tunnel over the piston of the brake in order to show the metal-work. I think this small bit of artistic license is permissible. All parts were put together with small blobs of zapon-lacquer, which dries up quite invisible.

Next the spring buffers were installed. Putting in the tiny hexagonal nuts required a very deep breath each time.

Flipping the carriage over the caster-wheels were put back, but this really taxed my patience. The wheels are held in place by little flat-head pins inserted from both sides. A simple through-pin would have been easier to install, but wouldn’t be quite prototype fashion.

The rail on which the upper carriage runs would be bare metal. Here the limitations of using cardboard as structural element shows its limitations. If I had used etched brass parts, I would have chemically tinned them before assembly and now could have just scraped off the paint or masked the area before painting to reveal the metal. Now I had to simulate it with paint and a soft lead pencil. I am not entirely satisfied with the result, but can’t do anything about it now anymore.

When proceeding to the upper carriage, I noticed a couple of mistakes I made years ago, when putting it together. Two of the transversal members were installed at a wrong place. The wheels of the carriage would have not touched the rails otherwise. When trying to rectify this, the whole assembly gave, but luckily I managed to put it back together without permanent damage.

Another issue also arose: one should not work from drawings alone, particularly in a project that streches so long as this one. It turned out that the carriage was a couple of tenths of milimeters to narrow and would not fit over the lower carriage with its guiding plates. I should have properly verified this, when developing the parts for the lower carriage. With a bit of bending and tweaking it could be made to fit, but cobble-jobs like this leave parts behind that are not as crisp as they should be.

Painting the gun barrel turned out to be a major nightmare. I did not want to prime the steel in order to not loose its metallic appearance. Usually, acrylic paints dry so fast that there are not serious issues with rust formation. When I first applied the first coat it looked ok, but the next morning it had developed a mottled appearance. The same phenomenon reappeared after each coat, but somewhat less. I attributed it to the fact that the bottle of paint was actually almost 25 years old and it had not been sufficiently mixed. In the end I cleaned off the paint and began again, but with the same result. Once more I took the paint off and then sprayed it, but without agitating the bottle, thinking that some of the pigment might have coagulated – same result. Finally, I decided to lightly prime the barrel with zapon-lacquer to isolate the steel. This forms a very thin and virtually invisible layer. This did the trick, but the priming was not done carefully enough and some spots were left bare – with the result that those areas appeared mottled again. I tried dipping, but this leaves a too thick layers in corners etc. Eventually, I managed to obtain a reaonably even layer – one has to work very fast and going over areas already treated is virtually impossible due to the rapid drying. It is also very difficult see, whether one has covered the whole surface. In conclusion, I think the pigment of caput mortuum, which probably is the mineral haematite (Fe3O4) has reacted with the steel (Fe0) leading to the mottled appearance. However, I managed to reproduce the appearance of the barrel of the demonstration model in Copenhagen reasonably well, considering the small scale.

A few of the flimsy and easy to break off details have not yet been installed and some levers to work the mechanisms still have to be fabricated.

The painted and (part) assembled gun

Shells in handling cradles	Powder bag	Free-hand turning of the shell	Gun drill, showing the cradle	The finished ready-shells

It not clear, how the heavy shells (weighing around 330 kg) were handled inside the ship and hoisted to the level of the barbette floor. The crane on the gun-carriage does not actually reach over the access-hatch to the shell-store through which the shells presumably were hoisted. The drawings are not clear on the various hatches in the barbette and over the shell-storage, because of various elments being hidden behind others and therefore not drawn. I will have to live with this ignorance.

Deck Furniture

Turning the raw bollard	Mounting the raw bollard in the dividing head on the milling machine	Milling operations: first squaring, then producing the waist			Rounding off the cap	The roller filing rest	Finished bollards and part of working drawing	Drilling the holes for the bases

Drilling set-up	Milling the beading	Sawing off surplus material	Parting off the individual bases	Milling a bevel	Parts of double bollards	Work holding for soldering	Bollards, chain stoppers and spill

Milling the profile of the chain stopper	Milling the slots on the lathe	Milling bits and product	Squaring the part on the upright collet holder	Close-up	Round-milling on the rotary table

Undercutting using a micro saw bit	Stoppers compared against a 5 Euro-Cent coin	Drilling the hole for the release lever	Finished after stopper	Etched fret with stopper base plates (bottom left) and levers (bottom right)	Finished fore and after stoppers (right column)

Milling the sprocket, 1st step	Milling the sprocket, 2nd step	Cutting with a forming tool	Drilling the sprocket	Facing-off the sprocket in a jewel chuck	Capstan head ready for cutting off

Assembled capstan head	Shaping the head of the rollers by rotary milling	Set-up for shaping the rollers using the geared dividing head	Etched fret with capstan base plate (top left) and pawl (bottom centre)	Finished Capstan (bottom left)	Engine-room telegraph drawings, original in the Norsk Maritimt Museum, Oslo, and the two telegraphs on the model

A short while ago I discovered during a visit to Oslo in the Norsk Maritimt Museum a very similar telegraph on display. Unfortunately, the legend is not readable on my image. I seem to remember that the inventor or patentee was named. A search on the Internet and in my library did not produce anything, so I would be grateful, if anyone has an idea, who the inventor or patentee might have been.

The telegraph was redrawn from the lithography in order to serve as a working drawing with measures to guide the lathe operation.

The whole telegraph seems to have been made from brass and accordingly the model was turned from brass. The indicator arm and follower were made from flattened brass wire and the ‘wooden’ handle built up from PVA glue.

SMS WESPE had two telegraphs, one for the starbord and port engine each, of this early twin-screw naval vessel.

Binnacles from the 1880s lithograph	Working drawings for the binnacles	Milling the octogonal columns	Milling the glass hood in the shape of an octogonal pyramid		Cleaning up after painting	The parts of the binnacles	Binnacles temporarily assembled

November 2019 - Binnacles. SMS WESPE was originally equipped with three binnacles, one on the bridge, the mother-compass on a sort of pole in front of the engine-room skylight, and the third one in front of the emergency steering-wheel at the stern. In the 1890s a fourth binnacle was installed on a platform atop the engine-room skylight, but is left off here. As SMS WESPE was built in 1876 the original binnacles lack the conspicuous compensation spheres, that were only invented in the 1880s by Lord Kelvin. Also other type of compensation gear is not visible on the lithographs and the earliest photograph. A photography of the early 1890s shows a much more substantial binnacle in front of the emergency steering-wheel, which preumably now houses the compensation gear and also sports the compensation spheres. Originally, the compasses must have been illumanted by petroleum lamps, but from the lithographs it is not clear, where these lamps would have been attached. At least there are exhaust funnels on top of the binnacles, which have disappeared in later photographs. This seems to indicated that electrical illumination might have been introduced, when a dynamo was installed on board in the early 1890s for a search-light.

For the model the individual binnacles were redrawn from the lithograph in order to serve as a basis for working sketch to guide the lathe- and mill-work. One needs to keep in mind that the total height is somewhere between 10 and 15 mm.
The columns presumably were made from mahagony and were turned from brass rod before being transferred to dividing head on mill to cut the octogonal shape.
The actual compass was made, as usual, from brass and so on the model. Body and funnel did not provide a particular challenge, not considering the small size. To the contrary, the glass hood with its narrow frames of perhaps 15 mm width on the original. The body was roughly turned from Plexiglas and then transferred to the mill. Here the octogonal pyramid was milled. Using a 0.3 mm ball-head burr narrow grooves were cut into the edges and these grooves filled in with brass paint.
Once the paint had thoroughly dried, the faces were very lightly milled over, which resulted in sharp narrow brass strips at the edges. This is a technique that I copied from making engraved scales.
Originally I had the crazy idea of placing a miniature compass-card underneath the Plexiglas hoods, but even without it, assembling the binnacles was fiddly enough.

January 2020 - Steering-wheels. All the boats had two sets of steering wheels, one on the bridge and the emergency steering-wheels at the stern. Both stands had double wheels that worked in the traditional way on drums and ropes. There is a rather good photograph of the emergency steering position, which allows to deduct the details of the wheels. On the model these wheels are rather delicate affairs of only just under 10 mm diameter overall. I had been considering many different ideas for different kind of materials for fabricating them. Machining the slender spokes seemed a daunting task. Photo-etching and assembling them from different layers seemed a more realistic proposition. It then appeared to me that laser-cutting might be also an option, as I had recently acquired a cheap, small machine.

After some tests with the laser-cutter, I finally chose 120 g/m2 Canson-paper, which is 0.15 mm thick and has a smooth surface. It cuts well with the laser-cutter, as it is not ballasted with inorganic material, such as barytes. Some trials were needed to determine the right cutting parameter combination of contrast, laser-power and cutting depth. One should assume that for a simple B/W-picture the contrast should be 100%, but somehow changing the contrast setting changes the width of the cuts. For this reason the final dimensions of the parts depend on the contrast setting. Laser-cutting is contactless and the cut-out parts are not moved during the cutting process. Therefore, it is possible to cut them out completely and in contrast to the photoetch-process they do not need to be attached to some frame. When designing the image with which the laser-cutter works, one needs to consider all these factors that sometimes can only be determined by trial and error.

The wheels are built up from five layers in order to simulate the joinery work and to arrive at the necessary 3D-rendering. The core part was thickened by two more layers, the outline of which was drawn a bit smaller to simulate the profiling of wheels and handles. A further layer on each side simulate the rim and hub. The individual layers were glued together with zapon-lacquer, which impregnates and stiffens the paper. Unlike many other glues, this lacquer only forms a very thin layer, not adding to the thickness of the wheel, and the parts can be adjusted, as long as the lacquer has not dried. 

The prototype steering-wheels were re-enforced by brass-rings screwed onto each face. My intention was to make these rings from real brass shim (remember: only real metal looks like real metal ...). However, I did not manage to cut so narrow rings from 0.05 mm brass-shim. In the end, I bored out a piece of round brass stock to 6.8 mm and turned down the outside to 7.2 mm. From this tube with 0.3 mm wall thickness, slices of 0.1 mm thickness were parted off. After a few trials to get the settings right, this worked fast and repetable. The rings were deburred on 600 grit wet-and-dry paper, ground finely on an Arkansas-stone and polished on a piece of paper with some polishing compound. The brass rings were glued on with lacquer.

The axle including drum for the steering rope were turned from brass. The wheels will be spray-painted painted all over and then the paint rubbed off from the brass rings. This will nicely simulate the rings let into the wood as per prototype.

Laser-cutting machine	Laser-cut steering wheels	Components of wheels	Steering-wheels and brass reenforcement rings	Assembled wheels and components	Gratings: JPG-mage as input for the laser-cutter	Steering-wheel pillars: JPG-mage as input for the laser-cutter	Machining the bearing caps in a ‘jewelling’ collet	Shaping the covering cap of the wheel-axle using a cup burr	Milling of the segment-shaped caps	Individual parts of the steering-stands	Steering-stand on the bridge loosely assembled

February 2020 - Steering-stands. They consist of two pillars each, supporting a pair of wheels. These pillars were in some way bolted to the deck, but drawings and photographs do not show how it was done. On the model this detail will be barely visible, as the lower part of the columns will be hidden by the gratings platform.The grating actually were photo-etched a long time ago. However, I did not like the rounded-out corners, which are due to my somewhat primitive etching process. Therefore, I cut the gratings also with the laser from Canson-paper. By playing around with the settings of the laser-cutter, I managed to produce reasonably square field and sharp corners. The fields resp. the ‘laths’ are only 0.3 mm wide and the grating is 0.3 mm thick (0.3 mm in 1:160 scale is equivalent to just under 50 mm for the prototype). I would have found it impossible to produce a grating in these dimensions prototype fashion.
The gratings are made up from two layers of paper 0.15 mm thick each. Imitating the prototype to some degree the lower layer only had transversal laths. Both layers were glued together with lacquer. The transversal reenforcing bars are built up from three layers of paper and glued to the gratings again with lacquer.
The platforms are raised above the deck by four short columns that were turned from brass rod. They were slotted for the reenforcing bars on the micro-mill.
The steering-wheel pillars were designed on the basis of the photographie showen earlier and what can be deducted from the lithographs. There is a pole protruding from the front pillar of the stand on the bridge, the function of which is unclear to me. It may have supported an indicator for the rudder or just the lanyard for the steam-pipe. The only known photograph that shows a boat before the armoured command tower was installed is too grainy from the printing grid (it is only known from a publication) to allow to discern such details.
The pillars where built up from three layers of Canson-paper, which allowed to represent the cannelures. The pillar appears to be rather thin, but this is how it is drawn on the lithograph.
The axle of the steering-wheel rests in bearings that are clad in brass or bronze. A piece of 2 mm brass rod was bored out for the round heads of the pillars and then a thin disc was parted off. For further machining the discs were held in special insert collets with a low recess turned into the front (so-calle jewelling collets, used by watchmakers to machine watch jewels or bushings).
The profile on the front was turned with a small boring tool and the dome-shaped cap over the axle was formed with a cup burr, as used by jewellery-makers to round off wires.  The caps are actually only segments of a disc and were milled of on the micro-mill accordingly. All parts were glued together using lacquer

November 2020 - Anchors. The WESPE-Class was fitted out with two Inglefield bow anchors and (presumably) a standard anchor as stern or reserve anchor. The bow anchors are stowed on chutes and handled with two small cranes on each side.
There is no drawing for the stern anchor, but the drawings seem to show chocks for its storage. There is also a hawse-hole in the stern and a crane above it. So it is likely that there has been a stern-anchor. What is not clear at all is, how the chain would have been handled and there are no stoppers or similar to belay the chain when in use. Neither is there a chain locker drawn in the stern. So there is de facto conflicting evidence.
Inglefield-anchors a are complicated affair, but seem to have been rather popular at the time with the Imperial German Navy. In an instruction book for drawing in shipbuilding a nice detailed drawing of an Inglefield-anchor was found and used as the basis for the model reconstruction. Its size is taken from the WESPE-lithographs in the German Technical Museum in Munich.
One could have perhaps sawn out the parts from a 0.5 mm brass or styrene sheet, but considering an overall length of the anchors of 12.5 mm this seemed to be a rather daunting task. For this reason the individual parts were drawn for the laser-cutter and cut from 0.12 mm Canson paper. The shaft and other parts were built up from several layers that were cemented together with fast-drying lacquer, resulting in some kind of composite material.
The parts then could be easily shaped using diamond and other files. After a certain amount of filing more lacquer was applied in order to prevent the fraying of the paper.
Finally the built-up parts were assembled using lacquer.
Instead of the traditional way of shaping the shackles from wire, I decided to also cut them from paper. The bolts on the smaller shackels would have been too small to represent and were omitted. I think they turned out quite convincingly.
On the other hand, the bolts that keep the parts of the anchor together were turned from steel and blackened before assembly.

