NMBROOK

In a strange turn of events, I actually worked on the AVS for a few hours today, and got stuff done!
 
Started working on the lower band of planking on the starboard side, got the garboard strake plus the next one in...

 
And worked on the final band of planking on the port side...

 
Last plank on the port side!

 
And the final plank glued in place...

 
And then cleaned it up with a damp cloth for a few photo's.

 
I made a number of mistakes on the planking, and I'm sure the eagle eyed amongst you can spot at least a couple of them, but outside of the ship-building community, I doubt anyone will notice, and the overall effect is quite nice, and I think it will really look nice after some final sanding and coating with poly.
 
Tomorrow I'm off to the track to play with my new car, so the other side probably won't get touched until Monday, but hopefully I can finish up the planking and get a coat of poly on it by next weekend, then I can finally move on to other stuff (and re-mask and paint the black that I damaged while planking before I covered it with tape).
 
Cheers!

Went and looked at various furniture Friday, and they definitely have some stuff that I'll probably use.  Big issue is transport, the shelf unit I'd like won't fit in my car!  I'll have to bug a friend and borrow a truck one of these days when I'm ready to grab some of it.
 
Oh look - a ship building update!
 
I finished the lower band of planking on the port side of the AVS.

 
I'm pretty annoyed at that last stealer.  When I placed it the fitment was absolutely perfect, and the piece would just barely fit into the spot for it, yet after letting it dry and removing the clamp..  there is a big ol' gap there (not terribly apparent in 'life', but the macro shot sure shows it up ugly as can be).

 
Ah well..  I'll do some sanding/white glue fill and hopefully it will cover it up pretty well.

Less done than I would have liked in the last couple days, but finished the 2nd band of planking tonight.
 
The pictures make the bow look more out of symmetry than the stern, but when measured the bow is actually within 1mm of even, and the stern is off by about 2x that much.  I think it will blend in with how narrow the planks are where they bend over the transom, but I'll try to get it adjusted across the next few planks.
 

Planking progresses.  Band 1 on the starboard side complete, band 1 and 2 on port side complete now, so 3 of 8 done.
 
I'm liking the way it's coming together.  As long as I don't make a massive mistake at some point along the line I fully expect to leave the hull below the wale natural.  I may do something with the waterline (paint line) but still undecided at this point, not sure if it would look good or terrible with the natural above and below it.
 
Still using just PVA, but I am using pins with collars to temporarily clamp some of the planks at the stem and stern to help me hold the trickier ones in place while the glue sets.  Getting the curves mostly set into the planks using a heat gun makes things go pretty smoothly for the most part.
 
I do need to figure out how to open up the rabbet a bit before laying the garboard strake, as I currently can't get the thickness of a plank into it along the keel, and I need to get these planks flush.  Combination of sanding blocks and filing I imagine, but I've got band 2 on the starboard side to complete while I ponder that.
 

 
Still not completely happy with how the planks meet the transom, but can't think of any way to improve it at this time. I'm thinking that it would look better with wider strakes landing on the transom, but I'm not going to deconstruct half the planking in order to add the drop planks needed to get wider strakes to it at this point.
 
 

Brief early Saturday update.  The first group of planking (of 4 planned sections) is complete on both sides, and the 2nd group is started on the port side.
 
As I was cropping these pictures I realized how much damage I'm managing to inflict on my poor painted cap rails, so I'm going to need to do a lot of repainting when I'm done with all the heavy handling of the hull.  In the meantime I'm going to cover the rails with tape to try to prevent further damage, since I'm apparently incapable of doing work on the hull and not beating up the already completed work.
 

Let the second planking begin!
 

 
So far done completely with PVA glue and no clamps, just holding each plank in position until the CVA takes enough set to hold it.  We'll see how far along I get with this system.
 
For the stern, I've only gotten two of the planks wrapped to the transom so far, and I've used water and heat to get them into shape prior to gluing.  Hopefully will be able to continue to get the shape of the planks at the stern very close to shape before placing.  If not I'll likely have to resort to clamps at some point.

