Arthur Wayne

Looking great Paul, and I'm still positive you will finish before me. Where did you buy the surgical blades?

Your boat looks terrific! At this pace you're going to pass me by in another 2 weeks!!

I'm glad to see another one of these models coming together, I look forward to watching your progress. I am equally interested to see what your final thoughts are on this kit versus the USN Picket boat you finished, which turned quite nice. 👍

xken, thanks for the reply. Not sure why I am having issues, maybe my kit was produced on a Friday afternoon? 😀 Another builder completed this kit here, you can see in his photos that the cockpit seats came up short for him as well. In any event it's not an insurmountable obstacle. Hopefully I don't come off as complaining, my intent is to help anyone building this kit not make the same mistakes I did.

That will work. I tried wide tape at first but found frosted scotch tape worked better for me and that what mattered most was transposing the shape of the installed strake onto the tape and then the wood. As long as you mark where the bulkheads are you can transpose the width and connect via French curve as you have planned. I found getting the tape to lay in the same plane as the plank you are creating helped a lot. Your planking looks excellent so far so I doubt you will run into trouble now.

I had to chamfer the edge of just about every single strake. What I did was chamfer only the inside of the top edge of the strake I was installing. I also noticed if you soak the strakes, they tend to bend at the bulkhead and not between bulkheads making the stair step much worse. Ideally the strakes should arc from bulkhead to bulkhead. I hope that makes sense!

I don't know if this will solve the problem you describe, I noticed the planks want to form a straight line between bulkheads as viewed from the edge of the plank. This required me to pre-bend them so they maintained a curve from bulkhead to bulkhead.

I think your boat is looking great! It was wise to rework the strake, one ill fitting strake at the beginning will result in a bunch of ill fitting strakes at the end! Strake #6 is the trickiest to get right, now that you have that tackled you shouldn't have any trouble at all with the rest.

DrPS good catch! I just looked back through the instructions and they do call for using 3/8" wide planks (a total of 4) for the #12 and 13 strakes. With 2 more going to the floorboards that leaves 4 left. Oddly enough the parts list doesn't mention them being used for strakes, it calls out using them for floorboards and platforms. If you look at the 1/48 scale longboat kit the platform planks are wider than the strakes. To answer your question more directly, I'm not sure there would be enough left over to make the platforms if you use 4 of them for strakes.

Luckily I didn't run into that issue DrPS but something I failed to mention in previous posts concerns the bow and stern platforms. The directions detail using the 1/4" x 1/16" plank scraps to create the platforms which is what I used. Long after they were installed I was looking at the wood I had left in the kit. Curiously there was a stack of 3/8" x 1/16" planks leftover and I wondered where on earth those were supposed to go. After looking at the Parts List under Wood Strips and Sheets section I noticed these are for the bow and stern platforms and the floor boards. I only used 2 for the floor boards so that leaves 8 for making the platforms. In the end I think using these wider planks would have been more akin to what is seen on the Medway Longboat.

