FriedClams

I’ll watch with great interest. It sounds like a nice looking model when finished with a rather different build method. Good luck, I’m sure it will come out well.
alan

Looks like an interesting build!

Here is where I am at the moment.  The kit has you stitch the first two pairs of strakes using included copper wire, then super glue the four frames in.  It's a little trickier than it sounds as the planks move around a little from the wire ties, and you want to keep the puzzle joint in perfect alignment as well as have the strakes slightly overlap one another as indicated by the indentations of the frames.  You naturally also want to have no gap between the first pair of strakes.  I found I had to pop off a couple of the frames to re-do things to have a tighter and more accurate fit, but I eventually got there.
 
Next I added the third pair of strakes, which are tied in via the copper wire but not yet glued.  Now that the frames are locked into proper position with the first two pairs of strakes, planks 3-5 should be a lot easier to install.

Thanks for looking in!

In the summer of 2020, I asked my young kids if they wanted to build it for their mother as a Christmas present.  They were all gung ho until the first step which involved using CA to create the long strakes.  Between the smell and sticky fingers, they quickly lost interest.  I ended up gluing the two pieces of each of the ten strakes together, and then the kit sat on the shelf ever since.
 
A couple of nights ago I decided to take the kit off the shelf to take a mental break from some of the other models I'm working on.  I thought I remembered reading somewhere that the kit takes about 20 hours to complete (which means it will take me 50+ given how slow I work), but I figured it's a good "palette-cleanser build" and a good time of year to build it with the weather turning nicer so that it can be painted outdoors.  Given the estimated time it would take, it would also help free up shelving given the size of the box.
 
First thing I did was clean up the CA between the joint in the strakes.  I haven't decided how I'm going to finish it, but I likely will stain and varnish the interior so I tried to make sure that there was no stray CA.  For this I used a hand sander to start, followed by some sanding by hand.

In the fall of 2019, I went to a model boat show in the Eastern Shore of Maryland, which ended up turning into a family mini vacation.  At the show my wife decided to buy some raffle tickets and she ended up winning the Chesapeake Light Craft Annapolis Wherry kit.

It's an interesting kit with a really nice 102-page spiral bound instruction manual (with three build photos per page).  As an added bonus, CLC put out a 40 minute video on YouTube showing step by step construction.  The model is built very similarly to their full sized wherry kit which CLC sells.  Construction involves connecting the overlapping strakes with wire, which are then wrapped around the frames to form the shape (eventually, those wire ties are removed).
 
For more information, you can go to CLC's website here:
 
https://clcboats.com/shop/boats/scale-model-kits/annapolis-wherry-scale-model.html
 
I should mention that @jbelwood and @gsdpic posted their very nice builds on here.  Originally I wasn't going to post a build log, but I figured I might as well in case people are interested in seeing how this nice kit comes together.

This model is looking really sweet, J.C.  Very nice.
 
 
Whenever I'm unsure, I always wait until I am sure because it can be so difficult to undue. After the chainplates and rudder hinges are on, the decision may be easier.
 
Gary

That makes more sense Keith- my mum god rest her soul called them 'senior moments'!
 
Keith

Looks really great!  Love the colors you are using.

It is looking really good. I really like the weathered look you have gone for. It suits the subject.
 
On dry brushing, the key thing is to get almost all of the paint off of the brush (I find dollar store makeup brushes work super well). Also it works best when there is lots of 3d detail. If you try to drybrush on a flat surface you just end up with a streaky look. You can also do the drybrushing in stages where you use a darker colour and heavily drybrush followed by a lighter colour with a light drybrush to just pick up the very edges.

Thanks, @wefalck! Dry brushing certainly seems to give a lot of bang for the buck--easier to figure out (at least the basics) than I expected and a little can add a lot of character.
 
After more consideration, I decided to just go for mounting the chainplates outside the rubbing strakes. I painted the rubbing strakes off the hull and glued them on 1/3 at a time, starting at the bow and working my way back. Rubber bands were helpful around the center, but not further forward or back, due to the pronounced curve of the hull.

 
I also attached the bowsprit and was able to attach the cross-piece rail that goes across it.
 
I realized that I should have waited to weather the gammon iron and surroundings until I extended the white stripe of the rub rails around the stem. The area was quite tricky to tape off.

