JSGerson

I'm not going to let those platforms get me. I am tenacious enough that I am giving the mast tops another shot using 1/16" square stock this time using wood glue instead of CA due to the larger surface area. So intent was I that after I chopped up some 1/16 x 1/16" wood to size and glued it together, I realized that I grabbed boxwood instead of holly as called for in the Practicum. I just can't win for losing. Well, so be it; boxwood it is.
 
Martin - Both the Practicum and Model Shipways are following Hahn's plans for the tops. Mamoli shows planking as well, just that all the planks are in one direction.
 
I'm not giving up on the Practicum just yet. It's gotten me this far which I would never been able to do without it. I'll just have to be more careful with these later chapters as they have more errors and omissions due to his rushing and corner cutting in the late stages of building his model and writing the Practicum. He indicated somewhere that he was building 4 models and writing their practicums all at the same time while trying to meet some deadline. It shows.
 
Boy are we having fun now.

I'm not going to let those platforms get me. I am tenacious enough that I am giving the mast tops another shot using 1/16" square stock this time using wood glue instead of CA due to the larger surface area. So intent was I that after I chopped up some 1/16 x 1/16" wood to size and glued it together, I realized that I grabbed boxwood instead of holly as called for in the Practicum. I just can't win for losing. Well, so be it; boxwood it is.
 
Martin - Both the Practicum and Model Shipways are following Hahn's plans for the tops. Mamoli shows planking as well, just that all the planks are in one direction.
 
I'm not giving up on the Practicum just yet. It's gotten me this far which I would never been able to do without it. I'll just have to be more careful with these later chapters as they have more errors and omissions due to his rushing and corner cutting in the late stages of building his model and writing the Practicum. He indicated somewhere that he was building 4 models and writing their practicums all at the same time while trying to meet some deadline. It shows.
 
Boy are we having fun now.

Very nice. I'm still plodding along, one step forward then two steps back. I'm no further ahead than I was 3 weeks ago. I must commend you for a job well done. 

Small Cleats
When building my first wooden model in thirty years, the Evergreen I needed to tie lines to the deck. I was winging it because the kit didn't have any detailed plans for any of the rigging and I knew nothing about rigging. I needed tiny cleats. Somehow I got an idea to use the tiny rail nails used by railroad hobbyist. In cross section a nail is the shape of a T, very similar to a cleat - a very short T.
 
I filed the edges of the nail head as shown in the diagram below. This gets you the basic shape. You can file the ends to a more pointed shape and add an upward bend to either side. Just drill a hole and insert to the depth required.

Because the planking will cover the edges of the transom, the transom had to be planked first. I chose to do this prior to installing the sheer line rail which the instruction would have me make next. The wood provided in the kit is basswood, a soft light colored material. I had a piece of teakwood at my disposal which I had obtained and described earlier in my Rattlesnake build log and decided to use it for the planking. The basswood planks were 1/32” x 3/32”. If the Rattlesnake is 1:64 scale then so must be the boat. A plank 1/32” thick would translate to 2” on the real boat, a bit excessive I thought. I first cut a teak plank to 1/64” x 3/32” which by the way is a piece of cake with the Byrnes saw but found that although the wood held up fine, it was a been too flexible. The resulting model would have felt like it was made out of paper. The next piece I made a tad thicker and that seemed to work. I planked the transom. The second photo is before any trimming.

The Sheer Line
The sheer line is made of 1/16” x 1/16” basswood. I debated whether to substitute teak for that or not and decided it would be easier to bend the basswood. I could always stain it to add an accent to the look of the boat if I didn’t like the way it looked against the teak. Because the plans are the same of all sizes of the kit, the plans were reduced to match the size of my kit. The basswood was soaked for a day and pre-bent using a copy of the reduced plans to pin and bend the wood.

Once the wood was bent and dry, it was dry fitted. Here it was discovered that again, either the instructions were not clear or the parts did not match the plans. All of the ribs had notches in the keel, the stem bulkhead did not. This created a disconnect as to how the planking would flow over it. The bulkhead also seemed too narrow so I tried to beef it up by adding more basswood. Even then it appears that I will have to use some wood filler to fill in some of the open gaps.
 
The first sheer line was glued in place with WeldBond at the bow. It will be completed when it is glued to all the remaining ribs and the transom. Of course this will be repeated for the other side.

