The Ship Model Forum

if the hull is primed / painted the pencil will work fine if you have not gloss coated it. I would be wary of a paint brush, because a change in pressure applied against the hull will give you a thicker or thinner line.

With these tools, will the pencil make a decent mark on a plastic kit hull? And would it be possible to affix a paint brush instead of a pencil?

I tape a drafting pencil to a stack of legos / styrene/ whatever of my desired height and use that in the same manner as the tool martin linked to. Simple and effective and uses stuff I have in my shop already.

I have that. It's not bad, but what I didn't like was that it scribes a line in the hull as you mark. I got this from Free Time Hobbies, and used it for the first time recently. It works pretty well.

http://freetimehobbies.com/hobby-zone-waterline-marker/

I've been intending to get a surface gauge for about 35 years, so the reference above got me to go looking... I found the one at Micro-Mark, but as in the past, I balked at the $39+ price. A bit of Googling turned up this:

At only $17, I ordered one. I'm always a sucker for a good tool that I know how to use at least once.
It'll show up late this week, I'll report back on it.

The red colour is due to the lead oxide in the paint. The lead is there to kill any micro-organism that might attach itself to the bottom of the ship. The lead will kill the organism and it will then fall off the hull leaving the hull clean. At least that was the concept.

The black stripe is called "Boot topping". With the advent of oil-fired boilers there were frequent occasions where oil would seep from the hull and then stick to the waterline area of the hull, making a mess of the ship's appearance. Often the XO of the ship would detail sailors to clean the hull during in-port periods to keep the ship looking nice (and keeping the CO off his back). This became quite onerous as there always seemed to be an oil smudge along the hull. Some bright soul (probably one of the sailors assigned the cleaning job) suggested they paint the waterline black to hide the oil so they wouldn't have to clean the hull all the time. The depth of the boot topping should depict the operational loading of the vessel in question. Thus the top of the boot topping should be at the deep load level (the ship at its designed max tonnage) and the light load level (the ship at its lowest operational tonnage). Merchant ships did not use this boot topping as much as warships as the merchantmen had a huge difference between the deep and light loads. Warships didn't have nearly the difference as the weight of a warship was mostly affected by fuel use so the boot topping was quite narrow. The waterline on a model warship usually shows the mid-load level so you could add a scale foot or two above that line for the deep load line and a few scale feet below that mid-level line for the shallow load. If you have a photo of the interested ship in drydock have a good look at the waterline and that should give you an indication of the depth you need for your model.

HTH,

Paul

Some ships' hulls can be eyeballed while applying masking tape (Tamiya), but some ships have unusual contours causing your tape to go all over the place. I bought this http://www.model-dockyard.com/acatalog/7378.jpg but if you have some tools and are handy, you could build one like this http://www.rktman.com/rlh/boothbay/step ... rline3.jpg another view http://www.rktman.com/rlh/boothbay/step ... evice1.jpg . Whichever you use, the ship has to be firmly placed to it won't shift from side to side, and your marking tool can't waver either, for a long straight line.

Can anyone share the secret to drawing a straight waterline on a curved ship hull? And how high should the waterline be? What about the black stripe above the red waterline? How thick to make that?

And why is the bottom colored red, anyway?

Thanks