Boot line question

[BrockyTaz]

Hi all,

I am working on my first serious ship building project and I'm at the point where I need to shoot the boot line. I have already shot the anti-fouling red on the lower hull and dark gray on the upper hull and all of that is masked off. Is the boot line finish gloss, semi-gloss or flat?

And just for GP what is a boot line for anyway besides making more work for the average modeler :)?

[ian_maw]

The "boot line", or bootstrap, or in some cases called the waterline, was meant to make the ship look a little tidier. The water around the harbour front used to be quite ugly with floating oil and other such evil sticky stuff. It left a dirty sludgy ring around the hull, which was made less noticable with the application of the black line. Kind of like painting the areas behind the exhausts on aircraft black to help hide the stains.

Hi all,

I am working on my first serious ship building project and I'm at the point where I need to shoot the boot line. I have already shot the anti-fouling red on the lower hull and dark gray on the upper hull and all of that is masked off. Is the boot line finish gloss, semi-gloss or flat?

And just for GP what is a boot line for anyway besides making more work for the average modeler :)?

[Grey Ghost 531]

"Boot topping" is the term.

I'd paint it the same luster as the gray and red. I'd also paint it first and then mask it with a strip of tape the correct width. I think it's usually about 6 feet wide on major ships; BBs and CVs.

Then paint the hull bottom, mask it and next paint the upper part of the hull. Finally I'd mask the upper part of the hull and paint the deck. I don't mask all the small deck fittings. I hand paint them after the deck is painted. I only mask off the larger deck houses.

Back in the coal days and even before that in the days of sail, there was no boot topping. Just the hull color and then the anti-fouling coating.

On ships with a "cruiser stern" you might need to touch up the boot topping as it's wider there as it goes around the more horizontal part of the curve.

[BrockyTaz]

Thanks Ian and Grey Ghost.

So it's a prim and proper thing? Having worked for the Navy these past 25 years I should have guessed that.

Thanks for the tips, especially the one about the stern being wider. I was wondering how I was going to keep the stripe the same width, but now I don't have to....

[Grey Ghost 531]

Thanks Ian and Grey Ghost.

So it's a prim and proper thing? Having worked for the Navy these past 25 years I should have guessed that.

Thanks for the tips, especially the one about the stern being wider. I was wondering how I was going to keep the stripe the same width, but now I don't have to....

Sure thing. The width of the stripe is constant as taken from the parallel to the waterline point of view. If the surface that the line is painted on isn't perpendicular to the waterline, the line will be wider in an absolute sense, but if you look at it from waterline level it will be a constant width.

The way I mark it is I clamp a pencil into a "third hand" tool with the pencil point set exactly at the waterline level. That stays stationary while I move the model against the pencil point to mark a dotted line at the waterline. The model is fixed to the stand to hold it perfectly level.

I just use a constant width of tape cut to the nominal width of the boot topping to mask it even at the top edge as it's pretty easy to touch it up with a brush by eye to widen it around the stern after the hull bottom paint is on.

[The Loggie]

It is beyond my comprehension why no ship models (well virtually none) include a separate black plastic plate that is either placed under the hull of a waterline model, or sandwiched between the underwater and the above-water parts of the hull. The black plastic piece would replicate the boot-topping of the ship.

George, out...............

[dnl42]

The way I mark it is I clamp a pencil into a "third hand" tool with the pencil point set exactly at the waterline level. That stays stationary while I move the model against the pencil point to mark a dotted line at the waterline. The model is fixed to the stand to hold it perfectly level.

I find it easier to tape a pencil to some blocks or something else very stable and move it around the hull. That way, I'm not trying to move the hull.

I just use a constant width of tape cut to the nominal width of the boot topping to mask it even at the top edge as it's pretty easy to touch it up with a brush by eye to widen it around the stern after the hull bottom paint is on.

You have a good hand! I need to mask the forward and after hull with additional tape to maintain the constant projected width...