Rigging Tips: Making Scale Rope Hanks

hi everyone Tom Lauria here welcome back to the shop today is going to be just quick video about making a jig that will hopefully make some of the aspects of your rigging life a lot easier it has to do with what do you do with the extra line after you've belated on the pin so this is a little jig I made it's very simple very low-tech if you have a piece of scrap wood some straight pins and a drill bit and get yourself one of these if you don't have them it's just an ellipse master template you can make one of these jigs and it will simplify the way you need to deal with hanged coils of rope as they add up multitudinously on your model so you'll see it here on this little mock-up that I have as we progress right now I've got nothing on it picks up these two lines and the way a lot of guys belay the pins is they just tie it off put a half hitch on it cut the end off and that's the end of the tomb this will hopefully get it to the point where it looks a little bit more realistic for you let's check it out okay so let's get started here so I'm gonna try and do this in real time I don't know if it's going to work or not but we'll give it a try so here I have almost so I've got my piece of scrap wood and I've got an ellipse thanks to my ellipse master I've got my ellipse laid out and now I'm just gonna drill a series of holes and I'm not gonna space them out any specific way the only thing I will do is I don't know if you can see on the pad but I do have a line going up through the center and what I'll do is at both both ends I'll leave the center unobstructed I won't put a pin there but aside from that there's no pattern to this the more pins you use the smoother your rope coil will be the fewer the more lumpy it'll look so here we go I'm going to make some noise you okay those are the holes drilled next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make two little soft curves and that's to hold the line you can see from this one right here I've got the line being held in place by those saw curves and not too well I might add but let's see we can do a better job here so I've got one made already and 100k I'm using pins that are about 25 thousandths of an inch thick and since this is for a rather small rope Hank we're not using a whole lot of pins doesn't really need it and you are gonna want to have some room between the pins to manipulate a pair of tweezers or something else and what I also find helpful is making them all the same height so I just take a piece of scrap wood of any height and start nipping off and it's easier to do it half at a time also if you have the luxury softwood for this is better than hardwood it just has to be scrap it can be any piece you can see this as a piece of knotty pine and anything really will do probably the only unsuitable wood would be balsa wares pulses pretty much unsuitable for anything involving model ships so there I've said it you could even do this I mean with pins this strong twenty five thousand seven inches a pretty thick pin and what pins this strong I could probably do this even without drilling the holes first I just find that a lot easier so there we've got the second knock those down and I am gonna take this off-camera for two seconds to put it I have a standing desk over on the flexible shaft tool over there and I'm gonna just smooth off the top of those pins so I'm gonna disappear for a second okay and we're almost finished you know one more thing to do we're gonna drill two more holes and for this I'm going to be using a 60,000 spit because that's about what I used over here on that one and you can see that it's at an angle and I don't know if you're gonna be able to see this almost camera but I will get a close-up of it a little bit later on probably in a still photo but you'll see that loop it's just about the size we want there are it's a two-step process to get that loop like that and that's what the two things about to join now [Music] okay so we are done there's our little jig now to actually use this thing let's see about that now to actually use this thing the first thing we're gonna do just put that 60,000 strobe it first hole the one that's farthest away from where we'll actually be working and trying to surround this way and for my little mock model which is now out of the frame but which you saw in the introduction the rigging line used for that was 20 thousands and that's what I'm using here 20 thousands and you take about oh I don't know a foot 15 inches whatever you want whatever you're comfortable working with and you put one end in that saw kerf hopefully yeah you know here's the only tricky part you are going to come up if you're looking at it the way I am this is the top this is where the loop is gonna be this is the left this is my right okay this is all gonna be done from my point of view so this is my right my left so here we go I'm going to take the line and I'm gonna come up on the outside on the right-hand side of this first pin closest to the top and remember there is no pin exactly on the top so this is the pin on the right-hand side who would be the equivalent of a one o'clock position on a clock face and I'm gonna come up on the outside of that on this side not this side but this side and I'm gonna wrap it around that pin but not all the way and then I wrap it around the drill bit then I do the same exact thing on the opposite side and I do it the same way I come up on what equivalent with an ounce to being on the inside of that pin and now I can just go around that was the tricky part if