So I decided that good is good enough, and I'm tired of painting black layers.  So, I decided tonight would be the night for the 'big reveal'.  How well did my masking work?  Was all of this a huge waste of time because the black bled all over the yellow ochre?  (insert drum roll here)
 
 
 

 
I can live with this.  This is prior to buffing (not fully dry on the final coat of black) and adding a couple layers of clear poly.  Needs a bit of touch up here and there, especially in the bottom and top of the gun ports, but certainly a paint job I can live with for my first run at wood painting.
 
As far as colors go, I painted 4 different color strips (3 different blues and a green) and laid them up against the hull to eyeball, and while the blue certainly adds a nice splash of color, I think I'm going to be different from every other AVS build I've seen, and leave the sheer strake black.  In the instruction manual, painting the sheer strake blue, red, or green is 'optional', and I'm kind of fond of the black right now.
 
Tomorrow I can put the taffrail on, and then apply a couple coats of poly to protect the paint, then it's time to start the 2nd planking of the hull! 

Here you go Keith.
 

 
The kit guns are really not bad at all.  They are a bit 'fatter' than the brass guns, but are reasonably clean and wouldn't have needed a great deal of clean up.  The Syren carriages come with far more parts, everything other than what you see here would have been made from various pieces of walnut (I presume - haven't actually read that part of the instructions) in the kit, rather than getting all of them nicely pre-cut.  I'd have had to drill out the barrels in the kit guns as well, as they are only indented slightly.
 
The Syren guns & carriages are actually 1:64 scale 6 pounders, but I printed out the plans from Chucks site at 1:1 scale and laid the kit barrels on top of them before I ordered them, and they are almost identical in length to the kit 4 pounders.

I made a tiny little handle for that tiny little quoin, and then drilled a tiny little hole in the quoin.

So for the last few weeks I've been spending a great deal of time watching paint dry.  I may have mentioned in passing (or a lot more than that) that I'm not a terribly patient person, so this has been a fair trial for me.  Due to my extremely limited work space I really haven't wanted to jump ahead and work on other bits and pieces because I don't have a reasonable place to put those pieces until they are needed later.
 
Tonight after putting another coat of black on the AVS and setting it back down to dry, I decided that I would look at assembling (but not gluing, so I can put it back in the package) a gun carriage so that I could make sure that it would work height-wise with the gun ports.
 
I am not using the kit carriages, and the ones I am using (from Syren) are taller than the kit ones when looking at just the side pieces, so I was concerned about the fitment. 
 
Test fitment was a success, making me really wonder if the kit assemblies would have been too low!
The carriages and guns from Chuck are ..  well, I'll just let the pictures speak for themselves. 

Good morning all,
 
I received a PM from someone this morning who was researching kits for future builds, and he asked about something that's a personal 'beef' of mine - How long is the hull of the AVS?
 
This seems like something that should be made available on all kits by all the manufacturers, yet it's extremely rare in a non-admiralty model to find that measurement.  Instead they use the largest measurement they can get, from the tip of the bowsprit to the trailing tip of the gaff boom, and print that on all the literature.  While it's nice to know that the AVS will be 31" (787mm) long using that measurement, it really does not give the shopper who is browsing through the kits a very good idea of the real size of the hull, especially when the bowsprit and boom have ridiculously large proportions to the hull like the AVS does.
 
In any case, I figured I would share the measurements here, so that anyone else who is following along and is considering this kit for a future build would have that information as well as the gentleman who asked for this.
 
The hull of the AVS (at least mine!) from the tip of the stem to the back edge of the stern bulkhead is 14 - 27/32" long (377mm for the non-Yanks).  That's measured at the top of the cap rail as seen below, so it's the max length, not along the deck to the insides of the bulkheads.
 

Not a huge amount of progress, as I'm working on paint which is of course very time consuming because of the need to wait between coats before sanding and repeating.  I did play with the camera a bit this morning, and think that it's going to allow me to take some pretty neat shots later on as I get used to what it can do and how to take advantage of it.
 
This was taken using a tripod with the camera about 6' away from the ship and then cropped.  No post-processing done at all, using some natural light from a window and a single LED lamp and the camera flash shut off.

 
Hrmm.. the forum apparently does some brutal image compression, as that is not as sharp as the original, and it's gone from a 551k original image to a 130k image as an attachment.  Learn something new every day.
 