Drawing of an Inglefield-anchor

Drawing of the components

Half-finishe Anchor and parts

Drawing for standard anchor

Laser-cut parts

Turning the anchor stock

Assembled anchors

Painted anchors

Set-up for milling flats

Milling cleats

Turning body of cleat

Finished cleat

Drilling cranes

Drilling seen through stereo-microscope

Anchor-cranes temporarily installed

The standard anchor possibly could have been cut from brass and soldered together, but then, once it is painted, no one really will know the difference. So I also made the respective designs and employed the laser cutter again. The proportions were taken from an anchor drawing in the Danish Naval Yard archives of the same period.
The shaft and arms were build up from six layers this time and after lacquering them together the part was shaped using a diamond nail file and various needle and echappement files. As usual more lacquer was applied to keep the paper consolidated. Finally the flukes were lacquered on and the large shackle also cut from paper attached.
The stock was the biggest challenge, as it is only 0.3 mm in diameter in the middle and tapering off. It was turned from thin steel rod. As the anchor will be stowed in the stern, the ball at the end of the bent side will not be visible and therefore left off. The visible ball was formed by a tiny drop of white glue.
March 2021 - Anchor-cranes - As noted above, the bow anchors are handled with two pairs of cranes that are positioned on either side of the anchor pocket. These cranes will be painted white in compliance will the prescribed livery. Hence, it does not matter what material is underneath and I first attempted to laminate them up from laser-cut Canson-paper parts. There are actually two sets of different cranes, one with three sheaves and one with two sheaves. They were made up from four and three layers of Canson-paper respectively and cemented together with lacquer in the usual way. The sheaves at the end are held by brackets that were lacquered on. Sheaves were turned and lacquered in. However, in the end the result was not as crisp as I had wished for.
So I turned back to brass, starting with pieces of 1.2 mm diameter wire. A spigot to fit into the sockets already installed on the boat were turned on and the other end received a male centre. The piece then was transferred to the dividing-head on the mill, supported by the tailstock. The four long flat sides were milled on with a small-diametre burr. The flat section is 0.8 mm high and 0.6 mm wide. The sides of the future brackets were milled flat. After re-chucking, a starter slot for the sheaves was cut with a circular saw.
In the meantime, the sheaves of 0.9 mm diameter were turned from the same brass rod and the grooves, which are 0.3 mm apart were marked with a pointed turning-tool. The main craine has three sheaves, while the auxilliary one has two sheaves only. They were all turned in one piece and I did not bother to drill the sheaves for axles.
The brackets on the cranes were bent to accomodate the sheaves, which were soldered in place. The shape of the cranes then were finished with files and abrasive discs in the handheld drill.
The tackles are belayed on cleats or belaying pins – the photographic evidence is not clear and on the drawings these were omitted. I decided in favour of cleats as these were easier to make.
A piece of 2 mm brass rod was chucked up in the dividing-head set vertically and a flat of 0.3 mm width and 0.9 mm height was milled on. This piece then was transferred to the lathe, where the T-shape and the 0.3 mm diametre spigot were turned. After parting off, the clamp was finished in a pin-vice using small files and an abrasive disc in the handheld drill.
As the cleats are fitted to the sides of the davits, 0.3 mm holes had to be drilled for their spigots. I did not want to do this before bending the davits, as it would have weakend them and the hole might become distorted in the process. However, it turned out the davits could be clamped conveniently in the mini-vice in the dividing attachment on the mill.
The cleats were soldered into the holes. This completed the construction of the davits.

Skylights, Companionways etc.

Etched parts for the skylights.	Shaping the central part for the boiler room skylight	The completed boiler-room skylight	Unglazed framework for the engine room skylight	Squaring up a Plexiglas block for the skylight	Milling the sloping faces	Polishing the sloping faces	Finished Plexiglas 'glazing' block	Glazed engine room skylight	Protective bars added	GEngine-room skylight ready for final assembly

Offficers' mess skylight	Milling Plexiglas block for the officers' mess skylight		Milling half-round copper wires	Grinding 45° bevels to half-round wires	Squaring up parts on the micro-grinder	The completed skylight	Milling and drilling operations on a hatch		Various hatches

Skylight being milled	Micro-draw-plate for mouldings	Trial of milling out window frame	Drilling frame for bars	Milling notches for window bars	Placing wires as bars	Building-up frames from styrene strips	Milling notches for window bars in situ	Grinding-down frames	Completed Skylights for officers' mess and pantry

Preparing a spacing device	Cutting notches for treads into stringers of bakelite-paper	Cutting slots for steps into stair-stringers of polystyrene	Glueing together the stair components	Sanding to thickness the stairs	Selection of stairs (not yet trimmed to length)	Laser-cut pieces for stairs	Collection of stairs and ladders (the stairs are around 4 mm wide)	Assembly of ladders for the barbette	Trimming flush the ladder rungs	Hatch with awning on a kuk warship	Hatch with awning on SMS WESPE

Images showing different types of ventilators on board of a WESPE-class gun-boat		Photo-etching mask	Setting up rectangular material in the 4-jaw-chuck	Turning the ventilator shaft	Drilling out the cowl	Aligning milling spindles	Setting up a brass rod in the excentric 2-jaw chuck	Turning the ventilator shaft	Turning the re-enforcement rings

Round milling the cowl back

Drilling out the cowls

Milling out the cowl

Shaping the back of the cowl on the grinder

Soldering on the topy of cowl

Finished ventilator and base

Boiler-room ventlators on boiler-room skylight

Milling officers' mess ventilator

Ventilator and Venturi suction- ventilator for the officers' mess

The boiler-room ventilators are sitting on a base that is square and then tapers into the round of the shaft. This part was milled and turned from Plexiglas, so that it can be cemented to the boiler-room skylight. This base will be painted white together with the boiler-room skylight, while the ventilator itself will be painted buff. This separation into two parts will give a clean separation between the colours.
The ventilators for the officers' mess, which included also a Venturi suction-ventilator, where produced in the same way, but are a lot smaller with the head only 2.9 mm high and the shaft having a diameter of 1.3 mm. All ventilators would be taken down, when the 'battle ready' alarm would be given. To this end they are mounted on sockets that would be closed with a lid or plug. This socket was turned from Plexiglas and will be glued onto the deck. It will be painted black together with the deck, while the white ventilator with black interiors will be put into place at the final assembly of the model.
June 2018: Two of the ventilators of the crew-quarters in the forecastle have the hollow chain-bollards as their base. These chain-bollards are used to relieve the chain-stoppers when anchoring or being moored using the anchor-chain. They have a couple of protruding 'noses' that keep the turns of the chain apart, so that the links do not wedge-in each other, making it impossible to cast-off the chain. Initially, two rims were turned on a piece of round brass and these rims then were reduced to the 'noses' by round-milling on the dividing head of the micro-mill. The base was also milled rectangular, as required. The ventilator was fabricated seperately, as the bollard will be painted black, while the ventilator will be white.

Shaping a Venturi suction-ventilator		chain-bollard	Shaping the chain-bollard that forms the base of the crew-mess ventilators				Collection of finished ventilators	Machining the funnel

July 2018 - Work on the funnel began. The main part was turned from a piece of Plexiglas™-rod. The bands were turned on and the top part hollowed cautiously 'flying', as a fixed would mar the soft acrylic glass. The remaining wall thickness is about 0.3 mm. The funnel is connected to boiler-house via a kind of apron that also accomodates its rake of 2.5°. The apron was turned from a piece of acrylic rod and then taken into a 'wheel-collet' on the vertical dividing attachment of the micro-mill. With the vertical axis inclined by 2.5° this allowed to drill out the apron at this angle. In the same set-up the holes for the two safety-valve exhaust pipes and the steam-whistle were drilled.
The funnel is actually only a sleeve and inside there is one smoke-pipe for each of the four boilers and a stiffening pipe in the middle. These pipes of 1.8 mm and 2.3 mm OD respectivel were turned from thin Plexiglas™-rod and then partly drilled out to the approximately scale wall thickness. Taking the funnel into the upright dividing attachment on the micro-mill, holes were drilled in the appropriate pattern. The upper ends of the pipes will receive stays from thin polystyrene sheet.

Funnel main body		Boring out sleeve	Seat for sleeve	Funnel with smoke pipes inserted

February 2020 - Boat-davits: Originally, the WESPE-Class was provided with four boats, later a small dinghy was added to the complemenent. The very first photograph shows the boats suspended outboard from the davits in the traditional way. A few years later ‘barrings’ or boat-racks were installed above the walk-ways along the deckhouse and the davits elongated accordingly. I gather the boats were prone to damage and prevented the boats from being alongside each other in a ‘parcel’ (as was common practice for flottillas of the same class of boats). For the same reasons at some stage sponsons were installed to protect the screws, which projected beyond the profile of the boats, from damage. However, as I will show SMS WESPE in her original configuration, I choose the shorter, fixed davits.
The davits presumably were hollow, but were not simply curved pipes, but changed their diameter and cross-section along the length. They apparently had a cross-section of a flattened oval in the curved part in order to resist the bending force of the suspended boat. This makes the construction of the davits a bit more involved. At the upper end there is a ball that holds four rings for the stays and the hook of the boat-tackle.
They started out as 1 mm brass rod (steel would have been better, but is more difficult to drill and to solder ...). The machining steps required a bit of planning in order to keep unsupported areas to a minimum. First the ball was turned in my small 6 mm lathe, where I could use the so-called ‘right-angle tailstock’ as a steady, using my home-made ball-turning attachment. The turning bit was a broken 0.2 mm drill, the end of which was ground at a suitable angle.
The pieces of brass-rod then were transferred to the dividing head in the micro-mill for 0.2 mm cross-drilling into the ball – four holes were needed in each. Aligning the drill and the ball is a bit tricky, as the drill might slip, bend and break.
This task provided the incentive to finally commission the antique stereo microscope that I bought a while ago, but never got work properly. By close inspection I discovered that one of the two objectives was misaligned – some previous owner must have tinkered with the adjusting and setting screws. Playing around with the screws, I managed to get proper stereo vision which made the cross-drilling job rather easy and I managed to get the 24 holes without drill break.
The remaining eight holes are axial and were drilled on the lathe.
The next two steps in shaping the davits were also carried out on the lathe. The section behind the bulwark is cylindrical. In order to safely turn down the the relatively soft 1 mm brass to 0.7 mm a so-called ‘Jacot-tool’ was used as a steady. This is essentially a an excentrically mounted hardened drum with groves of known diameter along the perifery. These grooves can be aligned with the centre-line of the lathe. Normally this tailstock-tool is used as a steady to burnish axles and similar watch parts. After each pass, the drum was turned to a smaller groove in order to provide good support while turning down the shaft of the davit.
In the following step, turning the tapering upper end of the davit, deliberately a groove one size too small, forcing the rod off-centre. This resulted in a slight taper as desired. The procedure was repeated with inreasingly smaller grooves until the upper end reached a diameter of 0.6 mm.
I didn’t take pictures of the next steps. The davits now were taken into a collet in a square collet-holder. Under the stereo microscope the cross-drilled holes at the top were aligned with the sides of the collet-holder. This allowed bending the davit in the corret direction. Bending was effected with bending pliers against a scale-drawing of the davit. That these slighly marred the back of the davit did not matter, as the shape had to be filed anyway. With various very fine files the shape of the curved section of the davit was developed.

Micro-ball turning		Davits with ball-ends	Drilling balls	Axial drilling	Jacot-tool used as steady for taper-turning		Set-up for drilling	Finished davits	Davits temporarily installed

The davits lock into the mounting plate on deck and are fixed to the rail of the bulwark with a bracket. This arrangement is entirely conjectural, as there is no suitable photographic evidence. The mounting plate is a simple piece of turned and drilled brass. The brackets started as thin discs with a slightly raised hub in the centre. From these discs three sides were milled off on the micro-mill to arrive at a rectangular plate with the raised hub at one end. Nothing spectacular either.
The boat tackle is belayed on a cleat that is fastened to the davit. The cleats were milled from a piece of 3 mm x 3 mm square brass rod (because I didn’t have 2 mm x 2 mm in stock ...). They are so tiny, that it would have been difficult to take pictures of the process. Again this was really only made possible now that I have the stereo-microscope in working order. First, the profile of the cleats was milled along the whole length of the brass, while it was clamped horizontally in my micro-vice. Next the piece was mounted upside down and a groove milled to fit onto the davit. The vice then was clamped vertically in the dividing head of the mill and the cleats sawn off.
The cleats and the bracket were soldered to the davit. For some reason I always struggle with soldering such parts whatever materials and tools I am using ... wanted to use soldering paste, but somehow mine didn’t work. In the end traditional solder did the job.
The eye-bolts were bent from tinned 0.15 mm copper wire. Tinned wire was used to make soldering it into the pre-drilled holes. First I formed the eyes around the shaft of a 0.25 mm drill, but then found that I can form them just with a pair of fine tweezers equally well. The wire ends were cut off flush with a pair of cutting tweezers, but a scalpel on a glass plate would have worked as well.
Soldering the eye-bolt didn’t quite work out first for the same reasons. I then tried to cement them in using shellac, but the joint wasn’t strong enough (I don’t have CA around and don’t like it anyway). It took a while until I developed the right strategy. Also, I didn’t dare to drill 0.2 mm right through the spheres, but with control under the binocular it can be safely done. It turned out that I had to re-drill various holes, because they became filled with solder. Holding the davits for re-drilling caused some head-scratching at first, but then I remembered that I had made clamps from fibre-reinforced bakelite (Novotex) for the third hand and took one into a 4 mm collet in the dividing head. This proved to be stiff holding arrangement and watching the drilling under the binocular, allowed the check for any dangerous deflection of the drill.
So on the bottom line, the following strategy would have been best (and was put into practice for some of the davits):
- drill the axial hole first on the lathe, bend the davit and the solder the eye into it;
- then cross-drill horizontally;
- insert an eye-bolt with a long leg and form the other eye with a pair of tweezers, so that both eyes are pulled tightly against the davit;
- solder the pair of eyes;
- cross-drill the vertical hole for the eye-bolt into which the boat-tackle will hook.
- insert an eye-bolt with a long leg and squeeze the leg flat, so that it cannot slip out.
- solder this last eye.
When the soldering is done fast and the other eye are not touched by accident in the process they will stay put.