The Sheer Line
The sheer line is made of 1/16” x 1/16” basswood. I debated whether to substitute teak for that or not and decided it would be easier to bend the basswood. I could always stain it to add an accent to the look of the boat if I didn’t like the way it looked against the teak. Because the plans are the same of all sizes of the kit, the plans were reduced to match the size of my kit. The basswood was soaked for a day and pre-bent using a copy of the reduced plans to pin and bend the wood.

Because the planking will cover the edges of the transom, the transom had to be planked first. I chose to do this prior to installing the sheer line rail which the instruction would have me make next. The wood provided in the kit is basswood, a soft light colored material. I had a piece of teakwood at my disposal which I had obtained and described earlier in my Rattlesnake build log and decided to use it for the planking. The basswood planks were 1/32” x 3/32”. If the Rattlesnake is 1:64 scale then so must be the boat. A plank 1/32” thick would translate to 2” on the real boat, a bit excessive I thought. I first cut a teak plank to 1/64” x 3/32” which by the way is a piece of cake with the Byrnes saw but found that although the wood held up fine, it was a been too flexible. The resulting model would have felt like it was made out of paper. The next piece I made a tad thicker and that seemed to work. I planked the transom. The second photo is before any trimming.

The Sheer Line
The sheer line is made of 1/16” x 1/16” basswood. I debated whether to substitute teak for that or not and decided it would be easier to bend the basswood. I could always stain it to add an accent to the look of the boat if I didn’t like the way it looked against the teak. Because the plans are the same of all sizes of the kit, the plans were reduced to match the size of my kit. The basswood was soaked for a day and pre-bent using a copy of the reduced plans to pin and bend the wood.

Once the wood was bent and dry, it was dry fitted. Here it was discovered that again, either the instructions were not clear or the parts did not match the plans. All of the ribs had notches in the keel, the stem bulkhead did not. This created a disconnect as to how the planking would flow over it. The bulkhead also seemed too narrow so I tried to beef it up by adding more basswood. Even then it appears that I will have to use some wood filler to fill in some of the open gaps.
 
The first sheer line was glued in place with WeldBond at the bow. It will be completed when it is glued to all the remaining ribs and the transom. Of course this will be repeated for the other side.

Because I chose the 4 3/4" sized boat to fit the Rattlesnake, I'm treating my model boat as 1:64 scale, the same as the Mamoli kit.
 
I thought about a bow locker, but not sure what it would look like for this boat. Take a look at the boats Captain Steve made for his 1:76 scale USS Constitution. He did a fabulous job on four different boats. There should be plenty of ideas to choose from for lockers, seats, oars, etc.
 
Jon
 
Edit: changed "six" to "four: I stand corrected

Because I chose the 4 3/4" sized boat to fit the Rattlesnake, I'm treating my model boat as 1:64 scale, the same as the Mamoli kit.
 
I thought about a bow locker, but not sure what it would look like for this boat. Take a look at the boats Captain Steve made for his 1:76 scale USS Constitution. He did a fabulous job on four different boats. There should be plenty of ideas to choose from for lockers, seats, oars, etc.
 
Jon
 
Edit: changed "six" to "four: I stand corrected

It's coming along very nicely. You're making a lot more progress than I am as I plod along.
 
I did notice that you ended up with the result that I have been trying to avoid so it will be interesting to see how you handle it. There is a gap between the bow bulkhead and the planking which I believe is a model design flaw. As I figured it, there should have been a notch in the keel for the bulkhead and handled just like the ribs. It would have made the bulkhead wider so all the planking would have fitted flush. Hopefully, when all the other stuff is put it their place, this minor flaw will be hidden.
 
Jon

The image below shows the dry fit of the assembled jig. Once it’s glued into place, the real building of the ship’s boat will begin.

Bending the ribs  was easier said than done, at least for me. My method to bend the wood was to use the heated iron. But because the bend is 180° the wood wants to kink or worse split. I also tried using my clamp type wood bender which put little creases on the inside of the bend; that was a disaster.  I finally got some satisfactory (not great) results working very slow with the heated iron and repeated dippings in water, but I used a lot of time and wasted more wood than I think the kit allows.
 