Link for uncompressed if you are curious - http://www.magetower.com/AVS/262OuterBulkheadsPaint.jpg

Alistair - to your previous question about the trim piece on the black strake.  I'm still undecided, but for now it's just black.
 
Update - I got a new toy today!
 
One final slightly out of focus (somehow appropriate) picture from the old Canon point and shoot:

 
On to the AVS.
 
I continued working on the cap rails, first placing the rest of the port side on to match the already completed starboard side.  The scarf joint on this side came out great, with only a tiny gap on the inside edge (which you couldn't even see in the picture from the old camera).

 
I managed to trim the main kit piece of the cap rail too short, so I had to add a small shim at the back end of it, but it will pretty much be covered up (except edge on) by the vertical piece at the quarter deck step.  After completing the main cap rail, I added the stern bulwark planking above the cap rail.  For this I used two 1/8" x .030 strips, and left them full width at the stern, and tapered them down to about 1/2 width at the front edge.
  
 
Once those planks were done, I sanded the edges level for placement of the upper cap rail along the poop deck.  This requires the placement of a vertical piece to cover the front edge of the bulwarks at the quarter deck.  I decided to do my fancy edging (if a single line can be called fancy) on the upper cap rail, and I did it on all three exposed edges.

 
One potential downside of the new camera, it exposes all evils, even when they aren't my fault!  Here you can see how much detail (and mess) I can now show by simply cropping out a piece of the 6000x4000 original image.  This shows the small 'shim' I had to add at the back of the cap rail - the vertical piece is on top of the shim.  I can probably get even closer/better than this by over-riding the camera and shooting manual, but it will take a while to learn the new toy.  The wood itself looks pretty rough when zoomed in this close.

 
For the stern cap rail, I decided that edge bending the largish walnut just wasn't going to work, so I used some heavy card stock and made a pattern off the top of the stern bulkhead, measured it out to be the same width as the cap rail, and traced it onto the same piece of wood that I made the bow cap rails out of.

 
The stern bulkhead was too narrow in comparison with all the other bulkheads, even with an inner layer of planking, and I thought that the cap rail overhang would look too extreme, so I glued a piece of 3/64 basswood to a thick piece of walnut (1/16" instead of the .030) and 'bulked it out', so to speak.

 
I used a heat gun to pre-bend the new stern cap rail over the curvature of the stern bulkhead (I built a curve into the top, rather than having it flat).  This is just laying in place, it's not glued yet, I want to leave it off until I'm done with the tedious priming/sanding/painting process on that bit of inner bulkhead at the stern.  Should have done this piece earlier, but I don't think I could have made everything fit right without the cap rails in place so I could see how it all fit together, and trim the stern bulkhead down to the correct height.

 
Oh yea, and one 'artsy' shot with the new camera.  It has an interesting effects mode called false color, where it will shoot black and white except for specific colors that you tell it to show.

I could see this making some really interesting photo's after there are more colors and the deck is starting to get fleshed out.
 
Have a great Thanksgiving everyone, even if you don't celebrate it in your part of the world!
 

So it's been a few days, and I haven't accomplished nearly as much as I expected to this weekend, as I caved in and bought a new video game (Dragon Age) so wasted most of the weekend camped in front of the computer like the giant nerd that I am. 
 
I have accomplished a bit though since the last update, including some new 'firsts' for me today, so I figured I'd give an update since I'm inordinately proud of myself for the latest bit. 
 
To start off with, over the last several days I finished up the aft outer bulkhead planking, and then put on the sheer strake.  For the sheer strake I used 4" sections (16' scale planks).  This is the first 'scale' planking on the model, although I meant to do that for the black strake and simply got ahead of myself and forgot.

 
I also got the hole for the bowsprit drilled, but it is left undersized for now.  I'll open it up the rest of the way later when I've got the bowsprit shaped for best fitment.

 
The next 'first time' thing I did, was I ground a simple trim form into a razor blade, and cut a 'line' into the outside edge of the cap rail pieces for 'fashion'.  I am reasonably pleased with out it came out for my first try at this sort of thing.