April to June 2021 - Block-Making - The 1/160 scale from certain perspectives is rather inconvenient actually: too big to fake things and too small to do them properly due to practical limitations of tool sizes and materials dimensions. Blocks at this scale would probably come in the range between 0.8 mm and 2 mm length. The latter would be a hefty 32 cm (or 13”) in real size, at least for smaller ships.
When I started dabbling with photo-etching in around 2007, I had the idea to fashion blocks from surface etched parts folded up and soldered together. As the need for blocks only arose now, I had never tried out the idea. Since then I got the laser-cutter and thought I might give the same principle a try, laminating the blocks from laser-cut pieces of paper. I am aware that larger blocks, build up from laser-cut wood pieces, are commercially available now.
My preoccupation was to produce blocks of the correct outside shape and through which the rope passes prototype fashion, i.e. to avoid the brick-like thingies from which the ropes sticks out vertically and then goes down with a sharp kink, as seen all too often on models.
Warning, the following text describes some dead ends without success - As aligning the tiny parts correctly would be the main challenge, I drew the pieces at their correct relative location into small frets of several blocks that would be laminated onto each other. Once the lacquer was dry, the blocks could be separated. As I needed various double-blocks for the boat-davits and the anchor-cranes, I started out immediately with that challenge, thinking that, once mastered, single blocks would be comparatively easy to make. In fact, due to the thicknes of the Canson-paper, I needed seven layers, one for the outer shell on each side, one in the middle separating the sheaves, and the sheaves made up from two layers each. While the lamination as such worked well, aligning the seven frets precisely enough did not work too well. It also proved impossible to sand the tiny paper blocks to shape and smooth enough. The main problem, however, was that somehow the hole for passing through the rope always got clogged up. Opening it up with a drill then invariably let to the distruction of the block.
After a dozen of tries with different variants of the laser-cut parts to facilitate alignment etc. I finally gave up that idea.
Next came several experiments with the classical methods of carving blocks from billets, but using styrene or acrylic glass, rather than wood. While both materials are easy to drill, they proved too soft for shaping the grooves etc. cleanly, particularly the styrene. Attempts to cut slots for the sheaves, then to glue on a bottom piece to close the slots, and to later insert turned sheaves failed also. It was impossible to keep the 0.2 mm wide and 0.8 mm high slots clean enough from glue and cleaning them out afterwards at this dimension is hardly possible. Using brass and soldering equally failed to produce the desired result.
Now comes the success story - In the end I resorted to my trusted bakelite. This material is hard and does not smear, but is much more brittle than the other materials. Drilling 0.2 mm holes is still quite easy and doesn’t strain the drills too much.

Drilling 0.2 mm holes	Milling 0.2 mm slots	Milling the grooves for the strops	Microscope to aid work	Row of double-blocks ready to be separated	Miniature cross-cutting slide for parting off blocks	A collection of blocks and the special pin-vice to hold them		A collection of blocks and 1 Euro-Cent coin for comparison	Two sizes of blocks of 2 mm and 1.6 mm length respectively	Blocks with strops

I cut strips of the required width from a 1 mm sheet of bakelite to start with. The micro-mill then was used as a jig-borer and a row of holes drilled for a batch of blocks. Using a broken 0.2 mm drill, ground flat at the end, was then used as an end-mill to cut the grooves that simulate the slots for the sheaves. The profile of the blocks was roughly milled to shape using various cone-shaped burrs.
For parting off the blocks, a miniature cross-cutting slide was made for the sawing table on the lathe. This prevented the small blocks from being catapulted across the work-shop.
The sides of the block-shells were smoothed and shaped with the blocks clamped in a kind of special hand-held vice. This vice has brass insert jaws that are curved and stepped so as to clamp the block securely while working on it with an abrasive wheel.
Strops were made from 0.15 mm copper wire. The block was held in the vice and a loop was laid around it and the ends twisted tighly together. The twisted tail was shaped into a hook and the surplus wire nipped off. Then the hook was dapped in flux and with a very small soldering iron a tiny amount of solder was applied to strengthen and stiffen it. Some of the blocks also have an eye at the end of the strop formed by twisting it twice before laying the wire around the block.

Ships' Boats

May/June 2022 - Gig - While I was waiting for the wire for the chain-rails to arrive, I turned my attention to the ship’s boats. At that time there were four, two class IV cutters, a gig, and a joll-boat. In 1:160 they are all less than 50 mm long and 10 mm wide. Thanks to some research of various colleagues in Germany, we have reasonably good information on these boats, including lines and their constructional arrangement. In addition, there has been a text-book on boat construction, published since 1878 with updates every few years until 1929, which gives quite a few details on the naval boats.
I don’t quite feel like building four boats with all their internal constructional and fitting-out details, so I decided to show three of them covered, ready for the sea, while the small joll-boat will be shown ready for launching in an emergency, as it was custom. I don’t actually know, whether this boat or one of the cutters was used for the purpose, but assumed that the smaller boat would be easier to get into the water in a hurry, say in case of man-over-board.
An additional challenge is that these boats were clinker-built. I once built a clinker-dinghy in 1:60, which was only 50 mm long, but it was much wider and deeper and with wider strakes. These boats typically have ten strakes on each side.
I picked the long, but narrow and shallow gig first. I had a body plan available, drawn by a colleague some years ago. In addition, the text-book (BRIX, 1883) provides constructional details. The text indicates the dimension of the various parts.
I decided on an overhead plank-on-bulkhead (POB) construction, which in a way seemed easier than trying to carve the hull with its hollow lines aft from a solid piece of wood using templates. The individual framing stations were taken from the body plan and drawn with additional material on the top in order to arrive at a common reference plane for overhead construction. The bulkhead were laid out for laser-cutting from Canson-paper. A second drawing for laser-cutting contains another set of bulkhead and doubling pieces for the keel and stem, so that a rabbet for planking can be created. All pieces are doubled up after soaking in varnish to stiffen them. The pieces then were assembled as is tradition for POB-construction and mounted onto a piece of Canson-paper for extra stiffness. The whole assembly will then mounted in turn on a piece of wood to ease handling.
So far so good, but planking will be challenge, as the individual planks will be less than a millimetre wide overall. In theory, they should be only 0.06 mm thick in 1:160 scale, but I will give it a try with the 0.15 mm thick Canson-paper and see what it will look like. If the planking looks to coarse, I will have to start all-over again …
Tapering such planks by hand would be too much of a challenge an not quite feasible in paper I think. However, my 2D-CAD program gives the length of the Bezier-curves used to draw the outline of the frames. So, I simply took this length, divided it by 10, divided the result by 4 and then multiplied it by 5, which gives the plank width at each station line assuming that they overlap by about a quarter of their width (according to the drawing in BRIX, 1883). The contours of the planks were drawn for laser-cutting with this information. A first run, was not so successful – I will have to optimise the cutting parameters.

Drawing of gig from Brix (1883)	Laser-cut bulkheads and keel-pieces	Bulkheads and doubling pieces for keel and stem	The assembled parts for the POB-construction	Planking in progress	Planking from the middle to the ends	Planking completed	Cut free from the building base	Gig with simulated cover	First paint coat

The ‘planks’ were laser-cut from Canson-paper as indicated earlier. Unfortunately, I do not have a software (yet) to develop a planking layout, so the planks were tapered, but straight and all of the same size. However, when wetted with varnish, the paper, unlike wood, can be relatively easily bent and shaped across the wide side of the plank.
When laser-cutting the planks, I ran into a small glitch, that is the outside of the planks have such a shallow curve, that the ‘stepping’ due to the 0.1 mm resolution of the cutter becomes quite pronounced. I hope I can remove this later by sanding.
When fitting the planks, I found the best way was to fix them in the middle first and then work towards the ends. This is not ideal at the bows, where the plank has to run against the rabbet. Paper as such cannot be sanded for a close fit. I cut them as best as I could with my micro-scissors. When soaked in varnish, the paper can be moulded and squeezed, so that I did not need to thin the overlapping part of the lower plank, which would have been quite impossible in paper.
The planking progressed reasonably well, but I actually needed two more strakes per side to be able to go up to the sheer-line. Not good for strake counters … I attribute this to the wider overlap needed than expected. This was particularly the case, where there is a significant angle between planks, e.g. at the turn of the bilge. For the other boats, I will have to cut the planks a bit wider. A few conclusions from this exercise for the other boats:
-    Cut the planks tapered only on one side, as they can be edge-bend, when soaked in varnish
-    Cut the planks for 30 to 40% overlap, not 20% as done in this example; this gives more flexibility to adjust the planks
-    Do not try to imitate full-scale practice by running the planks into a rabbet on the stem, rather attach the outer stem and keel-piece after the planking is complete and has been trimmed down to the rabbet line.
The planking then was cleaned up and the excess at the transom trimmed back. I tried to sand the jaggy longitudinal edges a bit, but that did not work very well with the paper. However, in the varnished state it is not very visible. The hull was lightly rubbed down with fine steel wool to smooth the surface. Then some spots where touched up with some putty.
According to the prototype cross-section, there was a rubbing strake added to the top-strake. It was ‘faked’ by attaching a 0.2. copper-wire below the last strake.
Now the boat was ready to be cut from the base. The bulkheads were cut down and the keel-piece trimmed to a line that would be followed by the tarpaulin cover.
There is a hoisting chain fore and aft to which the falls of the boat-davits will be hooked, As only the top ring will be protruding from the boat-cover, this chain was simulated by a drilled together piece of tinned 0.2 mm coper-wire. It was hooked into a bulkhead and glued down with varnish.
Typically, modellers show the boats open, but most historical photographs show them covered. The design of the cover seems to vary a bit and I could not find information about this. Some photographs show the cover going down over half of the sides of the boat, with ropes apparently zig-zagging down to the keel and back up on the other side. Others seem to show a line going through a hollow seam to pull it tight around the boat. I opted for the latter to show more of the planking and the (later) paintwork.
I was debating with myself, whether I should first paint the hull and then add the cover, or the other way around. I opted for the second, as messing around with varnish, could damage the paintwork, even though it made it more difficult to hold the boat during (spray-)painting.
Basis for the cover was a piece of ironed-flat toilet-paper that was draped over the hull and then soaked in varnish resp. sanding filler. It was smoothed down over the edges and down to the rubbing strake. Once dry the paper was cut back to the rubbing-strake with a new scalpel-blade.
Painting the Gig - The boat was given a few thin coats of white acrylics (Vallejo) all over with the airbrush - the results of which was quite sobering: all the imperfections that were not quite visible in the ‘raw’ state now began to stick out. The jagged edges from the laser cutting that seemed to disappear under the varnish are no rather visible.
Also, using toilet-paper as the basis for the boat-cover was not a good choice. I used it in military-modelling in my youth to simulate tarpaulins, but perhaps then my standards were lower. I choose it, because I wanted something that looks limp and more casually draped, as can be seen on many photographs of the time. However, it turned out to be fuzzy on the surface and the edges in spite of being soaked in sanding filler. On the next boats I will try some Japanese silk-paper that I bought some time ago. I hope when it is wetted it will drape well.
I then brush-painted the boat-cover in thick white acrylic with a tiny drop of Vallejo 71.288 (Portland Stone) mixed into it. This gives a very light off-white colour. I don’t actually know, whether these boat covers were oiled or painted canvass.
According to the painting regulations for boats, the top two strakes where to be painted black. Due to the cover not much of them is visible, but I managed to tatter-on a bit of black here in there.
I will now turn my attention to the other boats, considering the experience with this one. If they turn out better, I might try a gig 2.0.