 
Despite my best efforts to burnish the tape and seal it with clear varnish before painting, a good bit of paint still managed to escape on the port side (my apologies for the poor picture quality!). 

 
It took a good bit of patient scraping and repainting the area, but I was able to get it looking right, especially after adding the dry-brushed rust and some dark washes.

 
At the transom, meanwhile, I used Tamiya masking tape for curves for the white stripe.

 
Besides the rust, I also wanted to weather the hull a bit. I scraped and sanded some edges, especially on the rubbing strake and cap rail around where the shrouds/chainplates will be located and at the bow where the anchor would hang*, and around the keel, stem, and guardaplayas. I then used a dark wash to tone down some of the exposed bare wood (drawing on Gary's example in his dragger build). The effect is subtle.
 
*Some photos show lanchas with a hawse hole through the cap rail for the anchor, but many lanchas simply ran the anchor cable over the rail, as I've decided to go with on my build.

 
I also dry-brushed a very little bit of white in some places to suggest salt deposits. The hull could maybe do with a dash more color variation (maybe a brown wash?) to suggest more weathering, but I don't want to over-do it. (Not to mention that there will be rust around the chainplates and rudder hinges when those are added.)

 
In any event, the hull is basically complete now! I still do need to shape the masthead. I'm happy with how the build is turning out, thank you all for your advice and comments.

 

 

 

You've done lovely work on the model, Siggi. When finished will you be placing her in a case? 

Very beautiful work 

Hello, and thank you for all the likes,
and yes I'm guilty. I was't at the shipyard last week. We had here the finest spring weather, with sunshine and temperatures up to 24°C in the sun! 😊

But yesterday the weather changed, and I finished planking with the last two strakes. They are at least only 0,4 mm thick! So as next I will install the gun-wale.
I started with this project last November and planking mid January.



At the next picture you see the rocked keel. I reality the keel was in the middle 30 cm lower then at his outer ends.




 

I would add, also, that I’ve coiled and flaked rope as a volunteer on South Street Seaport’s historic schooner Pioneer.  Coils have to run freely, so longer loops and fewer are better than smaller, stacked coils.  Mostly though, at scale, I just don’t like the appearance of perfectly round coils that instantly bring to mind the knitting needle they were formed on.
 
The varnish tip is a good one, but I would be reticent to apply acetone to an acrylic painted, plastic model.  This approach, it seems to me, is perfect for wooden modeling.  ‘Something I will definitely tuck away for the future.
 
I can tell you from my several mis-adventures of blemishing my ventre-de-biche hull that color-matching that distressed appearance is a real biche 😜

For what it’s worth, as a ex-mountaineer and caver I would often coil rope around an arm and lay it down on the ground, where it would look just like Marc’s coils. I agree that some very stiff rope, especially when new, can want to do it’s own thing but even hemp or bark/grass rope softens fairly quickly. (On the climbing and caving side, most of us would have paid more for a rope that did behave rather than continually kinking. We used to have to regularly drag 50 metres of rope along the ground to get the kinks out and stop it twisting during coiling).

That's not a very true assumption, rope rarely, depending on the lay of it, has a tendency to coil up round. It generally depends on the lay, direction of coiling and simply the motion that is made during coiling that would define the shape of it. 
I must admit this is looking more like a coil that was made vertically, hanging and then laid down afterwards rather than a coil that was made straight on deck. But honestly... if that's the only question we can pose, he's doing a great job. And that's what this is! 
 
Great work all around, astonishing work and VERY Tiny blocks indeed!

I'm in for sure.  Brings back memories from decades ago of biking the Katy Trial (if I remember right). We'd start in St. Charles and go from there for maybe 4-6 hours and then turn around and go back.   Beautiful.

Great start to an interesting project, Eric.  Looking forward to following along.
 
Gary

Nice to see an update on this model, Dan.
 

Absolutely ditto that!
 
Gary

Great start to an interesting project, Eric.  Looking forward to following along.
 
Gary

Nice to see an update on this model, Dan.
 

Absolutely ditto that!
 
Gary

Nice to see an update on this model, Dan.
 

Absolutely ditto that!
 
Gary

Nice to see an update on this model, Dan.
 

Absolutely ditto that!
 
Gary

Nice to see an update on this model, Dan.
 

Absolutely ditto that!
 
Gary

Great start to an interesting project, Eric.  Looking forward to following along.
 
Gary