 
Unfortunately, when I went to actually fit the cap rails onto the bulkheads I ran into the problem that lead to my other 'first'.  The curve of the cap rails as they approach the bow was completely different than the actual curve of the bulkheads.  If I'd used the kit cap rails, the very tip would have actually ended up just behind the bulkheads where they meet above the stem, instead of extending beyond it slightly.  If I moved them far enough forward to meet where they should, the curve completely didn't work for the rest, and they also came up very short at the aft end.
 
So, I scrounged around in the box of wood that I got from Reno, and low and behold, there was a small sheet of 1/16" wood.  I'm not honestly sure if it's walnut or not, but it's wood, and close enough!  So I used the curve of the bulkheads, along with the width/shape from the kit cap rails, and made forward cap rail pieces from this new sheet of wood.  The sheet of wood I have wasn't large enough to make the entire rails over, so I just made the forward sections.

 
To join them with the kit rails, I made my first ever scarf joints, and cut back the original cap rails to match up with the new pieces.  I used my little shaped razor blade and cut my line into these new parts, and placed them.  This part is where I was really happy that I didn't try to use the kit pieces.  These came out great. 

 
I clamped the kit cap rail into place on the starboard side, and then measured and cut a 1/16 x 1/16 piece and cut the 'line' into it and placed it at the stern, and then I glued the kit piece into place.  I haven't completed these steps on the port side yet.

 
My 'trim' line isn't aligned perfectly where the scarf joint is, but I think I can make it look somewhat better with a bit of work using the sharp edge of a riffler file.
 
Hope everyone had a great weekend, cheers! 

I do have holly for the deck, but I got it in the same size as the kit decking, so should make no difference in height.  I've never really shopped at Hobby Lobby before, as I always thought it was more about 'craft' stuff (which honestly, it really is).  However, there are no traditional hobby stores at all on this side of town, and Hobby Lobby at about 30 minutes from my house is the closest place to get really anything hobby related that I can't get at a Lowes or Home Depot.
 
Made a little bit of progress since my last update, and learned another lesson about using clamps on painted surfaces (the lesson is - "don't do that you idiot").  I ended up having to do quite a bit of cleanup work on the inner bulkheads after leaving some divots and black marks on my nicely finished red bulkheads, so now I'm doing this when I need to clamp the outer planks:

 
I've got the three .030 planks on the outer bulwarks now from the aft gun port to the stem.  I need to trim them off at the gun ports now, and then paint the gunports again.

 
I also got a serving machine from Alexey and played with it a little bit this afternoon.    It will allow me to properly serve the rigging whenever I get to it - pretty slick machine, and the ability to fully serve the shrouds where needed in just a couple minutes will be amazing and awesome.  I need to find some slightly thicker thread though, the regular sewing thread I have is so fine that the 'serving' is sort of lost unless you are looking at it with a magnifying glass.

Photo update.  Went out this weekend and got some 'real' paint brushes instead of the cheapo's I've been using.

 
Did one last holly planking test.  This test was for two things - when I bought the brushes I also got some artists pencils, so I wanted to test the caulking with the pencils instead of the tissue.  The top two caulk lines have 4B pencil on both sides of the joint (i.e. I penciled both planks on the facing side).  The bottom four have pencil only on the upper plank.  Before doing any sanding, the top two were more pronounced, but after sanding down the filler for the nails, I can't tell the difference.  The pencil caulking is not as sharp or dark as the tissue paper (old sample to the left).
 
The three rows of tree nails are using the 'new' filler, and .031, .028, and .024 holes side by side, all applied at the same time, so they have the same finishing treatment (scraped and sanded, 2 layers of Poly applied and buffed).
 
I'm likely to go with the 4B caulking (single side) and .028 filler tree nails on the final deck.

 
My camera refused to get a good focus on the black strake showing my post-installation scuppers, but hopefully you can get an idea.  The first picture is the 'bad' side, where they are larger and more uneven.  The second is of the 'better' side.  If I could do it over again, I'd place some sort of filler block between the outer planking and the spirketing plank, and then be very careful not to drill all the way through, as it's quite clear that my inner and outer scuppers don't line up in several places when you line up and look through them.

 
And a few photo's of the current status of the inner bulwarks.  I somehow have a few tiny spots that the red paint appears to have a 'hole'.  No idea how that happened, but I may go back and try to touch that up when I do the final painting of the gunport sills, which I'll need to do after I get the outer planking on because of final trimming/sanding of that layer of walnut.

