Kenchington

My past week has been better for sitting at a computer, dodging stress, than for careful crafting of anything. As a result, after promising myself that I would never get stuck into more than one model at a time, I am now deep into the preliminary thinking for two others -- while my Muscongus Bay boat has languished. Still, I have managed some progress: Tidied up the ends of the toerails and rubrails, cleared up some of the excess glue and touched up the paint (though the camera shows that there is more tidying to be done): My attempt to file the scuppers in the toerails before gluing those on was a bust, though it did save me drilling a hole for the saw blade that (as per the instructions) I used to open up the holes. Once tidied up with a flat file, they turned out OK: Meanwhile, I added the bow chocks, cutting them carefully to suit their role as partners for the bowsprit, while shaping grooves for their second role as fairleads for the anchor warp or mooring pendant. Those, I painted black, while extending the contrast colour down to the rubrail. Once the tailboards are in place, that should make for a unified appearance of the head. I also made and fitted a sampson post. The kit one broke on me (twice!), so I made another from some basswood stock. The kit version was two parts, glued together, but both pieces are laser-cut in such a way that they have cross-grain -- a bad mistake by somebody. Mine has the grain along its length. The instructions call for the post's crossbar (I forget the proper term!) to be made of brass rod. Rather than fuss with blackening the brass, I used a piece of stainless steel (left over from making fishing gear for my dory) instead. I stained the sampson post with golden oak, which came out far darker than my previous use of the same stain, then finished it with wipe-on-poly: I'm quite happy with how that turned out. It does raise a general point, though: Ships and boats (almost) always have a lot of deck fittings. Many of those are fitted on the deck, even if they have fastenings that pass through it to the stronger structures below. However, in full-size reality some things, like a sampson post, pass through the deck and are firmly built into the hull structure to provide sufficient strength. In most models, of course, those fittings are placed on the deck but they should not look like they are. (For one example, to my eye, hatchway coamings that too obviously sit on top of a planked deck can really detract from a model's appearance.) The present kit has a hole in the deck and space in the structure below for an insert much narrower than the exposed part of the sampson post, which needs a shoulder where it sits on the deck. To get my post to sit nicely and look like it might extend up from the keel, I cut that shoulder to a careful square, with the shoulders on the sides of the post angled to match the sheer of the deck. I wasn't sure that that would work but it seems to have turned out well. So I have now arrived at: Next up will be the support blocks for the rowlocks, closely followed by the cockpit coaming -- blocks and coaming forming a joint structure when all is done. Trevor

Good thing that the giraffe didn't join in the shipyard game!

As Gregg has said, your pram is looking great! Installing before painting: Gluing onto a painted surface is never recommended, as the joint relies on the grip of the paint to whatever is underneath. Also, white and yellow glues grip into bare wood and don't do well with non-porous (e.g. painted) surfaces. Then there is a question of your chosen colour scheme. Anything that you want to keep with a natural-wood finish cannot be on the model when you spray it with primer, while parts that have contrasting colours are best painted off-model to ensure a clean edge to the paintwork. On the other hand, there are some parts that cannot be fitted after other parts are in place. You have to juggle with all of those and figure out a sequence that works with your own model. It may be the one in the instructions or it may have to be rather different. Holes in the quarter knees for the rope sheet-horse: You can make your own choice. Aim for the same spot in both knees (so they look nicely symmetrical). Keep away from the corner, so that you can later pass the rope through without trouble. Keep away from the open edge, so that the wood doesn't split. But otherwise just drill where it looks good! Trevor

What little has been published about the Muscongus Bay boats calls them centerboarders, with no suggestion that they had metal centreplates. Those would have needed lifting tackle, not a simple lever. And a wooden board won't go down through gravity. If the boat was mine, I would raise the board whenever the sails were down, if only to protect it from damage. Trevor

I have had very little experience with lever-controlled centreboards on full-size boats, so I can only guess from fiddling with the model. Seems to me that there is a simple push-down, pull-up action, with the option of folding the lever flat and (somewhat) out of the way when the board is up. Maybe the folding locked the board in the up position but it's not a positive locking on my model. I doubt that working fishermen did a lot of adjustment of the board, the way that racing sailors do. It will have been fully down when sailing, up when at anchor, moored, alongside or hauled ashore -- and, occasionally, when working in very shallow water or rowing home in a flat calm. Very rarely set anywhere but full down or full up. So the control lever would usually have been down when the fisherman and his boat were working but up (and annoying) when on board but not under way. That's when the folding would have been useful. That's my interpretation, anyway! Trevor

I had exactly the same tension when making the chainplate slots on my pram. A novel experience, as it was for you! Trevor

I'm having to look twice at that image of your bobstay plate to persuade myself that it isn't really a stainless-steel fitting on a full-size hull! You have achieved just the slight patina that stainless takes in the presence of saltwater! Trevor

Chris: You don't get to claim one of ours! The Tancook whaler was a boat of Big Tancook, an island at the mouth of Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia -- and we have not (yet) been annexed by our southern cousins 😀 Roach: You have made a very nice start with your pram. Hope to see more of your Muscongus Bay boat as you move ahead with that! Trevor

OK: It has been a year since I built my version of the kit, while I've had much else to fill my head in the meanwhile! Is the piece you circled the "band"? You don't seem to have those fitted in your photos from earlier today. Trevor

The dory has both "bands" outboard and "gunwales" (inboard) to reinforce the top of the sheerstrakes. (They are steps 16 & 17 in the instructions.) The longer piece circled is one of those -- a gunwale, I think. Don't worry over the smaller circled pieces. They are duplicates and should be left over if you don't break anything! Trevor

