Srodbro

We’re Here is a nice choice. After I built Hero I did Fannie Gorham, then We’re Here. My last one was Niagara, but Instead of building her plank on frame, and having only experience on solid hulls, I built Niagara’s hull solid, then planked it. Got all the thrill of planking without the hassles of trying to keep bulkheads square and aligned with the keel, and had an infinite points at which planks could be glued. Had, I thought, very satisfactory results.

Nice job. What’s next?

How do you keep your ratlines straight before and during gluing them to the shrouds? Run them thru beeswax? Maybe saturate with dilute Elmer’s and let dry?

I really like the look your method produces. Do you think it could be adapted to partially furled or brailed sails?

Mark Please allow me to slightly hijack your log to ask OC about his suggestion in the post above. Can you ( OC) expand on your technique of painting CA onto wood to strengthen it? Does that help only with minor surface chipping, or does it penetrate enough to actually reinforce, say, a timberhead, or, say, a small spar thru which you want to drill a hole near the end? Again, Mark, sorry for the digression.

Love following your work. Have you ever used any of United Fruit Company’s “Great White Fleet” of refrigerated cargo ships (“Banana Boats”) as a subject?

MAN-o-MAN! Does that ever look good,

Ah-Ha! Good news. Glad I found this. Will be following.

Will miss it. And will anxiously await your next build log. Thanks for all your contributions.

I built a solid hull version of Niagara that I called Lawrence and planked over the solid hull. Had no problems. I made my own planking from clear white pine, cheap and readily available. I think it turned out well. With regard to using other woods in lieu of painting ... the red stripe below the gunports is Redheart, and the lighter stripe above is Osage Orange. I know both will darken over time, but I treated both with Hard Oil which will slow the process.

Very nice work. I have followed with interest and admiration.

Hi, Jeff This Kit was my first, as well. It was very frustrating to me to try to get the blank to match the hull profiles of the plans ... so much so that more than once the kit wound up in the trash can ( subsequently retrieved). But, with much filler, filing, sanding, more filler, more filing, more sanding, I finally got to what was pretty close to the drawings, and acceptable to me. I found that hull blanks vary greatly from what you would expect to get based on the drawings (true for several manufacturers), and frequently are not symmetrical side to side or end to end (I even had one where the deck centerline was about 10 degrees off from the keel centerline!). Ultimately I found that building up my own solid hull using layers of Wood cut out based on the kit drawings and sandwiched together with glue gave me a much closer starting point than the kit blank. Since then, I’ve built half a dozen solid hull models, which turned out pretty good. Here is what I concluded: Nobody is going to see my model in a museum so it just has to be good enough for me. Symmetry from portside to starboard side is desirable but generally not critical because one almost never sees both sides at one time. And, there is no sin in using a lot of filler, if the hull is to be painted. Yours looks pretty good. I’d prime the hull before adding the deck, as you may find the priming will highlight a lot of imperfections not noticeable at this stage. I typically have to prime/fill/sand several times before I’m satisfied. Its unfortunate that these hull blanks are frequently so far off ... I’ll bet that has caused many modelers to trash the whole thing and thus be deprived of the rest of the fun and satisfaction of completing the model. There must be something in the kit manufacturing process that makes good hull blanks too expensive to produce ( hence, the proliferation of plank on bulkhead models). Keep at it .. you’ve a good start. Will be following.

The reconstruction is being performed at Mystic, Connecticut. But, you can’t see a lot of her ( at least you couldn’t in June 2018)

Ron: Fife rail looks good. Before mounting, you might want to consider reinforcing the joinery ... those rails take a lot of stress during rigging, and are a pain to repair at that point of the build. Pics below show how I inserted brass wire at the joints, and also when I mounted the assembly onto the deck. Just a thought.

Deck houses look really good. I’d have built them up by applying details to a solid block of wood. ... it doesn’t appear that is what you did. Can you describe your construction of them?Pics?