So..  painting tips accepted.
 
After 7 coats I'm still having problems with sanding between the coats.  I'm applying very thin coats, letting them dry for a day, and then sanding lightly with 1000 grit sandpaper.  Even doing my best to keep the sanding very light (in bright light I'm just knocking the 'shine' off), I keep ending up wrecking the edges like this:
 

That is after sanding the 7th coat.
 
Any idea what I'm doing wrong?  Is there some special way to sand between each coat of paint, or am I just a goofy ham-fisted oaf that can't sand lightly enough?
Here is the bulwarks after applying coat 8 tonight (got home late so no time for any other work on the ship tonight).

So I'm progressing with a single coat of red paint on the bulwarks each day, but I'm an impatient sort (I'm sure nobody has noticed that by now) so I've decided to start working on the outer planking while still working on the bulwark paint.
 
I started with the black strake, which the kit provides walnut strips to make.  Luckily, the walnut in this size is actually pretty nice and easily worked and not all splintery, so I inked it after carefully cutting the piece to length and shaping both ends, and placed this key component on each side.  Prior to actually gluing, I clamped some scrap of the same walnut stock in place along the gun ports and used that to do some final sanding of the lower port sills so that they would match the top of the black strake.
 

 
The photo showing the wale and black strake at the stem came out blurry, so I'll probably take another one later, but I'm really happy with how evenly they came out, and how sharp the match with the stem is.  The photo of the other side at the stern where it mates with the fashion piece came out blurry too.
 
I sealed the black strake and wale with a coat of wipe on poly after they were in place, and hopefully this will protect it a bit from my antics as I work on the planking above and below them.
 
I also got a delivery in the mail today - a drawplate from Jim Byrnes.   So of course I had to play with it, and made a few tree nails out of maple, and holly.  The green box is maple at .031", and the blue is holly at .031".  I am having a very difficult time getting tree nails smaller than the .029 drawplate hole, so if I chose to use real tree nails they would pretty much have to be .031 holes.  I really like the holly appearance, as the edges are quite sharp, and the color is the most subdued of all the real wood nails I've made, but they appear too large and out of scale to me.  In addition, the holly was very difficult to draw, I kept breaking the wood, so it would be a huge pain to make enough holly tree nails to do the entire deck.
 

 
In the end I'm probably going to go with the newer wood filler in .028, and try to do a neater job than the test planking when I'm doing the hole drilling and then shaving of the deck after the filler has dried in order to get a crisper edge on them.

So I got some 1000 grit sandpaper today (finest I've found so far) and used that instead of the steel wool after 4 coats, and it was 'peeling' the paint off instead of coming off in dust like it was with the steel wool.  It's been over 24 hours since the last coat, so maybe I got them on too soon between coats when using the steel wool.  I'll let it set for another 24 before trying the next coat and see if it does the same thing.  Appearance wise it's back to about '2nd coat' now after that sanding.  I may just be sanding too hard or aggressively.
 
At the same place I got the sandpaper, I found some new wood filler, and thought I would try it out for the nails - it's a 'maple' filler, so pretty light.  I drilled out another set of .031 holes, and then drilled half of the original .024 holes to .028, and then drilled out a set of .028 as well. 
New test (Only a single coat of wipe on poly, and not buffed).

 
Left to right:
Green is .031" holes with the new maple filler.
Old filler in .031" holes.
Toothpicks .031" holes.
Top half is old filler in .024" holes - Black (bottom half) is old filler in .028" holes.
Bamboo in .031" holes.
Red is .028" holes with the new maple filler.
 
 
Difference between the old filler and new filler is very subtle.
 

Wow, it's been a full week since I've updated this.  Vacation from my posting for everyone!
 
Thanks to everyone for the likes and comments on last weeks update, I do read and appreciate every one of them.
 
The reason for no updates this last week is really that I'm in a phase of the building where very little visibly changes from day to day as I was working on completing all of the gunport sills which took me several days, and then another couple days to fit the inner bulwark planking and prepare it for painting.  This morning I put the first coat of primer on, and it's now drying so with nothing I can really do on the ship, time for an update here!
 