I've been slowly chipping away at this boat, can't say I'm in the home stretch yet because the Army has a way of surprising me with trips that aren't on the calendar. As previously posted, the supplied laser cut cockpit seat parts are undersized and unusable for me. I made replacements from basswood sheet. I think this boat is 50% MS wood and 50% Hobby Lobby basswood. I made a number of attempts to scribe the decorative line around the inner perimeter of the seats but basswood is not amendable to my methods. I elected for a simpler version for the sake of a decent finished piece. For comparison, this photo shows how the kit supplied part just wasn't going to fit. I'll be interested to see if anyone else encounters this same issue. I made the thwarts with the kit supplied wood and scribed the decorative line with my homemade scraper. The kit supplied laser cut thwart/mast brace didn't work for me. For starters the semi circle cutout for the mast is 1/16" diameter larger than the mast. Because of that, the supplied casting can't be shaped to follow the contour of the mast. I also think the 4 holes for the belaying pins are too large to be scale, and are definitely so large the supplied brass belaying pins slip right through. At this point I doubt anyone will be surprised I made a replacement which you can see in a later photo. With the thwarts installed my next step was the cap rail. This proved easier than I expected. I made templates from 80 pound card stock as detailed in the instructions. I made the cutout for the stem, and traced the outline of the top strake with the model flipped upside down. I then made certain to split the template down the center. I made the cap rail from a single piece for each side, versus 2 shorter pieces per side as show in the instructions. The kit part uses 2 pieces per side I suspect, so that they can keep all of the wood 12" in length or less to fit in the box. Anyway this was a pretty easy step. Once the cap rails were in place I added the cannon mounts and breast hook. The kit supplied breast hook was no usable for me, perhaps due to the way I shaped the cap rail in the stem area. I made a replacement easy enough. This photo shows the replacement thwart for the mast mount. You can also see the holes for the belaying pins were made a more scale diameter. Now the metal mast mount fits around the mast like a glove. I also added the thwart knees doing my best to make sure they were parallel with the nearest bulkhead. Painted the thwart knees multiple coats before gluing in place, in these photos are just friction fit. An oddity is the round cannon mount. There's not mention of the 4 laser cut holes in the instructions. I surmise someone at MS thought they were a good idea for some reason? Perhaps they are for simulated bolts, alas there are just enough nails in the kit for other uses and not even a spare. Eventually I filled these holes in with spots of wood putty. Another error with the laser cut parts via the thwart knees. If the cap rail was 1/8" thick they would work, but it's only 1/16" thick so these are cut 1/16" too deep. I used scrap 1/16" thick wood to bring the depth up to 1/16". This is pretty easy to do, but an odd mistake for the kit to have. Luckily these parts will be painted. Another deviation to the kit I decided to make was to paint the thwarts red. I noticed photos of the museum models Chuck has posted in his Medway Longboat kit post had red thwarts and liked the look. Since the majority of the interior is unpainted and the hull is unpainted I think the extra color is complimentary. In the photos I have only applied 2 light coats, I have since painted several more coats and I like the look.

That looks awesome! I haven't tried mixing alcohol with water, I'm definitely going to give a try on my next build.

Dr PS, For the top (actual top of the boat) 2 strakes I used the kit supplied 1/4" wide stock. The garboard plank was also kit supplied stock. The next 3 strakes going up from the garboard I only used kit supplied 1/4" wide planks for the aft half of the run, the forward half were spiled. I did mark each bulkhead where there was going to be strake joint so they were staggered in the locations identified in the plans. After that I don't think I used hardly any of the kit supplied planks, maybe a few for the aft half of the run but only a couple. In hind sight for me, I think the curve the instructions have you create on the forward end of the garboard is too tight of a radius. On page 12 it states to mark the plank 1-3/4" down from the end. I would recommend marking it at 2-1/4" instead. I also recommend trying your best to get the end (pointy bit) of each of the strakes to fall where they do in the top right photo on page 15. I freely admit I threw away a number of spiled planks but the cost of the wood sheets is so low I was only wasting my time. I wish I could have gotten these planks to bend for me but they just wouldn't and for those that did, it was near impossible to not have them dented beyond redemption by clamps. The difficulty in this kit for me has been that you have to worry about how the planks look on the inside as well as outside. Hope that helps, if not I feel free to let me know. By the way I'm just south of you at Fort Hood, hope the twister near Waco missed you up there.

Thanks for the compliments SandyBay and Dr PS! Dr PS feel free to ask any questions you may have at any time. I am definitely no expert and I'm sure some of my work arounds could be accomplished in a better way. All I'm hoping to achieve is to help others avoid some of the pitfalls I've run into.

Looks pretty darned good Tiger65! I found a couple unusual issues you will run into during the next few steps. The instructions tell you to use 1/16 x 1/4" plank scraps to make the bow and stern platforms, and the photos in the manual show this. The inventory sheet in the kit however identifies ten 1/16" x 3/8" strips for the bow and stern platforms. I used the 1/4" strips per the instructions, but I think the 3/8" wide strips look more correct compared to photos of other longboats. I only discovered this when I inventoried what I had left in the box and couldn't figure where all those 3/8" wide planks were supposed to go. I also found the laser cut cockpit seats are not long enough by at least 1/4". There's no way to bevel them to fit against the transom and but up against the last thwart.