June/July 2022 - Cutters - As noted above, I will be following a somewhat different construction for the cutters. I will not create a rabbet by gluing doublings onto the keel-piece, but will attach the outer stem and keel, once the planking is complete. Hopefully, this will allow a cleaner run of the planks into the stem. Also, all the planks will be cut with a straight line on one edge.
I also decided to fill in the space between the bulkheads to avoid the (minor) cave-in that occurred in some places of the gig. The material should be softer than the bulkheads and I choose a hard foam going by the name Rohacell, which is essentially foamed-up Plexiglas and of which I have still many off-cuts from a project some 35 years ago.
However, nearly half-way now through the planking I have my doubts, whether there were any advantages in doing that. It turned out to be difficult to sand down the foam (which in itself sands very well with diamond abrasives or just sanding paper) to the bulkheads without damaging them and therefore alter the shape. If the infill actually is low, it become actually counterproductive, as the planks will follow this shape, rather than +/- the tangent between the bulkheads.
The bow-section is not so easy to get right, as it is quite full and there is a tendency for the planking to rise too high, when it comes off the bottom with little dead-rise. Again, I did not mark out the division of the strakes, but eye-balled it. I am not sure that I got the spacing at the bows quite right, as the planking is sweeping more up at the bows, than expected. As noted above, the forward section was more difficult than the rear section. Once the planking was complete, the stem- and stern-post (or rather the deadwood) areas were cleaned up and sanded to match the stem- and keel-pieces. The planks were also sanded flush to the transom.
The stem-keel-piece was laminated from three layers of laser-cut Canson-paper and lacquered into place on the boat. The outside contur was then cleaned up using a diamond nail-file. These files are very useful for the purpose. However, after a few strokes the freshly exposed paper has to be consolidated again with varnish to prevent it from fraying.
Like the gig, the cutter had a rubbing strake running along the lower edge of the top strake. This was simulated again using a 0.2 mm copper-wire lacquered into place.
Due to the charring from the laser-cutting process, it is difficult to see, whether there are any gaps between the stem-keel-piece and the boat as such. I probably will apply a thin coat of paint to be better able to see any imperfections, that then will be filled with putty. Overall, I a reasonably pleased how the cutter turned out so far and the strategy to attach stem-post and keel after planking is complete has paid off.
The hull was now cut off the ‘building-board’ and the infilling and the bulkheads shaped in a way I think the tarpaulin-covered sailing-gear, oars etc. which would be stowed in the boat would have looked like.
The use of toilet-paper to simulate the tarpaulin had only be moderately successful, but I remembered just in time, that a few months ago I had purchased some very light-weight (9 g/m2) Japanese silk-paper as a basis for sails. An appropriate piece was cut, draped over the boat and thoroughly wetted with zapon-varnish. It was glued in place so that it just covered the top-strake down to the rubbing strake. Once dry, it was trimmed back with a new scalpel blade to just the rubbing strake.
Installing the rudder while the gig was on the davits turned out to be misconception on my side, the boats were stowed with the rudder unshipped. So this time I only simulated the lower pintle with some flattened wire and a wire upright. Finally, the cutter was ready for painting and was given a good coat of Vallejo model-air ‘white’ all over. The tarpaulin the was given a wash of Vallejo white with a dash of Vallejo model-air ‘hemp’. Finally the two hoisting-rings made from twisted, tinned 0.2 mm copper wire were installed.

Laser-template for cutters	Three strakes on	Planking halfway up	Clamping tight at the bow	Planking complete and cleaned up	Dito.	Planking complete and cleaned up	The hull with the shaped ‘interior’	The cutter with tarpaulin in place, before painting	The painted cutter	The painted cutter

September 2022 - Jolly-boat - This is the smallest boat of the complement, at 6 m (= 19’8”). I am in for challenge, as I plan to build this open and fully equipped, ready to be lowered in case of man-over-board or a similar emergency.
I did not find an earlier drawing, but the drawing in the 1911 issue of the ‘BRIX’ is quite detailed, although it is for the karweel-planked version, while I will kit out WESPE all with clinker-built boats. It appears that the frames are drawn to the inside of the planking, which is exactly what I need. The arrangements for the keel and stem-/stern-post will be somewhat different from what I did for the other boats, as the bulkheads will only act as formers.
The laser-cut framework will be infilled with hard foam (Rohacell™) as before and then covered in cling-film to prevent the frames etc. from sticking to it. Below is the laser-cutting template for the main structural components. The thin strips on the right will become the ‘bent-in’ frames. Other parts will be drawn to fit as I am going along.
I will also need to still draw a base-board for the construction process, that has notches for the upper ends of the frames to rest in.
The main pieces for the core over which this boat will be constructed as plank-on frame build were laser-cut from Canson-paper and assembled in the manner described previously. The spaces between the bulkheads were filled with hard acrylic foam (Rohacell™) and the foam sanded back to the bulkheads using diamond needle files. Some gaps were filled with putty and then the whole thing soaked in wood sanding-filler to provide a hard surface.
The keel-stem combination and the transom were also cut out by laser in two copies to be stuck together to arrive at the correct thickness.
A base’board’ for building was cut from the same paper in double and the two copies stuck together for more rigidity. This baseboard had holes laser-cut in for the bent frames in order to give the exact spacing as per plan. The core then was covered in a layer of cling-film to prevent the lacquer to be used during the construction from sticking to the core (hopefully). Using again very thin double-sided mounting tape, the core was stuck to the baseboard.
The bent frames were cut using the laser to the required width of 0.2 mm which translates at 1:160 scale to a width of 32 mm. They should be only 0.1 mm thick (15 mm in the original), but the paper is a tad thicker. These frames were inserted into the pre-cut holes and aligned carefully. Then the keel-stem-transom assembly was lacquered into place. It should be noted that there are a couple of cant-frames that but against the keel/stem, rather than running under it.
It should be noted that this is the reverse construction order compared to the original. The clinker-built boat would be built over a couple of templates, with the planks going in first and the frames bent in afterwards. I chose this method, because having the frames in place is likely to make a stronger shell, when trying to remove it from the core.
On any clinker-built boat the garboard-plank is the most difficult to install due to its torsion and bending. Here it was no exception. It needed a fair amount of coercion, but it looks promising.

Drawing of Class 1 jolly-boat from Brix (1911)	Laser-cutting templates for jolly-boat	Core for clinker construction	The back-bone of the jolly-boat	The framed structure of the jolly-boat	Garboard-planks installed	Starboard side - overall length is 36 mm	Looking down onto the planking	Trimming the frames with micro-scissors	The hull slowly comes off the former	Separated hull

October 2022 - The planking then was finished as for the other boats. I am not 100% satisfied with my work. The plank widths could/should have been more equal, but I somehow struggled with the shape of this boat more than with the others. Also, it was easier to glue the planks to the solid core than just to the framework and the edge of the plank underneath.
After the planks were on, a doubling  for the keel and stem was attached to both side, kind of faking a landing of the planks in a rabbet.
There are several little gaps and other imperfections that need to be touched up with a bit of putty, but I will do this only after having separated (hopefully) the boat from the former. The putty is quite brittle and my fall out during the procedure.
Once the boat has been released and the frames trimmed back, the wash-strake can be sanded to its final width and shape. Some additional (cant)frames will have to go in before the further fitting out can begin.
The moment of truth: I removed the copper wire and cut the extended frames with my micro-scissors. With some cautious rocking of the shell, it came off cleanly. The result is a quite strong hull with the typical exterior and interior look of a clinker-built boat. Unfortunately, some of the frames have moved a bit, but with a drop of acetone this could be fixed.
I noticed, that the frames did not glue to the wash-strake, which is actually good, because on the prototype they did not continue to this strake, but ended under an in-whale. I will have find a way to cleanly cut the frames at the appropriate height and then continue with installing the cant-frames, in-whales, floor-boards, seats, etc.
I am actually wondering now, whether I could have assembled the hull in traditional clinker-fashion, with ‘edge-fastening’ the strakes only and then inserted the frames prototype-fashion afterwards. On the other hand, gluing the stem-keel-combination to the tied-down frames gave a rigid back-bone to work from. So this was probably the best way.

Cleaned up hull	Gunwales and inwales installed	Floor-boards installed	Stern-sheets, rowing seats etc. installed	Foot-rests installed	Design of the row-locks	Kitting out the jolly-boat	Kitting out the jolly-boat	Kitting out the jolly-boat

After some deliberations, I decided to cut the top of the frames back to gunwale level using a sort of micro-scalpel made from a piece of razor-blade just under 1 mm wide and held in a holder meant for that purposes (they come from the biological/medical realm).
Next went in the gunwale, laser-cut strips of paper 0.35 mm wide and 0.12 mm thick, and the inwales on which the seats rest, 0.5 mm x 0.12 mm. These were all lacquered in.
On the prototype the floorboard, of course, were individual planks, but aligning them properly would have been rather difficult, so I cheated a bit and joined them. This will be barely visible under the seats eventually.
As my building was not as precise to the drawings, as I would have wished, the stern-sheets and the little platform in the bow required a bit of trial and error, and re-drawing for the laser-cutting. Still a bit of sanding to fit was required. Sanding paper is not that much fun, but re-soaking it in lacquer after a few strokes with a diamond-file keeps fraying under control.
I also laser-cut some foot-rests for the rowers – these parts are double layers of paper, with the actual rest about 0.2 mm x 0.2 mm in cross-section
A couple of small details were still missing, including the rubbing strake, for which again 0.2 mm copper wire was used, the stanchions under the seats, and the row-locks.
The stanchions were composed from three layers of laser-cut paper. Perhaps I should have milled them from brass rod, but I was somehow too lazy to take out my micro-mill.
The row-locks actually form the stanchions for the wash-strake, which structurally and strictly speaking is not part of the hull, but attached to it to heighten the free-board of the boat. They consist of two wooden clamps on which the actual row-lock in cast bronze sits. The wash-strake has square cut-outs for the oars, which are closed with wooden ‘shutters’ fitting into bevelled slots. To illustrate this, I enclose a drawing by a colleague and expert on the Imperial Navy boats, who sadly died last year much too young. The basic shape of these tiny specs of paper were cut out using the laser-cutting and lacquered into place. Originally, I had envisaged to fashion them from brass, but had the feeling that they were just too small to make this practical. I decided to show the locks closed, which saved me the trouble of having to cut out the square openings in the wash-strake. I just little scored them with a not too sharp scalpel.
With this, the boat is ready to be painted. There is still some iron hardware that has to go on, but this will be installed after the painting, as it is supposed to be galvanized iron. I am actually not sure, whether the iron-work was painted over or left bare, but think it will add more detail to leave it bare.
December 2022 - Painting the Jolly-Boat began with applying a few coats of white overall. According, to a 1874 ordinance, the boats where to be painted white outside and inside, the top two strakes black, while the rubbing strake between them was left natural wood, as was the top of the wash-strake. Natural wood were also the seats and stern-sheets. The rowing-locks were bronze and were left bare.
The boat still has to be kitted out with some galvanised iron-work and, of course, all the equipment such as the oars, fenders, a water-cask etc. There is conflicting information, as to whether the mast and the sails would have been stowed in the ‘ready-boat’.
Somehow, I am not really satisfied with my paint-job. I didn’t get the colour of the seats etc. right, they look too reddish. I hope a wash of light ochre will correct this. I also had great difficulty to paint the rubbing-strake from a 0.2 mm wire cleanly. I tried to do it freehand, but perhaps should have masked it …

Painting the interior	Painitng the hull	Finished interior	Finished hull	Bundles of oars in place	Bundles of oars	More gear	Top view with hoisting chains	Another view	Jolly-boat and second cutter	Jolly-boat, gig, and cutters (left - right)	Cutters, gig, and jolly-boat

February 2023 - I adjusted the colour of the seats etc. somewhat and also worked on the rubbing strakes. For this I got myself a couple of markers with acrylic pigment paint (Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens with fine hard tip and soft brush-like tips) in various ‘wood’ colours, which really turned out to be useful for touching up etc.
Then I turned my attention to the oars and with a bit of trial and error managed to produce relatively reasonable laser-cut parts. Each oar is lacquered together from three layers to simulate the shaping. The round was build up with more varnish and they were finally painted in wood colour and the iron band around the blade simulated with my 0.1 mm marker pen. Not sure, whether they should be black though, as the original specification called for copper bands. There are a lot of unknown details. I know from the sources that the oars should be stowed ready for use in order of the benches, the outer pair for the first bench in the bow and so on. However, I don’t know how they would have been secured for the sea, probably with a rope around the benches. However, laying out the oars like that would have meant that there would have been no space for the men to step into the boat when lowered. So, I arranged them in bunches alongside.
I also realised that I forgot the spur for the heel of the mast, so this was added.
While arranging for the hoisting chains on the covered boats was easy, here it is a rather flimsy affair and I am not sure that it will work, as they are only glued. Likewise, the stays. The chains were simulated by drilling together two 0.2 mm wires until the pitch was about (without measuring) the length of a ring in the chain. Two of those drilled-together wires were drilled together. The overall appearance is roughly like a twisted chain.
Boats need rudders, so I drew one and cut it from Canson-paper in the usual way. When hoisted, the rudders are unshipped and stowed in the boat. However, I don’t really know where and how.
Stowage of various items is another uncertain point. There are a lot of items in the surviving inventories, such as an anchor, a small water-cask, a compass and a boat-hook, but I do not know how and where they were stowed. So I will omit them from the already quite crowded looking jolly-boat. The only thing I made were four fenders that are hung inside the boat.
With this the jolly-boat is complete.
In parallel I worked on the second cutter that also will be shown covered. As this is the same process as for the other covered boats, I do not show the process again. Just a couple of shots of the collection of finished boats.

Completion and Assembly

October 2021 - Basic paintwork: Normally, I leave painting as much as possible to the very end, just before the assembly stage. This avoids damage to the paintwork by handling the model or the problem of removing dust from it. However, I felt that the project had progressed to a point, where I wanted to see how everything comes together. This also boosts the motivation, rather getting lost in fabricating endlessly little pieces. So, the model was given a good cleaning to remove dust, grease etc. The sequence of colours had to be carefully considered in order to work from the light ones to the dark ones. I also wanted to work inside out, because in this way masking was facilitated.
The whole paint-work is done with acrylics from Vallejo (marketed in France under the brand ‘Prince August’) and Schmincke (a German manufacturer).
Hence, I started with the white of the inside of the casemate, the bulwark and the walls of the deckhouse, which was spray-painted with the airbrush. Unfortunately, I had some trouble with the airbrush that had not been used for a while. Apparently, some paint had accumulated in the nozzle from insufficient cleaning over time. This particularly affected the white, which seems to have comparatively bigger pigment particles and is more difficult to spray anyway. Due to the various bits and pieces added to the bulwark etc., it is virtually impossible to rub down the paint and begin afresh … so the white paintwork is not as good as I had hoped for …
The decks were not originally laid in wood (with the exception of the quarter deck and the floor of the casemate) or covered in linoleum at that time. They appear to have been painted with a mixture of tar and black oil-paint, with sand mixed into to provide a non-slip surface. I assumed that this mixture would attain a dark greyish colour with time due to weathering, similar to older tarmac. Prince August 996 (German ‘Panzergrau’ - tank-grey) seemed to be a suitable choice. All the deck areas were sprayed white together with the other parts to give a better key for hand-brushing. I began with painting the kicking-strips and water-ways between the bulwark stanchions and then progressed to several coats on the deck areas. All this painting was done by brush, as it would have been virtually impossible to mask-off the bulwark.
The paint-schemes of the Prussian and then Imperial German Navy ships are reasonably well known for the years after 1867, as the ordinances were published in official gazettes that have survived. For the first couple of service years of SMS WESPE, the 1874 ordinance paint-scheme would have been applicable. This specifies that hulls below the waterline were to be red and above black, with a white boot-topping; another white strip was to be painted below the main rails; all ginger-bread work in white as well as all superstructures and deck-houses, ventilators, etc. Funnels and masts were to be painted yellow (buff). Photographic evidence indicates that there were some variations to this scheme for SMS WESPE, but I will discuss these, when I come to describe the painting of respective parts.

