Erik W

I spent the week building the windlass mini-kit.  Hats off to Chuck for the engineering of this little thing!  It goes together easily, with the biggest challenge being beveling the edges of the windlass faces.  These didn't all turn out perfectly symmetrical, so I test fit the sub assemblies on the center strip in a bunch of different combinations.  I settled on what looks symmetrical when viewed from the top, and put the best sides facing up.  To get the windlass to snug down on the deck I taped a piece of sandpaper to a 1/16" thick wood sheet and then sanded each of the supports with one side on my cutting mat while the other side was being sanded on the 1/16" sheet with sandpaper.  Since the deck is angled towards the scuppers from the center line, sanding the windlass support bottoms like this allows them both to sit flat on the angled deck.  As far as getting the windlass positioned correctly on the deck in relation to where the bowsprit will go, I put a straight wooden dowel where the bowsprit will be and then marked the center line on the stern cap rail and top of the stem.  I positioned a steel yardstick on the center line and adjusted the dowel parallel to that.  Everything measured out and looked correct.  The proof will be down the road on the build when I'm installing the bowsprit step and bowsprit though!
 
Erik

Pop the champagne, I'm finished with the deck planking!  While a challenging and rewarding experience, I'm happy to be finished with planking.  Like everything else with this build, planking the deck didn't quite go as planned, even with the tick marks and planks drawn out beforehand.  And as you other perfectionists out there can sympathize with, there are a bunch of things that didn't turn out the way I would have liked.  That said, I'm happy with the results, and the quality of the deck planking is in line with the rest of the build.  Which is all I can really ask for as someone being new to this wooden ship building thing.
 
After thoroughly cleaning my hobby area of sawdust, which is also my home office, I'm happy to be moving on to less dusty parts of the build!  I plan on starting Chuck's mini-kit of the windlass this weekend.
 
Erik

Thanks for the likes and the encouraging comments.  I finished more of the deck planking this week.  I did my first scarph joints on the deck.  The remaining planking will be more time consuming since it involves cutting the planks out of wood sheet.  One note on planking color.  Since I have 2 different batches of 3/16" wide wood for the main planking I used, which are both different from 7/32" wide planking I used, which is different again from the wood sheet, I decided to deliberately mix up the planks of different shades from the beginning.  The plank color would vary anyway, and this kept it varied throughout the deck, rather than having bands of different shades as I transitioned from the planking stock to sheet stock.  The photos were taken after a quick first sanding.
 
Erik
 

Though I feel like I didn't get much done on the Cheerful over the last week, I do feel a sense of accomplishment.  After about 9 hours of work total, I finished both boom crutches.  These are easily the most complicated shapes on the build so far.  I read and reread Chuck's instructions on how to get the angles correct many times before I started.  I formed the first boom crutch and glued it on and painted it before I started the second one.  It probably would have made more sense to make the second one before I glued on and painted the first.  Doing it the way I did made it harder to get them the same size and symmetrical to one another.  I wound up spending some time sanding the first to get it to look like the second, after it was already glued into place.  A delicate task, to say the least.  At any rate I'm happy with how they turned out, more or less the correct angles and the same as one another.  While carving/cutting these out of single pieces of wood, I couldn't help but think of the guy who carved this out of a single piece of Carrara marble 500 years ago: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg/1024px-Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg
 
Erik

Though I feel like I didn't get much done on the Cheerful over the last week, I do feel a sense of accomplishment.  After about 9 hours of work total, I finished both boom crutches.  These are easily the most complicated shapes on the build so far.  I read and reread Chuck's instructions on how to get the angles correct many times before I started.  I formed the first boom crutch and glued it on and painted it before I started the second one.  It probably would have made more sense to make the second one before I glued on and painted the first.  Doing it the way I did made it harder to get them the same size and symmetrical to one another.  I wound up spending some time sanding the first to get it to look like the second, after it was already glued into place.  A delicate task, to say the least.  At any rate I'm happy with how they turned out, more or less the correct angles and the same as one another.  While carving/cutting these out of single pieces of wood, I couldn't help but think of the guy who carved this out of a single piece of Carrara marble 500 years ago: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg/1024px-Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg
 