Ten days of only intermittent work on my smack. The grey, spray primer went on easily and with no problems at the time, but I soon came to regret applying it. It revealed a few hollows that needed more filler but no second coat seemed worthwhile, so I turned to a white (artist's) acrylic primer, then a warm-white top coat. The problem was that the acrylics had poor opacity, so I had to put them on thick to hide the grey, then sand to get a nicer surface than the paste-like effect of the paint. The sanding let the grey show through, calling for another coat ... and on and on. I lost almost any sign of the planking strakes, giving me a hull that is too yacht-like for my taste. Finally, I applied a very slightly thinned coat in a (largely unsuccessful) attempt to fill the defects in the paintwork, followed by a polish with a sanding stick so worn that it has almost no abrasive effect left. I am not at all happy with the outcome but there seems no point in repeating to the process any further, so I added the rub rails and toe rails. The rub rails are very thin and easily bent with fingers. I pre-painted three surfaces black, leaving the back bare for glue. Meanwhile, I had kept line of 1mm masking tape on the hull, in the required position, so that there was bare wood to provide somewhere for the glue to grip -- though the masking wasn't perfect and I had too scrape out some paint. Each rail needs a slight bevel at the forward end, so that it can sit flush against the stem, but otherwise all was easy and the contrast against white topsides looks nice. (I did consider a bare-wood effect, with a golden-oak stain on the rails. However, in the finished boat, they merge into the black-painted headworks, so I thought black would go better throughout.) The toe rails were much more awkward. The kit instructions warn that they are thick enough to need bending with steam, not hot water. In practice, I found them easily handled with my usual soak in water boiled in the kettle. I shaped them on the sheerstrake, with rubber bands to hold them there while drying into the required 3D curve. Then I painted them with red ochre, to give the finished model a splash of colour without violating historical authenticity for the time and place. Finally, I sanded the outer edges of the deck to give the glue a grip there too. So far so good. However, there was enough spring-back after the rails dried that it was hard to get them properly aligned with the deck edge, made all the worse by there being nothing to clamp them to. In the end, I surrounded the hull and both rails with multiple rubber bands, then lifted those off the rail that I was fitting by putting Lego blocks under the bands. That let me get a glue brush under one section of the rail, then held it in place with finger pressure, removed the Lego so that the bands supported the glue while it set thoroughly -- and moved to the next section, working from the bow aft, before repeating with the other rail. The result is a mess of surplus glue and worn paint that needs cleaning up, along with rail ends that need trimming, but I think all will do well enough in the end. There are only a couple of spots where the rail is not neatly aligned with the deck edge and I can live with those: The instructions offer an optional extra of cutting a small scupper in each toe rail, after it is in place. But that raises a question of where to put it. With the boat upright on her mooring, rainwater on deck would pool against the rail abreast the cockpit. As the boat heeled to the wind, however, the low point would move forward, so spray would collect abreast of the live wells. I figured that three scuppers per side would really be needed but I didn't fancy drilling them out after the rails were in place. Instead, I used a file with a curved upper surface and worked on the underside of each rail until I had enough space to get the tip of the file in after the rail was glued down. They look like: That's out of focus but does also show the poor state of my paint job! The risk, of course, was that the cut scuppers would so weaken the rail that it snapped before being securely in place. As the second photo shows, I did have one break, but it will be easy enough to hide when I tidy up. So progress is slow and imperfect, but I am progressing! Trevor

As expected, I have been proceeding very slowly with this project but I have scanned the card model and enlarged it to 1:12. Reproducing the strake diagram then looked simple but the strakes were too long to be printed on letter- or A4-sized paper, so I have divided them up into groups and turned them until they fit the page diagonally. The stem, keel, wedge and sternpost were nearly as easy, being drawn in profile in the card version -- except that that has the transom in two layers, with only one inset into the post. That needed a minor adjustment to the cut-out on the after face of the post, to match the full thickness of the transom. I have also marked in (with grey shading) the half-lap joints between the keel and the stem and post, following their representation in McKee's Figure 3. In a lighter grey, I have marked the faying surface on the post, where the hog will lie across it. All parts in that drawing (stem, keel, wedge and post) are sided 2 inches (full-size). As with the strakes, I have had to rotate the image to get it onto one page: I won't waste MSW's resources by attaching the strake drawings here but, once I have the full set ready, I'll be happy to share with anyone interested. Trevor

Nice joggling of the planks! Trevor

Maybe I should add some other evidence. These are modern synthetics (probably Dacron) and machine-stitched but a full-size squarerigger's sails, when in use, can look like: Note that seams, tablings and various reinforcing pieces are visible but stitches are not. Alternatively, in close-up, the same sails look like: Hand-woven flax-and-hemp sailcloth would have a much coarser weave, of course (and hand-stitching doesn't give the zigzag effect). But an argument for the Silkspan approach anyway. Trevor

I have to agree with @druxey. In fact, as I move towards sailmaking for my current build, I was going to post something about scales and sails. I'll not put that here but the points I may yet work towards are (1) if you can see the warp and weft of your canvas, then it is out of scale and (2) unless you can make cross-stitches at finer than 200 to the inch, then any sewing will probably be out of scale too. When sailmaking by hand, stitch size depends on needle size and needle size has to match the weight of the canvas. I have a bag made, by the sailmaker on the big Russian barque Sedov, from a fragment of one of his ship's old sails -- so some synthetic equivalent to double-ought storm canvas. He worked four stitches to the inch -- 240 to the inch at 1:60. Good luck trying to replicate that! Anyone who likes the look of sewn model sails should go with their preference, of course, but they won't be to scale. Trevor