Photograph of 1876 of SMS WESPE	Basic paintwork	Basic paintwork	Basic paintwork	Boot-topping and striping applied	Boot-topping and striping applied	Wooden decking for the barbette and the forecastle	Forecastle decking put into place temporarily	Rear deck with sky-lights and bollards installed

First, the narrow visible part of the underwater hull was painted in Vallejo 71.269 (red RAL 3000). This area was then masked off with Tamiya masking tape. The inside of the hull was also masked and the hull sprayed black.
The bulwark-rail appears to have been varnished wood. It was first given a coat of Prince August 77 (bois-wood), followed by a light wash of 834 (bois transparent), which has a slightly lighter tone, followed by another light wash of Vallejo 71.074 (beige). Finally, a very light wash of Vallejo (transparent orange) was applied, which gives the wood a deep, warm tint.
The images above show the ‘raw’ paintwork. It still needs to be touched up and items such as the scrollwork needs to be refined. Eventually, there will be also a light weathering and ‘griming’ with pastels – the idea is to just show the effects of being in use, but with good maintenance.
According to the 1874 ordinance on paintwork, the ships were to have a white boot-topping stripe and a somewhat narrower white stripe just below the main rail. This scheme is clearly visible on the old photograph shown in the previous post. At that time also all the scroll-work was to be painted in a sober white, rather than the ochre/gold of later paint-schemes.
It occurred to me that the easiest way to apply the white stripes on such a small model would be to cut narrow strips of white decal sheet and to place them appropriately. However, the latter part resulted in a lot of stress, fumbling and cursing. These long, narrow strips needed a lot of coercing and touching up with white acrylic in places. As I do not work with decals very often these days, I did not have any decal-softener to hand, which might have made this operation somewhat easier. In the end, the strips had to fixed additionally by infiltrating dilute satin varnish underneath them with a brush. In order to blend everything together, the hull then was given a coat of satin varnish. Perhaps the Prince August Air varnish was too viscous still for the air-brush, but when sprayed on it turned out rather matt and made the hull grey! Brushing on another thin layer got me over the shock moment.
Perhaps it would have been easier to air-brush everything in white and then cut a narrow strip of Tamiya masking tape to mask the area of the white stripes and also to mask strategically for painting the hull in red and black …
The scroll-work at the bow and stern then was picked out in white acrylics using a spotter brush and a (reasonably) steady hand.
I also painted the only two pieces of wood decking on this ship, namely that on the forecastle with the distinct radial plank pattern (to minimise blast damage from the heavy gun) and within the barbette. The planks had been engraved a long time ago already with a hand-graver. The pieces were given a base coat of Prince August 77 (bois-wood) with the air-brush. This was followed by a light wash of 834 (bois transparent), which has a slightly lighter tone, applied with a flat hair-brush. Some planks were given another light wash of Vallejo 71.074 (beige) with a small brush. The planks then were followed with 0.05 mm black pigmented ‘fine-liner’. The excess was immediately wiped off with a clean finger-tip. In this way a narrow to scale seam remains.
The rear deck was fitted with the brass skylights that illuminated the quarters of the officers and other rooms. These were like portholes, but not moveable and had thick glass inserts. On the underside the inserts were shaped as multifaceted pyramids to collect and distribute the light from the deck above. The brass insert were turned and the glass simulated by pushing the brass parts into a drop of Acrifix 192 on a piece of smooth aluminium foil. The bright side of the aluminium-foils imparts a glass-like finish to the cured Plexiglas glue disc. I left the brass bright for a bit of contrast and interest to the deck. At the moment it looks to ‘model-like’, but over the years the brass will dull by oxidation to a more realistic colour and sheen – though I have no information on what they really looked like at that time. The glasses presumably dulled with time by the crew walking over them. It might have been better to imitate with a drop of white glue instead.
The double bollards and coal-scuttles (not visible on the image) were painted black as per prototype and installed.
Painting the various parts takes quite a bit of time. Some parts can be spray-painted, while other parts need to be brush-painted because either they are difficult to mask for different paints or because the parts are too delicate for this.

November 2021 - Fitting out the barbette: The deck of the barbette was fitted with the pivot, races for the gun and the rack that is used in training it. These parts were made a long time ago. The races are turned from steel, because I always think nothing looks like metal as real metal. Although, the races were probably rolled iron (like railway tracks), they looked to bright. So they were painted black all over and then the areas that likely show wear from the rollers of the lower carriage were rubbed with a lead pencil. In some areas also the paint come off again. Overall this gives the races a used look. The toothed rack was bronze and hence was made from bronze.
There is also the lid of the opening through which the powder-charged was man-handled up from the powder-chamber beneath.
The barbette was further fitted out with the ladders that allowed the gun-crew to scramble over its sides into it and with the racks for the ready-ammunition. Also installed were the gratings over the stairs down into the crew-accommodation below the barbette (which also housed the cranking mechanisms for turning the gun) and over the hatch through which the shells would be lifted up. These gratings are somewhat conjectural, as the existing drawings could also be interpreted as showing stairs. However, I assume that hatch down to the turning mechanism must have been covered to prevent crew from tumbling down, but also open to allow voice communication with the guys cranking away. For the access to the shell-room, the grating must have been hinged in some way. There was a small gallows-like crane above it to allow the shells being lifted up.
Also, there is a box in one corner with a kind of rack attached to it. Their function cannot be deducted from the drawings and the hand-written explanations are not readable in the scans available to me.
The next step will be to install the various portholes in the deckhouse and the hull. Their actual look is quite well-known, as one specimen has been recovered some years ago from the wreck of SMS SALAMANDER off a Dutch beach and which is now in private hands and of which I obtained pictures. However, on the model only a narrow brass ring will be visible from the outside. They were actually very small, only about 16 cm in diameter, which translates to 1 mm on the model.
My idea was to dip thin-walled pieces of brass tube into Acrifix 192, as was done for the skylights, but this glue is too viscous into the 0.8 mm diameter opening of the brass tubes. I have to figure out a different way …

December 2021 - An enigmatic feature in the barbette - On the plan view of the original drawings from the mid-1880s two enigmatic features appear, but they are not represented in the cross-sections, which could have provided further insight. These features have puzzled me for a while until I realised that the oval shaped items look like the cross-section of a rifle-butt – we are looking down onto two rifle-racks. This interpretation was confirmed, when I came across a later drawing that showed the same feature, but with an annotation.
Warships at all times were provided with some small arms to fend off boarding-parties, or to form boarding- or landing-parties themselves. According to RECKENDORF (1983) ships of the Imperial German Navy at that time in question were provided with the Jägerbüchse 71 and the appropriate side arm. The Jägerbüchse 71 is a refined version of the Gewehr 71 that was introduced after the Franco-German War 1870/71 to replace the famous ‘Zündnadelgewehr’. Jäger stands for hunter and Büchse for rifle. Compared to the standard infantry weapon Gewehr 71, the Jägerbüchse was more precisely manufactured/inspected and had a finer trigger, as the Jäger-batallions received better gun training and a good proportion recruited from the hunting and forestry professions. Both weapons were still single-loaders, chambered for metal cartridges.
In the cited book and on the Internet I found good photographs of the rifle. At 1:160 scale it is only 7.8 mm long, so requires considerable simplification. I drew the stock to be cut from two layers of 0.2 mm thick Canson-paper using the laser-cutter. At the same time, I drew my interpretation of what the rifle-rack might have looked like, as I only had the plan-view.
The individual parts were laminated/glued together Zapon-varnish and painted using Vallejo acrylics.
The rifles were fitted out with barrels from appropriate lengths of 0.2 mm tinned copper-wire. The rings that fix the barrel to the stock are flattened 0.1 mm tinned copper wire. As I still did not get around to build the miniature rolling mill for which I had drawn plans years ago, I flattened the wire by rolling a piece of round steel on a thick glass-plate.
As the tiny rifles are difficult to handle, they were glued into the already assembled rack at this stage using some satin acrylic varnish. Originally, I intended to complete them with trigger-guards made from 0.05 mm wire, but I did not manage to glue down the tiny 0.4 mm diameter rings, so I only added shoulder straps from rolled 0.1 mm wire that was painted in brown leather colour. These were also attached using satin acrylic varnish.
Given the amount of work that went into constructing these tiny rifles, I decided to only equip the most visible rack with them.
 

Barbette decking with gun  pivot and races	Shell-racks, ladders and hatchways	An enigmatic feature in the barbette	Laser-cutting template for rifles and racks	Jägerbüchse 71 in 1:160 scale	Rifle-rack	Painted and assembled steering stand	Painted and assembled steering stand	Pantry skylight	Pantry skylight	Officers' mess skylight	Officers' mess skylight

November 2021 - Assembly of the steering-stands - Much time has been spent painting various details, often beginning with a basic layer applied by airbrush and then detailing with a hairbrush. In many cases several coats of paints and washes are needed. In particular parts that are meant to resemble varnished or oiled wood will need a base-coat followed by washes of darker paint and again followed by several coats of varnish to increase the ‘depth’ of the colour. ‘Oiled’ wood is finished off with Vallejo satin varnish, while ‘varnished’ wood is finished off with a 1:1 mixture of Vallejo gloss and satin varnish. The satin varnish is not glossy enough to simulate varnished wood.
Above are a couple of shots of the assembly of the two steering stands from the laser-cut parts produced earlier. The steering wheels and the brackets are painted in Prince August (Vallejo) transparent ‘mahogany’, while the gratings were given a base-coat of Prince August (Vallejo) ‘wood’, followed by washes of Schmincke ‘ochre’ to simulate teak.
I have to take some better close-up shots, but the steering-rope leads into flared down-pipes fashion from 0.6 mm OD/0.4 mm ID brass tubes by widening one end.
BTW, the steering rope looks a bit like an anachronism in 1876, when steering chains and even steam-steering was available. However, it seems that warships have retained this simple mechanisms for a while, presumably because it was easier to repair battle damage off-shore.

January 2022 - Completing the skylights - Work on the skylights continued with the one over the pantry. The basic structure had been completed quite a while ago, including the protective grilles. Now, the upper part was painted in Vallejo ‘wood’ and then with a couple of coats of Vallejo ‘transparent mahogany’. Several thin coats of Vallejo ‘satin varnish’ gave the ‘wood’ some depth. The lower part was just painted white.
A chimney or stove pipe was turned from a piece of 2 mm brass rod and slotted at the top to simulate the vents. It was chemically blackened to simulate the appearance of heated metal painted black.

I only had side and plan views of the belfry and there is no photograph in which it is really visible. The bell of S.M.S. NATTER survived and is now in a museum-collection, so that we know what is looked like. I invented the shape of the belfry and drew it to be laser-cut. The parts were assembled in the usual manner using zapon-varnish. The bell was rough-turned on the watchmakers lathe and the actual ‘bell-shape’ finished with a hand-graver. I don’t really know, whether this is correct, but the belfry was painted white.

Finally some ‘hinges’ to the raising panels of the skylight were added in form of pieces of 0.1 mm wire.

The skylight above the officers’ mess in the rear of the ship is the only one for which a close-up photograph exists, so the details can be reproduced with reasonable confidence.

The basic structure, again, had been built a long time ago and now it was painted as per prototype.
The top of the skylight was removable and presumably could be replaced with a more solid hatch-cover in bad weather – the main deck is only a couple of feet above the CWL ! The tarpaulin to cover the hatch would be held down with battens for which clamps were provided on all sides. The battens and the clamps are laser-cut from 0.2 mm Canson-paper and were then soaked in zapon-varnish to harden them. The battens were built up from two layers. Battens and clamps were assembled and then the assemblies cemented to the skylight using satin acrylic varnish.
As opposed to the others, this skylight has outside protective grilles, that are fastened with hinges. The frame had been etched from 0.1 mm thick nickel-silver (I couldn’t get brass sheet that thin at the time). Etched-in notches on the underside ensured that the bars would be equally spaced. The bars are made from 0.1 mm brass-coloured copper-wire glued in place with varnish. This assembly then was cemented to the skylight using acrylic varnish.