Erik

Though I feel like I didn't get much done on the Cheerful over the last week, I do feel a sense of accomplishment.  After about 9 hours of work total, I finished both boom crutches.  These are easily the most complicated shapes on the build so far.  I read and reread Chuck's instructions on how to get the angles correct many times before I started.  I formed the first boom crutch and glued it on and painted it before I started the second one.  It probably would have made more sense to make the second one before I glued on and painted the first.  Doing it the way I did made it harder to get them the same size and symmetrical to one another.  I wound up spending some time sanding the first to get it to look like the second, after it was already glued into place.  A delicate task, to say the least.  At any rate I'm happy with how they turned out, more or less the correct angles and the same as one another.  While carving/cutting these out of single pieces of wood, I couldn't help but think of the guy who carved this out of a single piece of Carrara marble 500 years ago: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg/1024px-Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg
 
Erik

Though I feel like I didn't get much done on the Cheerful over the last week, I do feel a sense of accomplishment.  After about 9 hours of work total, I finished both boom crutches.  These are easily the most complicated shapes on the build so far.  I read and reread Chuck's instructions on how to get the angles correct many times before I started.  I formed the first boom crutch and glued it on and painted it before I started the second one.  It probably would have made more sense to make the second one before I glued on and painted the first.  Doing it the way I did made it harder to get them the same size and symmetrical to one another.  I wound up spending some time sanding the first to get it to look like the second, after it was already glued into place.  A delicate task, to say the least.  At any rate I'm happy with how they turned out, more or less the correct angles and the same as one another.  While carving/cutting these out of single pieces of wood, I couldn't help but think of the guy who carved this out of a single piece of Carrara marble 500 years ago: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg/1024px-Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg
 
Erik

Thanks for the kind words!  Toni, as far as the photos go, your comment is worth an explanation of how I get my photos.  I take the photos on my work space, which is pretty darn small.  Especially for the last year or so since I've been working mostly from home (I'm a remotely working accountant for the National Center for Atmospheric Research). I threw in a photo of my work space too.  Basically my work day, and hobby, all take place on different sides of my L-shaped desk.  It means my commute from work to modeling at the end of my work day takes about one second.  Haha.   I have a large sheet of light blue construction paper for a photo background that I tape down to my work surface.  For lighting, I always take the photos mid day in front of the window, which provides good area lighting, and use a halogen desk lamp with 700 lumen bulb as a spot light aligned with the lens of the camera.  The camera I use is a 7 year old Olympus OM-D mirrorless camera with a 14-22mm lens mounted on my now 30 year old Gitzo tripod.  I use the self timer so I'm not touching the camera when the shot is taken, this aids in crisp photos.  For each shot I take a 3 photo bracket by 1/3 stops using aperture priority with an F stop of F22 (creates the greatest in-focus depth of field).  The aspect ratio I prefer is 16:9 which gives a horizontal rectangle photo, rather than a square, so there is not too much dead space at the top and bottom of my photos.  For size I select 1280 x 720.  This is big enough to see details, but small enough to not use a lot of memory.  Once I have all my photos I upload them into the Olympus photo software on my laptop.  I delete 2 of the 3 photos taken in the bracket, selecting the one that is the best brightness wise.  The only editing I do is making the crispness greater (not sure why the camera doesn't automatically do that itself with in-focus photos), and to get the boxwood to look the actual color/shade it is, I've been color correcting slightly by adding a small bit of blue hue and very slightly removing red hue.  This has been an evolutionary process for me.  I don't have any kind of formal training, and taking photos of something as large as Cheerful, the largest model I've ever built, has had it's own learning curve.  I threw in a photo of my last ship build below, a 1/350 scale tugboat, for a comparison of the "normal" size I'm used to photographing!  For me, presentation is a fun part of participating in forums, so I really strive to have good photo presentation for you wonderful folks!   Hope this is useful for people.  I encourage my fellow modelers here to play around with their photography.  You'd be surprised at what you can come up with.
 
Erik

As always, thanks for the likes folks.  I finished a few different things over the last week.  I spent time shaping the rudder.  Using the plans I drew the lines that I would sand down to on the rudder faces and sides.  Doing this gave me the visual cue to not over or under sand.  Once the rudder was done I cut out the rudder port.  I made a paper template from the plans that I used to get the shape correct.  Next I made the top of the rudder post.  This took way more time than it should have.  I accidentally removed too much material from the laser cut piece.  So I would up gluing on a chunk of scrap wood to that piece and then shaping the whole thing again.  Sometimes it's the one little piece of wood that is the biggest pain!  The last thing I did was shape the 6 timber heads.  This was a bit nerve wracking as a newbie, but they turned out OK.  The photo below shows the tools that wound up working best for me (as well as a rough cut timber head before clean up).  For some reason, on any model I build, I'm most comfortable using either a #17 or #18 X-Acto chisel blade with no handle (rather than a #11 blade w/handle).  I know it's weird, but it gives me more control by holding the blade directly.  The overall height of the timber heads match the plans, but my angled faces are not as tall as the plans.  No big deal really since all 6 look the same.
 