Let me start out this update with a bit of commentary on two of the most useful tools for this segment of the build, and really I see them being some of the more heavily used items in my inventory going forward.
 
1) The common disposable syringe with a 23 gauge industrial (not sharpened) tip.  I got these from Amazon because I'm an Amazon junkie.
 
100 Syringes and 50 tips are about $20 bucks to my door, which makes them pretty darned cheap individually, and I find that I can use a single syringe and tip for weeks before needing to replace the tip or syringe.  I cover the tip with masking tape in between uses, and when it gets clogged up, a #78 micro-drill is a perfect fit to clean it out and keep on trucking.
 
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001889SBA/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1
 
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0021M3NSQ/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o06_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
 
The syringe allows for very precise placement of very small amounts of glue in places that would be very difficult to get into with the regular glue dispenser (especially with CVA), and it is not messy and wasteful like using a toothpick, and I don't have to deal with the CVA bottle tip cleaning constantly.

 
2) The UMM Micro saw pack - http://umm-usa.com/onlinestore/product_info.php?cPath=21_28&products_id=37
and the UMM micro mitre box - http://umm-usa.com/onlinestore/product_info.php?cPath=21_28&products_id=3340

 
This has rapidly become my go-to tool for cutting of pieces to length.  It's fantastic for trimming overhanging pieces very closely and very precisely, and with the mitre-box it's much more accurate than the X-acto aluminum mitre-box and razor saw and has a much finer cut with less splintering.  I found this on a post on here, but I can't seem to find it now.  Whoever recommended this a couple months ago, thank you, it's an awesome tool.
 
On to the actual update.  My deck on the port side has some issues that I did not realize until last week when installing the spirketing planks and seeing how badly out of whack the gun ports were with the top of the plank.  The photo doesn't really show it very well, but the deck has a significant dip, and then a corresponding rise at the forward two gun port locations.

 
I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how I could fix this, and I sanded down the spirketing plank at the forward gun port in order to make the sill be at approximately the correct height on the outer hull.  Other than that I finally went with the "Congress" solution, and stuck my head in the sand, pretended it didn't exist and went on.  I don't think it's fixable at this point, as the core issue has to be in the bulkhead tops under the false deck, so I'm just going to work around it as I go and see what happens.  Chalk this up to lessons and try to figure out how to better detect this at the fairing step on future builds.
 
Adding the inner bulwark planking was fairly straight forward, just cutting pieces to length, edge beveling to get a nice close fit to the previous plank, and gluing them in place.

 
At the bow, even though everything will get wiped out by the hole for the bow-sprit in the future, I decided to try a technique I've seen in a couple other builds, and rather than bevel the ends to try to get a perfect alignment with the other side, I 'criss-crossed' them.  I put the first plank on the starboard side all the way to the bass-wood on the other side, then butted the port side plank up against that one, and then put the next port side plank all the way to the bass-wood and on top of the first plank from the starboard side, repeat to the top.  I really like the results, and will probably use this technique in the future for places where planks join at an angle like this.

 
The poop deck area required quite a bit of work and trimming before I had both sides pretty equal and the inner planking fitting correctly, but in the end I think it came out well.

 
After sanding (going to need to make myself some oddly shaped sanding tools/sticks in the future for working on the 'inside' of things like this), I thinned Model Shipways primer - 1 part water to 4 parts primer, and applied the first coat of primer.

 
And that's where I'm at now.  I did however, between various things do a bit more experimentation with my Holly decking.  I increased my drill size to .031" from the original .024", so the holes are now oversized for scale, but I'm going for 'appearance' vs. accuracy here.  I made some tree nails out of round toothpicks, as I wasn't happy with the bamboo.  I think I'm even less happy with the toothpicks, they get very dark when sanded down flush with the deck.  I also tried wood filler in the larger holes.  Still wasn't all that happy, but when I applied the wipe-on poly, something magical happened, and the wood filler got just slightly darker!

 
Above shots are with 3 coats of Min-Wax wipe on Poly with a steel wool wiping between coats.  For the final deck I believe I will split the difference in hole sizes and go with a .028" hole and use the wood filler.  I will test this on my test deck first, but based on the appearance of the wood filler in the .024 & .031 holes I am fairly certain this will get to the appearance that I'm looking for.
 