January 2022 - The mast - These boats initially had a very simple one-piece mast for signalling purposes. At a later stage, a more complex version with a topgallant mast and cross-tree was installed to allow for a better spread of signal flags and the cones that indicated the rudder direction to facilitate flotilla manoeuvres. However, the model will be fitted with the simple mast only.
The mast itself was turned from a 1.5 mm steel-rod with a shoulder to accommodate the four shrouds and hangers for the signal halliard blocks. The information is rather scarce with only the earliest picture of S.M.S. WESPE showing the whole mast and the lithographs showing the lower part. The height had to be estimated from the photograph, while the lower diameter could be taken from the lithograph. The belaying pins for the signal halliards are set into a wooden shelf, rather than into the spider band. This wooden shelf was fashioned from a tiny piece of bakelite paper into which the appropriate holes were drilled before.
Belaying pins of 2 mm length and 0.2 diameter are a modelling challenge. A first attempt using lengths of wire and drops of white glue to represent the handles did not produce consistent and satisfactory result. Therefore, I decided to attempt to make them the ‘proper’ way, i.e. to turn them.
After a couple of failures (though the first two attempts went well), I arrived at a procedure that produced consistent results with a low failure rate. The key is to do the turning in small steps to minise cutting forces, having a sharp tool, set to just a tad below centre-height. The material used was 1 mm mild steel-rod because the brass I have available would have been far too soft for such tiny pieces. Although the belaying pins are a bit oversized for flag-halliards, making the pins was a bit of a proof of concept with my follow-on project in mind, where I will need quite a number of such small ones.
In a first step, the 1 mm diameter was reduced to 0.4 mm over a distance of 0.8 mm. The handle then was shaped using a 1 mm mouse-tail and a tiny flat file. Then the diameter below the handle was cautiously reduced to 0.2 mm. The first cut here is quite critical, as the square cutting tool cuts over its whole width of 0.4 mm. In several 0.2 mm steps one then works towards the target length of 2 mm. When trying to reduce the diameter below 0.2 mm, the finished belaying pin usually shears of cleanly from the stock. The pins then were chemically blackened.
The mast was given a base-coat of Vallejo 71.033 Yellow Ochre, a wash of Schmincke 28610 Ochre, and a very light glazing of Vallejo 70.956 Clear Orange. Once the blackened belaying-pins had been inserted the whole assembly was given a light coat of a mixture of Vallejo satin and gloss varnish to make the mast resemble oiled wood. The shoulder, where the shrouds rest probably had been protected by a copper sheathing and this was imitated by paint.

1st step in turning micro-belaying pins	2nd step in turning micro-belaying pins	3rd step in turning micro-belaying pins	Final step in turning micro-belaying pins	Finished mast	Funnel and boiler-room ventilators	Funnel and boiler-room ventilators	Fore-deck painted	Seams picked out and varnished matt	Populated quarter deck	Populated quarter deck

February 2022 - Funnel and Boiler-Room Ventilators - Not really much to write about, as the parts had been built quite a while ago. Just a bit of assembly work and painting. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of the assembled parts before painting. Just before painting, also the turning handles for the ventilators were glued on using shellac. These are made from 0.1 mm wire flattened at the ends using a specially made die in my little jewelling press. They are extremely delicate.
The colour of the funnel and the boiler-ventilators may be debatable. Research on possible colours arrived at nothing. The 1874 ordinance states that funnels should be ‘yellow’ or ‘mast-colour’, but I could not establish what this yellow actually looked like. A colleague recently discovered an 1890 ordinance that specified that the ‘mast-colour’ should be mixed from 460 g dry white-lead and 260 g dry light ochre pigment with 300 g varnish, to be diluted for application with a further 310 g of varnish. The ratio between white-lead and light ochre suggests a rather light yellow hue, but we do not have a real clue to its actual hue. Circumstantial evidence, such as paintings, seems to suggest that in those early years of the Imperial Navy the yellow was indeed lighter than in later years. Preserved models from the later 1880s show a darker and murkier yellow than one might expect from the above recipe, while the strong yellow of the late tropical livery of the Imperial Navy had a decidedly orange tint. The buff/yellow of the RN seems to have undergone a similar development, while the French navy used a rather murky beige.
The first photograph of S.M.S. WESPE of 1876 must have been taken either on a wet collodium or on a dry gelatine plate. Both of which have little red sensitiveness and, therefore, represent colours at the ‘warm’ end of the visible spectrum darker than one would expect from an orthochromatic film. The funnel thus appears considerably darker than the white of superstructure. After some colour testing, I finally decided on Vallejo Model Air 71.107 ‘US interior yellow’.
The boiler-room ventilators show the same level of grey as the funnel and are decidedly darker than the other ventilators. This indicates that they were also painted yellow, while the 1874 ordinance prescribed white for ventilators. Given their closeness to the funnel it does make aesthetic sense to have them painted yellow.
Another issue is the interior colour of the ventilators. We seem to take it for granted that ventilators are red inside mostly, but it is not clear when and how this fashion came about. Perhaps they were painted red to resemble the copper that was frequently used in their manufacture in earlier years? On the early photograph the interiors appear very dark, but due to the limited red-sensitivity this is not conclusive evidence that they may have been painted black. Nevertheless, in the end I decided on black for the interior of all ventilators.
February 2022 - Quarter-deck v4 - While the wooden quarter-deck previously produced (v2) was not entirely bad, it lacked the crispiness I had wished for and also the colour was somewhat murky, more like oak, and not like the teak it was probably made from. In addition, I found a mistake in its shape that could not be corrected.
This quarter-deck is somewhat unusual in lay-out, as the planks are radiating with the gun-pivot as centre. This lay-out probably was chosen to minimise the effect of the certainly considerable blast from the 30.5 cm-gun. Apart from the fact that most wood-species would be to coarse at 1:160 scale, it would also be a challenge to produce such deck with tapering planks only 0.4 mm thick. A painted version renders more likely a realistic representation, is technically easier to achieve and more in line with the style of the model.
The shape of the wooden deck was cut from a 0.4 mm thick sheet of bakelite-paper and carefully fitted to the hull of the model, which was quite a bit of work given the multiple curvatures. The caulked seams were indicated by narrow engraved lines as described earlier in this building log. The holes for all the fittings were also drilled at this stage.
In between, I had tried using black styrene, rather than bakelite-paper as a basis for the decking (v3). The rationale was that I would clear out the engraved lines after painting down to the black plastic. This strategy did not work for two reasons, namely the styrene (Evergreen™ sheet) is much softer than the bakelite and the acrylic paints form a kind of quite soft skin, which tends to rip in flakes when trying to re-engrave the lines, so that I dropped this idea.
The wood character of the quarter-decking was to be achieved by giving each plank a slightly different colour, imitating the natural variability of wood. The piece was given a base-coat of Vallejo Model Air 71075 ‘sand (ivory)’ using the airbrush. In a next step single planks were randomly given a light wash with Prince August 834 ‘natural wood transparent’ or Vallejo Model Air 71023 ‘hemp’ (which turned out to be a bit too dark actually). In a next step randomly selected planks, particularly those ‘hemp’ ones were given a very light wash with Vallejo Model Air 71288 ‘Portland stone’. Another very light wash with Vallejo Model Air 71041 ‘armour brown’, toned down with yet another very light wash using Vallejo Model Air 71132 ‘aged white’, pulled everything together.
To facilitate the picking out of the caulking seams, the decking was given a sealing coat of acrylic glossy varnish. The definition of the caulking seams was enhanced by running the back of an old scalpel along them, making impressions, rather than cutting through the paint. The caulking was imitated using a 0.05 mm marker with pigmented permanent (hopefully) ink. After each line was drawn, the ink was allowed to dry for a few seconds and the excess wiped off with a barely humid finger. This leaves the ink only in the incisions, resulting in a very thin black line. In spite of the glossy varnish, a haze of the ink is left on the planks, darkening them somewhat, but this effect was calculated in, when setting out the original paint scheme.
The surface was lightly rubbed down with an abrasive foam block (as used in mani-/pedicure) to thin down the glossy varnish without damaging the underlying paint. This rather complex procedure was concluded by applying another very dilute wash of Vallejo Model Air 71132 ‘aged white’ and finally a sprayed on coating of Vallejo matt varnish.
March 2022 - Further work on the quarter deck - Having now satisfactory wooden decking for the quarter-deck, this was permanently cemented into place, allowing to progress with the installation of the various bits and pieces that had been fabricated years ago. These include the anchor capstan, the four patent chain-stoppers, chain-bollards (which are hollow and double as a base for the crew accommodation ventilators), various eye-bolts to which stoppers are shackled, that secure the chains during mooring, and the forward pair of mooring bollards.
Probably the only bought-in item will the studded anchor-chain. Recently, some really good 3D-printed chains have become available. My excuse is that that many shipyards did not make the chains themselves either, but bought them from specialised forgeries (apart from the fact that I didn’t want to go insane over making such microscopic studded chains). I choose the smallest size from yxmodels (Product no. YXN700-001). With 8€ plus shipping for a length of 120 mm they are the most expensive (not considering my time) item on board. They are printed in a light brown resin and were given several light dusts with acrylic paint to turn them black without clogging up or cementing the links together. The connecting link with the anchor shackle was bent from 0.2 mm tinned copper wire.
The anchors are held in place with chains attached to the release gear that had already been installed. These chains were imitated by twisting together two strands of 0.1 mm blackened copper wire so that each twist is about the length of the assumed link length. The length of twisted wire then was folded over in half and twisted together in the opposite sense. With some imagination this looks quite like a slightly twisted chain. The anchor were secured in place with a couple of dots of shellack and then release chains installed – which not unexpectedly was a really fiddly task.
I arranged the chains as they would be kept ready for dropping the anchor or in light weather, without further securing by rope chain-stoppers, as I do not have any pictorial evidence for how that would have been done on the real ship.
The quarter-deck later will receive some light weathering and the chain-rails need to be installed, but as they are extremely fragile, this will be put off to the moment, when the model is installed on its final base-plate.

Base-board covered in moulded water-colour paper and primed	Base colouring sealed with gloss varnish	Sea-scape with wave-crests sculpted in filled acrylic gel	S.M.S. WESPE placed temporarily into the sea-scape	S.M.S. WESPE placed temporarily into the sea-scape

March 2022 - Mounting the model - The base-plate, a piece of 20 mm thick, MDF, forms an integral part of the display case that had been constructed earlier. To this the model will be fixed with a single wood-screw from the bottom. The hole in the model for this had been drilled early on in the construction process. I did not envisage to have to mount and unmount the model frequently, otherwise I would have embedded a threaded nut into the bread-and-butter hull and used a machine screw instead.
With hindsight, I perhaps should have extended the hull a bit more than just 2 mm below the waterline. The 2 mm are not that much to model the sea, but would translate into a wave-height of around 32 cm or a good foot.
The scenario I imagined for the presentation is that the ship moves in a rather calm sea, but at moderate speed (the max. speed of the WESPE-class was only around 10 kn anyway). The weather is fine, with sun and a light breeze – a summer day on the North Sea or the Baltic.
There is only one image I am aware off, that shows one of the boats moving, S.M.S. NATTER moving slowly along the Kiel-Kanal. Therefore, we do not really know what their wave-pattern would have looked like. The bow is quite full, it has a ram protruding below the waterline, and hard bilges with a flat bottom. In a way, this is the form of our river freighters. Therefore, I looked around on the Internet for pictures that show such ships on the move. Of course, there is a difference in wave patterns due to the restricted water depths in river channels. The wake would be more or less a Kelvin pattern with the waves radiating from the ship with an included angle of around 40°. The base is not much bigger than the ship to allow close-up view of the model, so there is actually not so much sea to model.

I decided to try something new (for me) and instead of sculpting and carving the sea from plaster of Paris, as I had done in the past, I used a sheet of thick water-colour paper. The waves were formed by placing thin scraps of acrylic foam (because I happen to have some) underneath and then gluing it down with white glue, working from the bow to the stern. The space for the model was cut out first, of course. Once the glue set, the paper was trimmed to size. The gaps under the paper were filled with acrylic wood-repair putty and the edges sanded smooth once the putty had set. At this stage also the fit of both, the model and the display case were checked and small corrections made. Finally, the whole base was given a coat of sanding filler to seal the paper and the wood. The edges were sanded smooth again.
Painting proceeded in several steps. First a coat of Schmincke AeroColor turquois acrylic was applied by airbrush. However, the paint was applied in a glancing fashion against the direction of the waves. A second coat using Vallejo ModelAir ‘steel blue’, again glancing, but with the waves was applied. Here in this application, it is not really apparent, but when there are shorter, steeper waves modelled this causes a colour change effect, when you look at the sea-scape from different angles. The front of the waves then was lightened up somewhat by a light spray of Schmincke AeroColor chrome-oxide green and the crest areas further lightened up with a light dust of Vallejo ModelAir ‘hemp’ to give the sea a flatter green appearance. This base colouring was sealed by two generous coats of acrylic gloss varnish applied with a flat hairbrush.
In the next step, the wave crests were modelled using acrylic gel and gel filled with acrylic ‘micro-balloons’. In the past I actually used crystal sugar as a filler, which works very well, as not all crystals dissolve, but remain as transparent parts. I used this even before I became aware of acrylic gels together with wallpaper-glue and this ‘icing’ is holding up well after 40+ years. Part of the bow-wave was sculpted again in this way.
With the sculpting of the wave-crests and foam stirred-up complete, the sea-scape was given several more coats of gloss varnish to smooth it out, playing also with more rough areas behind breaking waves, as these should appear more matt. Assuming that the top of the waves would be more exposed to the action of wind than their front, these areas were also stippled with acrylic gel using a bristle brush, simulating the wind rippling that indicates an incoming gust of wind to the attentive sailor.

Having prepared the sea-scape in this way, the model will not yet be placed irretrievably into it. Filling the gap between the sea-scape and the model with acrylic gel will be left to the very end, so that the model can be removed, should the need arise.

April 2022 - Beginning the assembly - Over the years many parts have been produced and more recently painted. It slowly time to put everything together.
The first step was to semi-permanently install the boat in the seascape. I do not expect to have to remove it again, but one never knows, so I am leaving filling the gaps around with acrylic gel to the very end. The model was screwed to the base from the bottom using a single wood-screw in the middle.
At this point also the deckhouse could be permanently installed. Which in turn allowed to install the various ladders. These had been fitted with ‘brass’ anti-slip pads and shoes to keep them in place.
The various skylights also have been installed and the steering-wheels together with the associated binnacles.
The seams between the deckhouse, the skylights and the decks were touched with paint and some light ‘weathering’ with pastels applied with the idea to ‘pull together’ all parts visually. Thus, corners were touched up in dark grey pastel and typically more worn areas in front of ladders etc. were given a light rub with white pastel. This has to be with restraint, as the boat is meant to be depicted in a relatively new and well-maintained state, around 1878, so not much rust etc.