The next thing I'll be working on is the boom crutches.  Wish me luck!  Haha.
 
Erik

Thanks for the kind words!  Toni, as far as the photos go, your comment is worth an explanation of how I get my photos.  I take the photos on my work space, which is pretty darn small.  Especially for the last year or so since I've been working mostly from home (I'm a remotely working accountant for the National Center for Atmospheric Research). I threw in a photo of my work space too.  Basically my work day, and hobby, all take place on different sides of my L-shaped desk.  It means my commute from work to modeling at the end of my work day takes about one second.  Haha.   I have a large sheet of light blue construction paper for a photo background that I tape down to my work surface.  For lighting, I always take the photos mid day in front of the window, which provides good area lighting, and use a halogen desk lamp with 700 lumen bulb as a spot light aligned with the lens of the camera.  The camera I use is a 7 year old Olympus OM-D mirrorless camera with a 14-22mm lens mounted on my now 30 year old Gitzo tripod.  I use the self timer so I'm not touching the camera when the shot is taken, this aids in crisp photos.  For each shot I take a 3 photo bracket by 1/3 stops using aperture priority with an F stop of F22 (creates the greatest in-focus depth of field).  The aspect ratio I prefer is 16:9 which gives a horizontal rectangle photo, rather than a square, so there is not too much dead space at the top and bottom of my photos.  For size I select 1280 x 720.  This is big enough to see details, but small enough to not use a lot of memory.  Once I have all my photos I upload them into the Olympus photo software on my laptop.  I delete 2 of the 3 photos taken in the bracket, selecting the one that is the best brightness wise.  The only editing I do is making the crispness greater (not sure why the camera doesn't automatically do that itself with in-focus photos), and to get the boxwood to look the actual color/shade it is, I've been color correcting slightly by adding a small bit of blue hue and very slightly removing red hue.  This has been an evolutionary process for me.  I don't have any kind of formal training, and taking photos of something as large as Cheerful, the largest model I've ever built, has had it's own learning curve.  I threw in a photo of my last ship build below, a 1/350 scale tugboat, for a comparison of the "normal" size I'm used to photographing!  For me, presentation is a fun part of participating in forums, so I really strive to have good photo presentation for you wonderful folks!   Hope this is useful for people.  I encourage my fellow modelers here to play around with their photography.  You'd be surprised at what you can come up with.
 
Erik

As always, thanks for the likes folks.  I finished a few different things over the last week.  I spent time shaping the rudder.  Using the plans I drew the lines that I would sand down to on the rudder faces and sides.  Doing this gave me the visual cue to not over or under sand.  Once the rudder was done I cut out the rudder port.  I made a paper template from the plans that I used to get the shape correct.  Next I made the top of the rudder post.  This took way more time than it should have.  I accidentally removed too much material from the laser cut piece.  So I would up gluing on a chunk of scrap wood to that piece and then shaping the whole thing again.  Sometimes it's the one little piece of wood that is the biggest pain!  The last thing I did was shape the 6 timber heads.  This was a bit nerve wracking as a newbie, but they turned out OK.  The photo below shows the tools that wound up working best for me (as well as a rough cut timber head before clean up).  For some reason, on any model I build, I'm most comfortable using either a #17 or #18 X-Acto chisel blade with no handle (rather than a #11 blade w/handle).  I know it's weird, but it gives me more control by holding the blade directly.  The overall height of the timber heads match the plans, but my angled faces are not as tall as the plans.  No big deal really since all 6 look the same.
 
The next thing I'll be working on is the boom crutches.  Wish me luck!  Haha.
 