Another part of the problem was how the strip of wood was held in place on the jig. It can’t take much stress due to the 1/16” thinness of the jig and the softness of its wood. If you don’t bend the rib wood strip enough prior to putting on the rib jig, forcing the strip into its final shape on the jig will break the jig. You can see that result in jig No. 4. All the ribs ends are glued to the jig at the bottom. Hopefully the flaws will be buried under planking and internal boat structures.
 
BTY, the gap at the top of the arch is supposed to be there to make it easier to remove the hull from the jig.

The Main Ribs
 
The kit provides 4 rib jigs to form the main ribs. Nos. 2 – 4 are the same size. Using the “paper” method, 4 pieces of 1/16” square stock were cut to length. The idea is to soak the strips and then bend them around jig form and glue them, just at the ends, to the jig. I soaked the wood for 24 hours. At a later point in the build, the ribs are to be cut from the jig.

The boat shell (without rudder) that came with the Mamoli kit is about 4 3/8" (see photo), and the Model Shipways' boat that you construct "bread & butter" style is just shy of 5". I purchased the 4 3/4" kit because the next size up was 5 3/16". All of the boat are similar but not quite. So who is to say with certainty which one the actual ship had. If I really screw it up, I can always fall back to the kit's boat (I hope not).

Model Shipways Typical Ship’s Boat* (SMALL)
*As labelled on the kit. On the website it’s called: Plank-on-Frame Lifeboat Kit
 
I am building the Mamoli 1:64 scale 1781 American Privateer Rattlesnake with the help of Robert Hunt’s Practicum. In the process of building the Rattlesnake, I had to make the ship’s boat. The Mamoli kit provided the model builder with a pre-cut wooden shell for the hull from which the builder could then create a completed model (which the Practicum addresses). If I had built the Model Shipways’ version of the Rattlesnake, I would have had to make the ship’s boat “bread and butter” style. Somehow neither option satisfied me. So I decided to go all out and build a ship’s boat from the keel up or as the case turn out, from the keel down.
 
Model Shipways makes 5 sizes of kits; I purchased the Typical Ship Boat No. MS0108, a Plank-on-Frame construction kit (POF).
 
Model No.:    Size
MS0105          3-3/16'' (81mm) MS0106          3-3/4'' (95mm) MS0107          4-1/4'' (108mm) MS0108          4-3/4'' (122mm) MS0109          5-3/16'' (135mm)  
This is my first POF as well as my first small boat build, so this will be all new territory for me. Not only that, I won’t have the Practicum to hold my hand until the hull is built.
 
The kit is fairly simple, one laser cut sheet provided the keel, the bow bulkhead, the transom, and the frames to create the bot’s ribs. A bunch of stock wood pieces which I believe to be Basswood as it is fairly soft was also included. The instructions are straight forward but not overly detailed so a lot of the skills and nuances of model building must be brought with the builder. Unfortunately the resolution of the photo images in the instructions is low and therefore hard to see detail. 

I'm blind as a bat having to wear strong magnifying glasses since I was seven. I've been wearing tri-focal lens for years now and even then I still need a magnifying lens to read fine print. I use a clip-on 3 Doppler Ary eye loupe to do my model work. It clips on and it flips up and down as necessary with ease. The one I have, I bought many years ago, probable in the late 70's and it still works fine. Today, they go for about $80 odd today. I have no idea what I paid for mine.

I'm blind as a bat having to wear strong magnifying glasses since I was seven. I've been wearing tri-focal lens for years now and even then I still need a magnifying lens to read fine print. I use a clip-on 3 Doppler Ary eye loupe to do my model work. It clips on and it flips up and down as necessary with ease. The one I have, I bought many years ago, probable in the late 70's and it still works fine. Today, they go for about $80 odd today. I have no idea what I paid for mine.

Masts…Again
 
Meanwhile, back at the masts, all three lower masts were completed to this point:

The result is what you see. It is most likely full of mistakes and omissions, but visually it works for me.

The Main Ribs
 
The kit provides 4 rib jigs to form the main ribs. Nos. 2 – 4 are the same size. Using the “paper” method, 4 pieces of 1/16” square stock were cut to length. The idea is to soak the strips and then bend them around jig form and glue them, just at the ends, to the jig. I soaked the wood for 24 hours. At a later point in the build, the ribs are to be cut from the jig.

After the strips were dry, they were cut to their final size and glued into place.