The turning handles were made from 0.1 mm wire shaped in a die on the jeweller press that also flattened the end uniformly were glue onto the various ventilators. This operation was left to the last moment, as these handles are extremely flimsy and easily damaged or broken off. The ventilators now were ready to be spray-painted.
There is some uncertainty around the interior colour of the ventilators. The interior appears very dark on the earliest photograph, suggesting that they have been either black or red. On later photographs with the black-white-yellow colour-scheme according the 1878 ordinance in some cases the interior seems to be the same colour as the exterior, namely white or yellow. There is no written evidence of a red interior, so I went for black to keep within the somewhat more sombre colour-scheme of the 1874 ordinance.
Given the flimsy nature of all those parts that come on board now, I am working ‘inside-out’, so that I do not need to reach over already installed parts with the risk of breaking or bending something. This requires some strategic thinking.
Now the lower carriage of the gun was finally assembled with the platform for the gun-captain, the shell-crane including its hand-cranks, and one training-shell in its wheeled loading-tray.
The carriage was glued in place on its pivot. Unfortunately, once installed in the barbette many of the little details that took a lot of time to make are not visible anymore. However, I did make the effort, because there may be certain angles of view, where they may be in part visible at least.
Next thing up will be the chain-rail around the deck-house. I think I found a way to simulate the chain, but I am waiting for some speciality wire (0.05 mm Konstantan wire, which is a copper-nickel alloy, which is somewhat tougher than pure copper).

March 2023 - Next, I have put the gun onto the tracks of the lower carriage. It was just glued in place – something I am not entirely happy with considering the top-weight of the barrel, but hopefully I have added enough white glue at hidden places. The original had clamps that go under the tracks, but this was difficult to reproduce at this scale.
The two engine-room telegraphs were installed on the bridge.
I am not sure that these were rigged like that, as the existing photographs are either not taken from the right angle or the resolutions is not good enough for the forecastle is too messy. Anyway, two cable stoppers fashioned from ‘rope’ were attached to eyebolts (which were drawn in the plans) and provide additional security against the anchor-chain flying about on the forecastle
The four anchor cranes were completed with the tackle and temporarily installed. There would have been quite a few metres of the running part to stow securely while on sea. Judging by the photograph of S.M.S. CROCODILL below, it was slung around the cranes in a perhaps not quite so ‘ship-shape and Bristol-fashion’. Anyway, I emulated this on the model.
Next up is the most dreaded part of the model, the installation of the various chain rails. Because of these I hesitated for a long time to tackle this project.
April 2023 - The material of choice is black-oxidised Konstantan™-wire of 0.06 mm and 0.07 mm diameter. Konstantan™ is a CuNi-alloy that is characterised by a very constant specific resistance over a wide temperature range and low temperature extension coefficient. However, I am not interested in these properties, but it is the thinnest black wire I could get and its breaking strength is somewhat higher than that of pure copper.
The idea is to twist together two strands of wire so that the pitch is approximately that of the length of a chain-link. Two strands of this twisted wire then are twisted together in the opposite direction. To the naked eye and with my +3 loupe this looks quite convincingly like a somewhat twisted chain. That is a close as I can get in this scale.
There is a photograph that shows details of the railing on the deck-house quite clearly and there is an instruction book for draughtsmen (WAAP, 1900) that has a drawing of the folding chain-railing as used by the Imperial German Navy. There is a scale bar that allows to calculate the various dimensions and the height tallies with the railings in the lithographs of the WESPE-Class. According to this the stanchions are around 85 cm heigh which translates to 5.3 mm in 1:160 scale. The chain-links are 60 mm (0.4 mm) long with a wire-diameter of 8 mm (0.05 mm).
Years ago, I had drawn my own stanchions and etched them from 0.2 mm brass-sheet. The idea was to solder two together in order to arrive at the correct thickness, without problems with under-etching in my primitive set-up. However, when I recently saw the commercially produced etched stanchions by SÄMANN-Ätztechnik in Germany, I realised that my home-made one could not compete quality-wise. However, their two-chain ones in 1:150 were too high (even at that scale). The three-chain ones, on the other hand, where of the correct height when using the lower ring to simulate the hinge for folding down. With the laser-cutter I also cut some small plates to simulate the foot-plates.
The holes for the stanchions were enlarged at the top with a round burr, so that half of the lower ring would be embedded. It would have been nice to have also photoetched parts for the foot-plates, which would have looked much crisper …
The chain-stays for the smoke-stacks caused me some head-scratching, in particular the connections to the stack and to the deck. The chain was done as for the railings, but with the 0.07 mm wire. Making and fitting shackles of less than 1 mm in length was physically impossible. So, I resorted to some dark grey thread. Not ideal, but there are just some physical limits that are impossible to overcome.
In order to not damage completed work, I am working from the centre of the ship outwards. For this reason, I also had to put on first the inner stays of the smoke-stack and then the railings. As always, close-up photographs are rather discouraging, but the rails look quite reasonable at normal viewing distance (me thinks). A problem is the springiness of the wire, so the double-twisted wire is more forgiving than the simple wire. It is not so easy to shape a nice catena that properly sags downwards, with the upper and lower chain in one plane. Luckily, deviations are only noticeable, when looking straight down. I still have to work on the stays …

Mai 2023 - I have now installed the rails around the deck-house on the starboard-side too. This time a picture with a coin for size reference.
In the meantime, a forum colleague made the suggestion to braid the wires instead of double-twisting them. I think I had tried this earlier on, but the copper-wires were too soft and broke to easily. I’ll gave it a try again with the Konstantan wire, but it still did not work. They used chain on this boat for a lot of things, where today one would find wire-rope instead.
Mast and rigging - As noted above, my intention was to work ‘inside-out’ when installing the rails, so as not to damage already installed parts. I now realised that I should have installed also the mast and its stays first, before the deckhouse rails. So, it was high time to do it now, before going on with more rails.
The pictorial evidence is rather scarce for the early form of the mast. In fact, there is only the very first photograph that shows SMS WESPE being fitted out. All other photographs show later forms, when the mast had acquired a top-mast and a fixed signalling yard. When this was installed is not known. Perhaps around the time of the first minor refit, when the boat-racks were installed, or when she got the conning tower with the search-light on top, as shown by the only other photograph with the black/white/yellow livery (as per 1878 regulations).
The mast had been turned a while ago from a steel rod and fitted with belaying pins. Not sure, whether I showed already pictures of this.
It seems that there were double stays leading forward to the front of the boiler-casing, but there are no pictures that show how they were fastened and the drawings are silent on this detail. So, I assumed that there must have been ring-bolts rivetted to the casing. In fact, I should have installed this before painting and installing the casing, but did not have sufficient foresight. Hence, they had to be ‘retro-fitted’ now. Then there is a pair of shrouds on each side – quite a few for a simple pole mast. These shrouds seem to have been made fast on eye-bolts between the rail-stanchions on the deck-house, for which there is a vague indication on the drawings. Again, there is no evidence for how they were set tight. I gather it must have been some hearts with lanyards between them.
I assume that the stays and shrouds were wire-rope. On some later picture it vaguely looks, as if these ropes had been served all over. To imitate such ropes, I have collected over the years electronic copper wires and stranded wires and are spun with silk (as used in high-frequency coils). I choose a 0.15 mm wire for the purpose here. The silk in my case was green, so it had to be given a light coat of black paint first.
Before the shrouds and the stay could go on, the signal halyard blocks had to be installed. I assumed that these were stropped double-blocks, but this is purely conjectural, based on the number of belaying pins. For the signal halyards I used some of my treasured nylon-thread as used in the old days for mending ladies’ stockings – a tightly spun two-ply thread that does seem to be out of production now (better than the fly-tying threads). The lay still was not tight enough, so I twisted it a bit more and stabilised the twist with a light touch of varnish.
At that time a steamer should have carried a steamer-light at the mast at night, but the available photographs are not are not clear enough to be sure that it would have been hoisted from a halyard in front of the mast. I just installed the halyard without attempting to model any additional arrangements, such as guiding ropes. The lithograph from the early 1880s also shows a crane for light just in front of the casemate, but it is not visible on the photographs.
Making working hearts for the stays would have been asking a bit too much, so I simplified the arrangements and just provided seized eyes at the end of the standing rigging and roved the lanyards through them and directly through the eyebolts. I gather this is good enough at this small scale. It was difficult enough to install all this without destroying other things already put into place.

June 2023 - Foredeck Chain-Rails - I was a bit worried about the various corners these chain rails take on the foredeck – not a problem in real life, but the fake chain made from double-twisted turned out to be surprisingly compliant, without getting kinks that could not be straightened out.
Also, the ventilators for the crew-quarters beneath the foredeck were installed now.
Next thing on the to-do-list will be the anchor-buoys that, according to the photographs usually were tied to the rails near the anchor-davits.
Apropos anchor-davits: I realised after taking the above pictures, that I didn’t put them back yet – I had taken them out to facilitate the threading of the chain-rails.

July 2023 - Anchor-Buoys - A fairly conspicuous detail on warships of that period were the buoys for the bow-anchors that were lashed to a convenient place near the anchor-davits, when not in use. Their purpose was to mark the location of the anchors. It was important to know, where the anchors were laid out in order to detect, whether they may have shifted and to indicate their location to newcomers, so that they don’t throw their anchors across yours, which could cause trouble, when you have to raise your anchors.
At the time of SMS WESPE, the buoys were made from galvanised sheet-iron and had the shape of two cones joined at their base. A web of served wire-rope gave two attachment points, for the rope with which they were attached to the anchor and for a fishing-lanyard. As per an official instruction sheet, the sheet-metal was supposed to be painted in red lead-oxide primer. There is, however, no clear information in what final colour the buoys were to be painted. Typically, modellers chose green for the starboard anchor-buoy and red for the port one. There is a certain logic in this, because in this way the anchors can be identified, even if the boat may have swayed around them.
There is a picture taken on board of S.M.S. HERTHA around 1876 that shows seamen working on such anchor-buoys: There are two buoys visible, one on the left in a quite light grey and another one, almost covered by the seaman at the front, which is a lot darker. Considering that the glass-plate negatives of the time were less sensitive to red than to green, which would appear darker in the positive print, one can conclude that the buoy on the left was probably painted green, while the other one was probably painted red. This is so far the only evidence from the period in question for them having been painted in different colours.
While the shape is seemingly simple, it is not so easy to produce and to manipulate. The two cones have to be turned separately and then fitted together. I choose Plexiglas for ease of gluing the halves together. Turning proceeded in steps: first the diameter for the wooden caps was turned and a groove to mark the overall length, then the top-slide was set over at an angle of 28° to turn the cone. As per prototype four notches were cut into the caps using a pointed cutting tool set with the cutting-edge vertical. Finally, the cones were parted off. The two cones were glued together making sure that the notches for the rope-web were offset by 45° at each end.
Another consideration was how to reproduce the carefully spliced web of served wire-ropes. I decided that tightly twisted 0.1 mm diameter tinned copper-wire would be the best route. Four strands of twisted wire with a loop at the end were produced and slipped over a ring of twisted wire which then was soldered closed. The four strands were distributed equally around the ring and fixed with a tiny amount of varnish. The arrangement was slipped over the buoy, gathered together at the end and secured with a short winding of thread soaked in varnish. One of the strands was bent into an eye and secured with a half-hitch of thread. Finally, all the ends were trimmed down to the binding.
The buoys then were sprayed red and green respectively and once the acrylic was dry, the wire-rope was picked out with a sepia artist’s marker pen (which seemed to give more control over the paint flow than my brushing technique). I did not take any pictures of the manufacturing process, as each step was actually quite straightforward.
On several photographs one can see that the anchor-buoys were tied to the chain-rail near the rear anchor-davit. I don’t know how long the rope was with which the buoys were tied to the anchors, but I would think it would in the order of 20 m, accounting for typical anchoring depths. A thin ‘rope’ was produced on the rope-walk from slightly brownish material, assuming that such rope would be heavily tarred to resist its permanent exposure to the elements. A ring was formed and tied together with the buoy to the rail.

October 2023 - Some ‘clutter’ on the deck-house - I found producing the stanchions for the awnings too much of a challenge at this small scale and didn’t like the look of them anyway. So, I did not install them on the model (and even omitted their sockets, as I did not have any information on how these really looked like). My excuse was that the model will be shown in a semi-battle-ready gun-exercise situation, where the stanchions would be stowed.
There are quite a few stanchions, which are tapered and slightly curved at the upper end with the ring. The upper section is round, while the lower section that fits into the sockets is square. According to one picture available, it seems that the stanchions were stowed in sort of racks along the rails of the deck-house when not in use. The same applied presumably to the wooden beams that formed the centre ridge of the awnings.
Mass-producing these stanchions that would be barely seen, when stowed in the rack, from brass-wire seemed a disproportionate effort. Hence, I decided to laser-cut them from card-stock. They are very flimsy and were stiffened in varnish before proceeding them to paint them with acrylic paint. The paint was applied quite generously to have a sort of rounding effect.
I could not find any picture that showed the stowing racks, so I had to invent something that seemed reasonable. Somehow the racks seem to be associated with the rail-stanchions. I devised a sort of cage with a laser-cut base and uprights made from thin tinned copper-wire. The racks also accommodate the (foldable) wooden beams that support the awnings amidship. In addition, it seems that the mops etc. for the gun were stored in these racks.
Crane above the projectile hatch - Projectiles and powder bags were stored in different compartments for safety reasons below the barbette and in consequence, each had its own hatch. That for the powder bags was round, while the one for the projectiles was rectangular in order for them to lifted out on a trolley.
As discussed in a much earlier post, the lithographies from the early 1880s do not show any mechanical device to help the 330 kg heavy projectiles from their storage space to the floor of the barbette. Man-handling clearly is out of question. However, drawings related to a later re-fit show inside the deckhouse a winch marked as ‘winch for the hoisting of projectiles’ and a simple derrick-like wall-crane bolted to the rear wall of the barbette. In these drawings it is not shown how the runner rope would have been led from the crane to the winch, there most have been some sort of opening in the rear of the barbette. Also, not clear is, how the in the gun-crew in the barbette and the men in the projectile storage room would have communicated with the winch-men inside the deckhouse.
Interestingly, in the same drawing a simple wall-mounted crane for the powder-bags seems to be indicated, but no winch belonging to it. Perhaps the 45 kg bags were hoisted up with the help of a tackle.
The small detail (about 3 mm by 3 mm) of the projectile crane caused me a lot of aggravation and took a long time to fabricate. I drew it in several versions to be cut from Canson-paper on the laser-cutter until I arrived at a solution that worked. Assembly was also rather difficult and several parts jumped into the invisible black hole on the workbench, so that they had to be replaced. The pulley was turned from 1 mm steel rod.
The hook was fashioned from tinned copper-wire and the shape built up from Vallejo acrylic paint ‘oily steel’. A short piece of rope was spliced into the ring and the spherical weight built up from acrylic paint.
Likewise, the powder-crane was cut from two layers of Canson-paper, soaked in varnish and painted. There is no information on what it may have looked like. I did not model the tackle, assuming that during the gun-drill in which the model will be presented, no charges were used and therefore, the tackle was not rigged. Only a shackle was fashioned from tinned copper wire.
Lamp-boards - Another small item on my to-do-list were the lamp-boards. According to the very first photograph of SMS WESPE these were placed at the front end of the deckhouse surrounding the barbette. In the lithograph and in later photographs they are shown on short poles towards the rear end of the deckhouse and raised above the rails.
These lamp-boards were laser-cut in three parts from Canson-paper and painted appropriately after assembly. The petroleum-lamps are not shown, as during day-time they would have been cleaned and then stored in deckhouse(?).