Erik

Though I feel like I didn't get much done on the Cheerful over the last week, I do feel a sense of accomplishment.  After about 9 hours of work total, I finished both boom crutches.  These are easily the most complicated shapes on the build so far.  I read and reread Chuck's instructions on how to get the angles correct many times before I started.  I formed the first boom crutch and glued it on and painted it before I started the second one.  It probably would have made more sense to make the second one before I glued on and painted the first.  Doing it the way I did made it harder to get them the same size and symmetrical to one another.  I wound up spending some time sanding the first to get it to look like the second, after it was already glued into place.  A delicate task, to say the least.  At any rate I'm happy with how they turned out, more or less the correct angles and the same as one another.  While carving/cutting these out of single pieces of wood, I couldn't help but think of the guy who carved this out of a single piece of Carrara marble 500 years ago: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg/1024px-Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg
 
Erik

Though I feel like I didn't get much done on the Cheerful over the last week, I do feel a sense of accomplishment.  After about 9 hours of work total, I finished both boom crutches.  These are easily the most complicated shapes on the build so far.  I read and reread Chuck's instructions on how to get the angles correct many times before I started.  I formed the first boom crutch and glued it on and painted it before I started the second one.  It probably would have made more sense to make the second one before I glued on and painted the first.  Doing it the way I did made it harder to get them the same size and symmetrical to one another.  I wound up spending some time sanding the first to get it to look like the second, after it was already glued into place.  A delicate task, to say the least.  At any rate I'm happy with how they turned out, more or less the correct angles and the same as one another.  While carving/cutting these out of single pieces of wood, I couldn't help but think of the guy who carved this out of a single piece of Carrara marble 500 years ago: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg/1024px-Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg
 
Erik

Though I feel like I didn't get much done on the Cheerful over the last week, I do feel a sense of accomplishment.  After about 9 hours of work total, I finished both boom crutches.  These are easily the most complicated shapes on the build so far.  I read and reread Chuck's instructions on how to get the angles correct many times before I started.  I formed the first boom crutch and glued it on and painted it before I started the second one.  It probably would have made more sense to make the second one before I glued on and painted the first.  Doing it the way I did made it harder to get them the same size and symmetrical to one another.  I wound up spending some time sanding the first to get it to look like the second, after it was already glued into place.  A delicate task, to say the least.  At any rate I'm happy with how they turned out, more or less the correct angles and the same as one another.  While carving/cutting these out of single pieces of wood, I couldn't help but think of the guy who carved this out of a single piece of Carrara marble 500 years ago: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg/1024px-Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg
 
Erik

Design prototype for the fancy bulkhead....version 4b and counting.   I really dont want to build version 5.   But its getting close.   This one is so close.....
 


 
Chuck

Though I feel like I didn't get much done on the Cheerful over the last week, I do feel a sense of accomplishment.  After about 9 hours of work total, I finished both boom crutches.  These are easily the most complicated shapes on the build so far.  I read and reread Chuck's instructions on how to get the angles correct many times before I started.  I formed the first boom crutch and glued it on and painted it before I started the second one.  It probably would have made more sense to make the second one before I glued on and painted the first.  Doing it the way I did made it harder to get them the same size and symmetrical to one another.  I wound up spending some time sanding the first to get it to look like the second, after it was already glued into place.  A delicate task, to say the least.  At any rate I'm happy with how they turned out, more or less the correct angles and the same as one another.  While carving/cutting these out of single pieces of wood, I couldn't help but think of the guy who carved this out of a single piece of Carrara marble 500 years ago: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg/1024px-Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg
 
Erik

Thanks for the compliments Eric and druxey!  And Eric, though I'm in an accounting role, these are definitely interesting times to be involved with the Earth system sciences.
 
Erik

Though I feel like I didn't get much done on the Cheerful over the last week, I do feel a sense of accomplishment.  After about 9 hours of work total, I finished both boom crutches.  These are easily the most complicated shapes on the build so far.  I read and reread Chuck's instructions on how to get the angles correct many times before I started.  I formed the first boom crutch and glued it on and painted it before I started the second one.  It probably would have made more sense to make the second one before I glued on and painted the first.  Doing it the way I did made it harder to get them the same size and symmetrical to one another.  I wound up spending some time sanding the first to get it to look like the second, after it was already glued into place.  A delicate task, to say the least.  At any rate I'm happy with how they turned out, more or less the correct angles and the same as one another.  While carving/cutting these out of single pieces of wood, I couldn't help but think of the guy who carved this out of a single piece of Carrara marble 500 years ago: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg/1024px-Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg
 
Erik

Thanks for the compliments Eric and druxey!  And Eric, though I'm in an accounting role, these are definitely interesting times to be involved with the Earth system sciences.
 
