More Model 63 Herter's repairs.

[Steve Sanford]

All~


Having mailed 6 Herter's Model 63 Mallards and Wigeon down to South Jersey, I was disappointed to learn of a bit of damage to one bird:




I thought I had packed and padded everything carefully. As the Bluebill head I put on this Wigeon was quite old, I cannot help but wonder whether the bill break was incipient....a hairline fracture I had never noticed when painting and installing it on a Mallard/Black body.

The owner had tried gluing it back together - but the repair failed almost immediately. He sent me both pieces - and so I set out to carve the necessary third piece for a strong repair. The White Pine was carefully carved to fit snugly into both the bill-tip and the face.



The wooden insert/plug was slathered with thickened epoxy (epoxy + fairing compound) and held in place with masking tape. I made sure the epoxy did not stray beyond the bill itself - to avoid having to refinish the face.



After making sure everything was snug and aligned, I put the head in a vise so that the bill pointed downward. This step is critical. It keeps the epoxy from moving away from the wooden plug inside the head during the curing process - when epoxy becomes less viscous before it hardens. Gravity ensures that the epoxy will surround the plug and the inside of the face and then harden.



The next day the epoxy had cured and the seam was sufficiently tight.



I sanded all around the seam with 80 and 120-grit paper before repainting the entire bill. After an overnight drying, I coated the whole bill (and eyes) with spar varnish (as usual).



She will migrate back South in tomorrow's mail - to be re-united with her body.


More Model 63 adventures in the next post.....


SJS

 

[Steve Sanford]

I also worked on a couple of Model 63 bodies - Mallard/Black bodies that will become Gadwalls.


One came as a Gadwall - and had the earlier flat bottom (no extruded keel) and a badly broken head. I picked up the other from a friend in Hauppauge last weekend (the LIDCA Annual Show). It had an extruded keel - but the foam had worn away and the lower edge of the ballast was exposed. It came to me as a Greenwing Drake - with the "ugly head" that came on some Herter's decoys in the later years.


In any event, the first body simply needs my usual coating with epoxy + fine sawdust. It is in process....


For the second body, I decided to try something new. Instead of securing the ballast in place, I decided to remove the entire extruded foam keel to produce a flat-bottom body to match Body # 1.


I used my multi-tool to carefully slice through the foam - and then extracted the ballast with pliers. I think the ballast is mild steel. Most interesting was that the ballast weighs 9 ounces - but the body sans ballast is only 5 ounces.







I bored the socket for the head with a 1" hole saw on the drill press. I also excavated the slot for the ballast another half-inch or so deep - so the ballast will lay just below flush.







Here you can get an idea of the new depth.






Tomorrow I will bed the ballast in straight epoxy - then seal the entire bottom - and an inch or so up the sides with straight epoxy. While it is still wet, I will sprinkle fine sawdust over it. I always coat bodies in 2 steps: bottom first - which includes up under the tail and the vulnerable edge of the tail itself, then the topsides the following day.


All the best,


SJS

 

[Eric Patterson]

Steve

That bill repair is stronger than new. I recently made a repair to a cast resin drapery bracket for a friend of my mom's. It snapped in two much like the bill on that decoy, right where the rod sits. Wish I had taken pictures, but I fixed it by cutting and shaping two pieces of birch plywood and epoxying to the sides of the bracket where the break was. Had I just glued the break it would have failed like the bill did. By adding pieces to the sides of the bracket the forces to make it fail again would have to be quite large and in shear. I don't think doing chin-ups on the bracket would be enough for that, much less draperies. Once painted it the birch pieces were not noticeable.

Point being, when dealing with breaks it is always better to attach reinforcing material than to just glue the parts back together. That decoy is a good example of how to go about it. Thanks for sharing.

Eric