you got that down you got the whole thing down so now I can just go around and make as many loops as I want I would say you have a tendency to want to go 6 8 10 loops don't do it don't do it unless it's a piece of rigging on your ship that would normally have that amount of rope like let's say oh let's say it was a halyard a Topsail halyard and you had the the yard hoisted up which means down on the deck you'd have a lot of X line then you would put a lot on other than that no you probably wouldn't want to only because this is going to be one line of many on a ship that probably has tons of these things so they're gonna add up so you you know you're going to have to balance you know scale realism with the reality of your own model and you're not going to be able to put scale equivalent lengths of rope on that would really be on the ship in full size so you're gonna have to make those decisions as you go if space is cramped you want to put less less line into these loops into these Hanks the other thing that I need to tell you is that when you actually rig the line when you actually run the line around what you really need to make sure you do is to not twist the line so in other words what I'll do here is I'll take this off so what you don't want to do is just sort of run it around like this what you want to make sure you do is as you run the line around you give it a half twist in the OP in the direction that you're that you're coiling the rope in and what that does is it'll yet allow the rope to lay flat it won't kink up as you so you take it and you twist it over like that take it give it a half twist over so that it lays gently and naturally on top of its the previous loop so you can do it that way but take it twist it and lay it down so I've got enough there let's end that you know I'm just gonna wrap it around now to keep it out of the way and I'm also gonna use that sucker to hold now two more things to do before we're done in order to make the loop that loop that we have right now is way too big so we have to alter that loop so we're gonna remove the pin remove the drill bit and I'm gonna see if we can get that loop back into our little Hank here there right now we have a little bit of excess because the loop is now shorter so we just pull on that and that tightens it up you'll also notice where you should be able to notice hopefully you'll be able to see it the camera is close enough that the loop points down it tilts down that's kind of important because you're gonna want to put it over the belaying pin and you're gonna want to have it cascade over the pin rail in a nice natural way so now the hard part is getting just a touch of CA glue and you want just a touch you don't want to discolor it too much you don't want it to be too noticeable you're gonna put that right at where the two pieces of the loop meet over the hang of the ring it's also important to notice that I gave the loop a half twist before relocating it in the new closer pinhole and you have to do that before you can give the whole thing a coat of white glue as you'll see next so I'm gonna make this dirty brownish white very thin water and glue mix and I'm gonna brush the whole heck even the loop itself now if you get any excess in there and you fill the hole like that make sure you blow it out you don't want any real excess build-up there because that's gonna be one of the more visible parts of this if you manage to get a little too much CA glue and it discolored the line a little bit down here it's gonna be less of an issue because that's gonna be draped over you'll see when it's on the little mock-up of the ship's bulwark over there in about 10 minutes when this is dry so see you in a bit okay so we're back now the glue is dried so let's cut this thing loose and see how we did so you want to take very sharp knife scalpel if you got one or a very sharp razor blade as close to the hank as possible cut that off cut it free and you want to do the same thing on this side cut it has close to the hank as you can get there you have it now we can take this huh and we can finesse this a little jig okay okay yeah we've tied our little piece of rigging line line off with a half hitch and what we're going to do now is just install this right on there and you happens just the way you think it would put it over the belaying pin and then you try and get this to hang as naturally that's possible looking at it without my cheaters I think that's probably about as close as we're ever gonna come let's be a bit more natural I know if this were a real model what I might do to keep that in place is touch the bottom or the top of the deck a little bit of white glue and then push the bottom of the line coil right on it like that to hold it in place but since this is just a demonstration and I may want to take that line off for a further video down the line I'm not gonna glue anything but there you see it so I hope this little video helped and has given you guys some ideas as to how to handle your rigging problems and if you have any questions or comments as always I'm eager to see what you've got to say so leave me a comment down below and if you like what you see don't forget to hit that like button and hit that subscribe button every little bit helps so until we see you again take care and thanks for watching

Channel: Tom Lauria

Views: 116,655

Keywords: model ships, boat models, rigging scale models, rigging tips, ship models, model building techniques

Id: bgWHqw4Pg8Q

Length: 20min 51sec (1251 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 16 2018