Erik

Though I feel like I didn't get much done on the Cheerful over the last week, I do feel a sense of accomplishment.  After about 9 hours of work total, I finished both boom crutches.  These are easily the most complicated shapes on the build so far.  I read and reread Chuck's instructions on how to get the angles correct many times before I started.  I formed the first boom crutch and glued it on and painted it before I started the second one.  It probably would have made more sense to make the second one before I glued on and painted the first.  Doing it the way I did made it harder to get them the same size and symmetrical to one another.  I wound up spending some time sanding the first to get it to look like the second, after it was already glued into place.  A delicate task, to say the least.  At any rate I'm happy with how they turned out, more or less the correct angles and the same as one another.  While carving/cutting these out of single pieces of wood, I couldn't help but think of the guy who carved this out of a single piece of Carrara marble 500 years ago: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg/1024px-Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg
 
Erik

Though I feel like I didn't get much done on the Cheerful over the last week, I do feel a sense of accomplishment.  After about 9 hours of work total, I finished both boom crutches.  These are easily the most complicated shapes on the build so far.  I read and reread Chuck's instructions on how to get the angles correct many times before I started.  I formed the first boom crutch and glued it on and painted it before I started the second one.  It probably would have made more sense to make the second one before I glued on and painted the first.  Doing it the way I did made it harder to get them the same size and symmetrical to one another.  I wound up spending some time sanding the first to get it to look like the second, after it was already glued into place.  A delicate task, to say the least.  At any rate I'm happy with how they turned out, more or less the correct angles and the same as one another.  While carving/cutting these out of single pieces of wood, I couldn't help but think of the guy who carved this out of a single piece of Carrara marble 500 years ago: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg/1024px-Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg
 
Erik

Though I feel like I didn't get much done on the Cheerful over the last week, I do feel a sense of accomplishment.  After about 9 hours of work total, I finished both boom crutches.  These are easily the most complicated shapes on the build so far.  I read and reread Chuck's instructions on how to get the angles correct many times before I started.  I formed the first boom crutch and glued it on and painted it before I started the second one.  It probably would have made more sense to make the second one before I glued on and painted the first.  Doing it the way I did made it harder to get them the same size and symmetrical to one another.  I wound up spending some time sanding the first to get it to look like the second, after it was already glued into place.  A delicate task, to say the least.  At any rate I'm happy with how they turned out, more or less the correct angles and the same as one another.  While carving/cutting these out of single pieces of wood, I couldn't help but think of the guy who carved this out of a single piece of Carrara marble 500 years ago: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg/1024px-Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg
 
Erik

Though I feel like I didn't get much done on the Cheerful over the last week, I do feel a sense of accomplishment.  After about 9 hours of work total, I finished both boom crutches.  These are easily the most complicated shapes on the build so far.  I read and reread Chuck's instructions on how to get the angles correct many times before I started.  I formed the first boom crutch and glued it on and painted it before I started the second one.  It probably would have made more sense to make the second one before I glued on and painted the first.  Doing it the way I did made it harder to get them the same size and symmetrical to one another.  I wound up spending some time sanding the first to get it to look like the second, after it was already glued into place.  A delicate task, to say the least.  At any rate I'm happy with how they turned out, more or less the correct angles and the same as one another.  While carving/cutting these out of single pieces of wood, I couldn't help but think of the guy who carved this out of a single piece of Carrara marble 500 years ago: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg/1024px-Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg
 
Erik

Though I feel like I didn't get much done on the Cheerful over the last week, I do feel a sense of accomplishment.  After about 9 hours of work total, I finished both boom crutches.  These are easily the most complicated shapes on the build so far.  I read and reread Chuck's instructions on how to get the angles correct many times before I started.  I formed the first boom crutch and glued it on and painted it before I started the second one.  It probably would have made more sense to make the second one before I glued on and painted the first.  Doing it the way I did made it harder to get them the same size and symmetrical to one another.  I wound up spending some time sanding the first to get it to look like the second, after it was already glued into place.  A delicate task, to say the least.  At any rate I'm happy with how they turned out, more or less the correct angles and the same as one another.  While carving/cutting these out of single pieces of wood, I couldn't help but think of the guy who carved this out of a single piece of Carrara marble 500 years ago: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg/1024px-Pieta_de_Michelangelo_-_Vaticano.jpg
 
Erik