"Rigging and assembling little metal sailing ships" Topic

Well these are discoveries to me at least and I thought I would share them.

I use 1/2000 Valiant ships and for rigging have use paint bristles, stiffened varnished thread and thin brass rod. These all have some drawbacks. Recently, while haunting the local Michael's Craft Store I found the best thing to date. In the bead & jewerly section are spools of "Bead Stringing Wire" (fil pour enfiller les perles). It comes in 60 foot rolls and cost 3-4 dollars. It is made of nylon coated stainless steel and comes in several colours. The black really looks like tarred rope and appears to have some striations in it as well. It also comes in several thickness, I find that the 0.015 inch / 0.38mm thickness works for 1/2000 shrouds and standing rigging. (The product is "Beadalon" JW02B-60ft from Beadalon, Valley Twp, PA, 19320). The stuff is cheap enough that I can make a lot of snips off the roll to get the exact right length. Hold with forcepts or tweezers, dip both ends into some white glue, drop one then the other glued ends where needed, do fine tuning of the position by poking it with a pin.

The second learning lesson for me is how to make the sails and little parts stay in place untill the glue sets enough to hold thing on their own. First, glue the ship hull to its base before trying to assemble, so it stays still. Secondly, I use some ~3" x 3" x 1/2" grey sponge packing material that some other wargame pieces came with. You can stick pins into this to form scaffolding to hold those falling masts up. To hold bowsprints in place, make a 1/2" deep vertical tear in the sponge and Voila' you have a comfortable clamp to hold it snuggly while the glue dries.

Any other obvious tricks of the trade out there?

Yep – and if you need finer than the bead wire…look to industrial supply houses. Here in the US McMaster-Carr is my go to place for that. They have bits and bobs of nearly everything in nearly every form you can think of.

While most the scales I work in are slightly (or significantly) larger than what you are talking about, I find single stranded elastic to be great. Glue one end…let it dry fully. Apply a drip to the other ends target and pull taught. Hold till dry and trim as needed (spring tweezers are a great thing).

For doing the net rigging – I use woven wire screening (not welded). You can cut a small bit and fiddle around with it till it starts to come loose. Once that happens slide the top wires together and then a few dabs of extra thin super glue to lock them in place. Apply to where ever you need it. For the smaller scales – window screen is too coarse, but filter screen is great.

veltd.net/fighting.htm

I use hairbrush bristles – your local stuff mart should have a $2 USD brush with incredibly thin bristles – you just have to look at a lot of them to find what you like. If they are not the right color I just dye them right on the brush with some ink. Rustle them periodically with your fingertip to keep them from sticking together as they dry.

Let me add this about using the nylon-coated stainless steel wire. The stuff is strong (on the order of 60 to 120 pounds) and fairly stiff. There is no way to pull it apart (the glue joint fails first) and it is stiff enough in short sections that resists being pushed to shorten.

I usually rig my SOL/frigates with 3 says to the bow sprint, 3 between the main and foremast & one backstay, the same between the mizzen and main, as well as one wire (slightly angled to the back) on each side representing the shrouds to the fore and main masts. The lowest forward say is glued to the deck as is the backstay. It is not that hard to rigg these up, with a nailclipper and snipping a tiny bid off the ends, its easy to cut the stuff to the right length and after a few hours of building, you would be surprised at how accurate you can cut it.

Rigging with this stuff makes the models incredibly strong. You can pick the ship up by grapping any sail or mask and drop it off of a table and at worst it bounces a little. The wire and white glue I use are both plastic a a bit and springy, so you don't have hard joints shattering or put much stress on the casting at the mask:hull joint. Also helping is that the wiring is symmetric around the mask which allows give and take. (Just like a real ship, which bend and work with stresses from the wind and waves). The mainmast, for example, has 8 wires holding it up, plus the mast glued to a deeper-drilled hole in the deck. If you used a paint brush bristle you would have only a fraction of this strength.

Anyway, everybody is free to do what pleases them, but I would highly recommend trying this stuff and anticipate that you'all would be highly pleased.

Hmm nylon-coated stainless steel wire… I can see that Beadalon makes them in the U.S, and it sounds like they're worth a try.

Thanks for the tip, 1968billsfan!