Whew.. if I was talking I'm sure I'd be all out of breath now!  Until next time, take care all, and happy ship building.

Thanks all.  Was a pretty good weekend, even though I had to work about 9 hours today on a Sunday.
 
I finished the replacement spirketing plank, and it came out pretty good, and I think I got the scupper shaping even better on this one, so all's well that ends well.

 
I got sidetracked (shocking, I know) and played with the holly planking sample again.  I drilled out one of the lines of tree nail locations to .031" and made some bamboo tree nails and placed them.
 
I'm glad I tried this, but they stand out way too much, so I won't be using them on this deck.  For a darker deck, like boxwood, these might work ok, but I'm not sure I like the dark 'spots' they seem to have, so I'll try using some regular wood of some kind next.

 
Next up was gun port sills.  When I got to the point of doing this, I realized that at some point in the build I've managed to screw up, probably way back at the deck fairing, as the spirketing plank is not at an even height along all the gunports.  In one case it's very far off and I'm not really sure what I'm going to do about it.  The starboard side wasn't nearly as bad as the port, so I started on the sills there.  I decided that I could use the sills themselves to 'fix' the problem with the spirketing plank not matching up to the gunports correctly, by installing the sills to the outside of the outer planking instead of just installing them between the outer planks and the spirketing plank like you are supposed to.
I began by taking a 1/8" x 3/32" piece of basswood and cutting it to the proper width for each gunport, and then using small files, shaping the piece into an "L" shape to fit into the gap between the two layers of planking while also extending outside of the outer layer of planking.

 
Once placed, the sill is both too high, extending above the spirketing plank, and too wide, extending outside of the outer plank layer.

 
I then filed/sanded the outside down to match the outside planking layer, so that it's the right width, but still too high.

 
Then, I filed the sill down to match the top of the spirketing plank, leaving it fit to the port, and making the top of the spirketing plank even with the outside planking.

 
Did this for all 4 ports on the starboard side.

 
As none of the ports on the starboard side are terribly out of alignment with the top of the spirketing plank, this worked out quite well, but the port side is worse, so I'm going to have to think about what is going to happen on that side to even things out.  One port in particular is low (or the plank is high) by 1/2 the height of the spirketing plank (so about 1/16").  I may be able to lower the spirketing plank a little bit by sanding it down to take up part of this discrepancy, and sort of blend it in well enough that it won't be noticed later.
 

So today was a pretty good day.  The model show was fantastic.  So much amazing skill on display, and the venue was just as good, with some awesome warbirds on display.  I took 470+ photo's.
 
I got a very nice surprise at the end of the day.
 


 
To be fair, there wasn't much competition for out of the box, but it made me happy anyway.

Thanks for the feedback gents.  I hope to not need anything like 'filler' for gaps in the deck, I was only using filler to plug the tree nail holes to simulate them.
 
Treenails are one of those things that I think are something everyone will have a different opinion on as far as visibility goes.  While the photos from Keith show treenails that are all but invisible, there are photos from the Endeavor in Australia that show the exact opposite:

 
While I don't want glaring black treenails, I think I want somewhere in the middle.  I may use this exact same method, but simply use larger holes, as I think that would come close to the visibility seen on Dubz Syren, which I find visually quite appealing.  While they aren't high contrast with the deck, they do add a detail that I think really makes the overall effect striking.
 
As for the Holly, both Holly and Boxwood are incredibly nice woods that I really like.  Since the spirketing planks are going to be painted, I almost made them out of Boxwood, but I ended up using the Walnut out of laziness, as the correct size was already cut for me. 
 
Jeff was kind enough to send a few extra pieces that he probably ended up with after cutting my planks that are less than full length with a rough end, so I chopped up a couple of those for my fake deck sample.  The lengths of the individual planks are obviously cut way too short to get the butt-shift pattern visible on such a small sample to play with the look.
 
Depending on what sort of look I'm going for, I may use Boxwood for deck planking in future builds, if I want a more muted tone.
 
Off to work, thanks again for the feedback gentlemen, I value your opinions and ideas as I progress further into this hobby.  Have a great day!
 