November 2023 - Banisters at Stairs - These banisters are flimsy matters so that I left them to the end as far as possible, still following the pattern to work ‘inside-out’ in order to not damage delicate items.
The information is somewhat patchy as to what the banisters actually looked like. They are represented in the lithographs and on one or the other photograph, one can see parts of them. Basically, there are two types: bend pipe-work and straight stanchions located in sockets that support a wooden rail.
As the metal parts are laid out in yellow on the lithography, they appear to have been made from brass (or bronze). One picture shows bare metal for the pipe-work. Hence, I decided to make them from bare 0.3 mm brass wire. At the moment this looks rather bright, but I assume that it will tarnish somewhat with time.
The pipework ones were bent over a scale copy of the lithograph. The ends, where they attach to the stairs appear to have been flattened, which duly was represented on the model.
For the ones with wooden rail at the end of the deckhouse, I cheated a bit and instead of having individual stanchions, I flattened the wire in the area of the wooden rail to have a support for it and bent the stanchions down sharply. The sockets were cut from 0.5 mm OD brass tube, which is a sliding fit on the 0.3 mm wire. The ends were milled down to the appropriate angle. The wooden rail was fashioned from two laser-cut strips of paper laminated together with varnish. With hind-sight, fashioning all parts from brass and soldering them together in a jig might have given crispier results.
All parts were cemented in place with clear varnish.

January 2024 - Completion of the staying of the funnel - According to the principle of working ‘inside-out’, installation of the outer pairs of funnel stays had been left to a moment, when other work would not interfere with them anymore.
The stays are chain and they were simulated in the same way as the chains for the rails etc. Luckily the lithograph represents these chain-stays by dotted lines, so that the points where they have to be made fast are known. Miniature eyebolts were fashioned from wire and glued into holes drilled for the purpose. They also received laser-cut washers of 0.5 mm diameter. The stays are set taught with lanyards made from thread as used in the old days for mending ladies’ ‘nylons’.
Not sure, whether I showed pictures before of how I am making fake chains using twisted wire. The material is oxidised Konstantan (a Cu/Ni alloy), sofar the best material I found for the purpose due to its tensile strength.
Depending on the envisaged use, one could also pull the ‘chain’ through the fingers with some graphite to make the links more visible. 
Micro-marlin-spike - In between I also spent some time on the lathe and made marlin-spike for the upcoming ropework. So far, I just used a hypodermic needle, but found holding it between the fingers not very satisfactory. I knew that hollow marlinspikes are being used for work with wire-rigging, but somehow it had not occurred to me to use it in the model-realm. Thanks to ‘archjofo’ who described his marlin-spike made from a sharpened piece of brass tube.
As I have quite a collection of hypodermic needles in my scrap-box, I selected a suitable size. The nice (real) ebony handle also has been in the scrap-box for a long time, waiting for a suitable use. I gather it came from my father’s estate, who had trained as a medical doctor during the war. At that time a lot of better-quality (biological, medical, dissecting) instruments that did not need to be sterile were made with ebony or ivory handles – looking rather elegant today.
The handle was almost ready to use and needed just a bit of turning down, where the ferrule will be fitted. The ferrule was turned from 6 mm brass rod and drilled out for the handle. A deep hole for the 0.8 mm hypodermic needle was drilled. The ferrule is a tight fit on the handle, but was secured with a drop of PVA glue, while the needle was just driven into the slightly undersized bore.
Hypodermic needles, of course, are meant to cut through the skin and in consequence have very sharp edges – not so good, when working with fine threads. The cutting edges, hence, were dulled with an Arkansas-stone.
Using such marlin-spike, it is possible to make fake eye-splices with ropes as thin as 0.18 mm …


February 2024 - Installing the ship’s boats - This detail was the most dreaded of all, due to the flimsy character of the parts. The davits had been produced a long time ago, as were the blocks for the hoisting tackle, and, of course the four boats.
There are no pictures, except the very first photograph of SMS WESPE that indicate the arrangements for the boats hanging outboard on the davits. While it seems to have been a quite common arrangement on smaller warships of the time, it was already noted in reports by captains of Prussian gunboats ten years earlier, boats in such a position are prone to be carried away by seas of even moderate height. So, quite early on barrings and boat skids had been installed on the WESPE-class boat and the davits lengthened to lift up the boats. For this final arrangement, various images are available.
Somehow, the boats must have been prevented from swinging in their hoisting gear. A typical arrangement would have been a spar lashed across the davits and the boats pulled against them with cross-wise boat ties. In the absence of other pictorial evidence, this is what I opted for. There were, however, still some detail questions open: were those ties strips of heavy canvas or braided rope-work and did the spars have bolsters around them to prevent damage to the boats? For the latter questions there are examples of both option on photographs and (contemporary) models.
I recently visited again the Maritime Museum in Stockholm, which reminded me of a possible solution on a model of the same period. The boat-ties seem to have been heavy canvas and had triangular rings at their ends. They are attached to an eye at the top of the davit, run around the boat, then around the opposite davit, and are hauled taught with a tackle of blocks hooked in between them. No bolsters on the spars.
I decided to leave out the tackle and just use a lashing between the rings to tighten the ties. The lashing will be difficult enough to access behind the boats.
The triangular rings were fashioned from 0.15 mm tinned copper-wire wound around the tang of a triangular file with 1 mm sides. The windings were cut open with a scalpel. The ties themselves are narrow strips of a special kind of material: a kind of very fine silk-paper tape with a backing of a thermos-setting acrylic glue. This material is used in book repair for instance. Brand and other details can be seen on the photograph. The 1 mm strips were cut with a new no. 11 scalpel blade and folded in two. The material is slightly tacky which is helpful when aligning the halves and inserting the rings. The glue was set with the help of my hot-air soldering gun set to 110°C as per instructions. The halves were pushed together using a tool as used in the old days to rub down transfer lettering. The ties were painted in Vallejo ‘hemp’.
It took some tries to work out a workable sequence for installing the davits, spar, boat-ties and boat-tackles, considering also the difficulty of access. Eventually the ties were fastened to the davits and the tackles hooked into the latter with the loose end already belayed to the clamp on the back of the davits.
The davits then were inserted into their sockets and fixed with a drop of white glue. Next the spar is lashed to the davits. Then the ties were arranged in preparation of the boats and the lashing is reeved.
The davits are now ready to receive the boat, which is slipped in and the tackles hooked into the respective rings on the boat. The ties are now pulled tight, so that boat rests against the spar.
Overall, the installation of the first boat went reasonably well. However, it is hanging a few millimetres too low. The boat’s keel should have been level with the bulwark handrail. Somehow, I didn’t manage to make the close-hauled tackled as short as it should have been. Also, the hooks on the blocks are a tad too long. Not 100% satisfactory, but I am not going back two steps to remake the blocks and tackles and all. Let’s assume the crew hasn’t done such a good job in stowing the boats and the officers haven’t noticed it yet …
The installation was moved further to completion by tidying up the loose ends and producing the bunts for runners of the boat tackles. The runners are about five times the distance between the head of the davits and the waterline long, plus some extra for handling. However, as the rope is slightly overscale the runners were cut a bit on the short side in order to make the bunts not too bulky. The actual runners were cut above the cleats and the bunts were formed over two clothes pins driven into a piece of wood and have a loop pulled out with which they can be hung over their respective cleat. Note that the runners for the ‘ready’ boat are not arranged in bunts but in coils, ready to be thrown loose so as to allow the boat being lowered quickly e.g. in a case of man-over-board.
Again, working from the inside out, the next items to go on were the stays for the davits. Luckily, the stays are drawn in the lithographs so that their points of fixation are known. I had to deviate a bit from those drawings, as they pertain to the longer, turning davits for the boats stored on rack, which belong to a slightly later period. The stays are supposed to keep the davits aligned, rather than helping to swing them around.
It was a bit of a trial-and-error procedure, before I came up with a protocol for making miniature fake chains of exactly the right length and with loops at both ends. The chains would have been shackled into ring-bolts at the head of the davit. No way of making shackles in this scale, so I just tied the fake chains to ring-bolts with fly-tying thread.

March 2024 - Toolkit for the gun - The operation of the gun required quite a few different tools for handling the projectiles and the powder-bags, as well as for cleaning and maintenance.
There were two different wipers, one for cleaning with soap-water and the other one for greasing the bore after use. This still was the era of black powder, which means that the bore had to be cleaned frequently.
Loading required a rammer to push the projectile and the powder-bags into the chamber of the gun. The rammer also served to unload the gun by pushing it through the muzzle. It had a depression in the front so that one would not push onto the fuse.
The large-scale instruction model in the (former) Orlogmuseet in Copenhagen came with many of the necessary tools. Their look tallies with the description of a textbook on the Imperial German naval artillery (Galster, 1885). The length of the shaft was given as the length of the barrel plus some extra for one or two men to be able to hold onto it, while it was fully inserted. If there were not enough space for such long implements, there were also versions in two parts with a brass connecting sleeve.
The body of the implements was turned from some 2 mm steel rod, as I had this to hand. The shaft is a 0.8 mm piano wire. The latter appears to be quite hefty, but seems to tally with the photographs. As the gun will be shown undergoing a drill, the wipers are not needed and will be shown in their protective canvas covers, stored in the racks on deck-house as per photograph below. The canvas covers were simulated with some Vallejo liquid putty. According to Galster (1885) the covers were supposed to be painted black, but the above photograph indicates that they were white, which is what I opted for. The rammer body has two copper-bands to protect it, which were simulated with paint. The limited space in barbette seems to prevent the use of a full-length rammer, so I gave the end of the shaft a connecting sleeve simulated with paint.
Tampion - The photograph of the instruction model in Copenhagen also shows the expanding tampion that was constructed from two brass discs with some fibre material in between that was contained by a leather sleeve. An internal screw operated by a T-shaped handle squeezed the fibres between the disc and made them expand to lock into the muzzle. It was turned from a length of brass rod. The handle was first turned as a thin disk and then the excess material was milled away to leave the T-shaped handle standing. The greased leather sleeve has been simulated by some brown paint.
Gun-sights - Gun-aiming laying didn’t significantly progress until towards the end of the 19th century. Just very basic front sights were used that sat on the trunnions, while the rear sights were adjustable in height for different distances and laterally for lead-angles. The rear sights used on the 30,5 cm gun a clearly visible on photograph below. Galster (1885) gives a detailed description. Basically, it is brass-tube of about 4 cm diameter that is set into a whole drilled vertically through the rear of the gun. In this tube runs a graduated brass-rod for setting the elevation as a function of the type of projectile used and the size of the powder charge. Firing tables were provided with the gun. On top of the rod is a cross-piece that runs in a dovetail-slot and allows to pre-set the lead-angle. The lead-angle was calculated inter alia on the basis of the estimated relative speed of the target and its distance. There was the usual V-notch on the top of cross-piece.
It took several tries to produce these tiny pieces. In the end their dimensions are slightly over-scale due to the limitations of machining brass. Starting from 0.8 mm brass-nails, which are slightly harder than the usual brass wire due to the forging process, a 1.5 mm length of 0.2 mm diameter was step-turned over short lengths successively. Then a 0.2 mm long length was turned down to 0.7 mm diameter and this ‘rod’ with a disc at the end parted off. Luckily, I have a 0.2 mm collet for the lathe, so that the part could be inverted and the parted-off end cleaned up. With a pair of cutting-tweezers the disc was clipped down to the size of the cross-piece. Burrs were removed with a fine file.
This part fits into a 2 mm long section of 0.3 mm OD brass-tube (from Albion metals).
When I made the gun-barrel in about 2008, I did not have really the technology to safely drill to any depths the 0.3 mm holes for the sights, I was glad to be able to mill the flats with a broken drill that I had ground flat at the end. With my micro-milling machine and the dividing head this would not be a real issue anymore. Unfortunately, I forgot to do that before painting the barrel. Therefore, the sights had to be simply cemented onto the flats with a tiny drop of shellac.
Before doing that I also added the protective frames over the sights using some 0.007 mm diameter silver-wire.
Stern anchor-crane - There are drawings as well as the photograph below that show the anchor-crane in some detail. Basically, the dimensions are the same as that of the boat-davits, so that I was able to use a spare one that was left over. The ball at the end was drilled for the ring into which during service the anchor-tackle would be hooked. When not in service, the davit was steadied with two chain-stays.

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