Edit: Forgot to include - the photo above is from this post by hornet - http://modelshipworld.com/index.php/topic/8317-to-treenail-or-not-to-treenail/?p=246825

A little bit of progress.  Moving quite slowly at the moment between work and some car trouble I just haven't spent much time working on the ship.
 
I got the second wale on, and only after editing the pictures to post here did I see the gap I left at the stem.  Close up photo's are the harshest critic.  I used a batch resizer for this group of photo's, so hopefully they come out at least reasonably close to the previous photo's for quality.

 
Next is the spirketing plank, which includes the scuppers that were discussed here over the last week.  I've decided to just build them in per the plans and not worry about the water sloshing around on the deck for the non-existant tiny sailor-men.  Given the type of ship, chances are fairly high that if it was taking enough water over the bulwarks to need the scuppers, it would be heeled over pretty good and the water would drain over the waterway anyhow.
 
I started by fitting the wood to the top of the waterway, and getting it cut to size and sanded properly (rounded the inside edge, and put a slight bevel on the bulwark side for fitment, as well as getting the angle against the stem right).  I clamped it down with a whole bunch of clamps after soaking it, and then continued to use an eye-dropper to add water in the areas that had the most severe bend, and then left it overnight.  The next day while it was still in place, made marks in the center of each section where a scupper needed to go, and then removed the plank from the model and used a compass to mark the height of the scuppers, and marked 1/16" on either side of my center marks to define the basic location of each scupper.  I was pretty worried about trying to trim these little guys out with a razor knife, as they are really tiny and I am not that great with depth control when using a knife - I tend to overdo it.
 
Luckily, as I was playing with different tools I discovered that I had a small square file that was exactly 1/8" wide to the outside of the cutting edges.  Bam, solution!  I cut the basic rectangle to depth with the square file while the plank was clamped in a vise, and then used the smallest round file I have to shape the scuppers.

 
Pretty happy with how they came out.  Next of course, I had to get the thing back in place and glued.  I used regular PVA from a syringe to get the glue along the back and edges of the plank without getting any into the areas of the scuppers, and then clamped the crud out of it again and left it to dry.

 
After it dried, I removed the clamps, and it's pretty decent.  I would have liked to have it fit perfectly against the waterway, but there is a small gap there.  It snugs up against the bulwark extensions nicely though.

 
I am now doing the same thing for the other side.  I've got the plank cut to size, and it's currently soaked and clamped in place.  I'll keep it wet for a bit longer until I head to bed.

 
While I was waiting for things to dry (either water or glue) I also embarked on a bit of a planking experiment to try out two things:
1 - caulking with the method outlined in a thread by Nigel (found here: http://modelshipworld.com/index.php?/topic/7445-plank-caulking-using-tissue-paper-tutorial-by-nigel-brook/) using tissue paper.
2 - Tree nails.
 
I made a huge mess with the tissue paper and glue, but the results were surprisingly good given my first try, and how much of a mess I made.  Note that as can be seen in the photo, I didn't measure anything for this experiment, so the butt's don't really line up very well.

 
Tree nails on the other hand, were a bit of a failure.  I drilled 0.024" holes, which are about 1.15" in scale, and then tried to draw bamboo to the correct size, and failed badly at the hole 3 sizes above what I needed to get them down to.  I don't know if the draw plate is bad, or if that's just the smallest I can get with the materials I have.  The draw plate is from the Reno trip and I have no idea of it's source - the size that failed is the size he was using for his final size on the Hannah model, so maybe it's just worn out?  I may get another plate (Byrns?) or try it with another material later. 
 
Since the actual tree nails failed, I fell back to the method that Alistair (I think) said he used, and tried my wood filler putty.  It worked, but I'm not happy with how well it fades into the holly deck.

 
I think I'll use larger holes than these, even though they are already slightly over scale, and then try to get real tree nails to work down to the size I need, or use a darker filler of some kind, or possibly go with the mono-filament line that's been mentioned by other builders here.  Either way, I do plan to tree nail the deck, and while I don't want them to be obnoxious, I do want them to be visible when looking at the deck from a couple feet.
 
Until next time, cheers! 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Have had no time to work on the ship since I put on the starboard wale, but I did get a package left at my door today.
 

 
So pretty.