dunnock

Thanks for all the all the likes and to Rob for the encouragement. This might be obvious to most but despite cleaning up any excess immediately, I was having difficulty obtaining clean joints with the wood glue that I was using. After reading around, I realised that what I thought was PVA was in fact a PU adhesive. I have now bought a bottle of aliphatic glue which I’m finding is much better. It quickly forms a strong bond and any excess can be cleaned up without leaving any stain. I wasn't happy with my attempt at hand-painting the taffarel and maintain a fine line, so I have taken some 1x1mm strip scraped and sanded it down to about 0.5mm and formed it around the bottom of the curve. A bit more touching up of the paintwork and further decoration to be added before it’s complete but I'm happier with the look now. In the meantime I’ve been working on the main rail. After many failures at cutting a suitable scraper freehand, I finally got to a working method by fixing my Dremel in it's stand, turning it through 90deg and set it running with the thinnest grinding disc. The blade to be cut was fixed in my drill vice and then the scraper blade was moved towards the grinding disc. The rails are 2.7mm square boxwood planed down to 2 x2.7mm. A final check on the run of the rails and the quarter gallery I used Tamiya tape as a guide for fixing the rails The chesstrees and fenders are also cut from 2.7x2.7mm boxwood. I'm working on the steps now. After a few attempts, I have cut a profile for the scraper that I was happy with and then cut and shaped the steps. 13 done and 13 to go...

It’s been a while since I updated my log but I’ve been away on ‘staycation’ for a few days. I’m not sure when this portmanteau word was brought into the language: it always used to be called a holiday... The hatch gratings and frames for the lower deck are complete but I need to add the shot lockers and to order some 2mm cannonballs. The kit supplied parts are slightly oversized. I have continued to work on the stern and quarter galleries. I decided to follow Rob’s lead on Jason in the end and make my own lights rather then use the PE versions in the kit. I cut the mullions first and then finished off with the transoms. Then I cut them all out and started again because all the joints looked dirty and some were misaligned. The finished version. Still not great but I have lost the will to do it yet again! I have added some embellishments to the taffarel but the brass framing provided looked too bulky and in any case was too wide for my revised version. I cut the lines from 1x1mm boxwood strip and thinned it down to look more balanced. The scroll-work was also too large. First, I tried to paint it in but my hand is not steady enough, so I carefully filed the brass etch thinner and bent it into a better shape to fit my version. I did successfully paint the two smaller arches by cutting a stencil from Tamiya tape after the freehand version was a failure. Some touching up still required. You might also be able to see the repair to the port leg which broke off. For the quarter galleries, I made up mock versions using balsa block to check alignment with the stern. The general fit looks OK and they line up with the stern quite well. I think I can work with that so continued making them for real. I used 1.5mm boxwood for the frame and modified the kit ply for the top and bottom patterns and end and back panels. All these were cut and sanded to Rob Durant’s template. For the quarter gallery lights to line up, I have to make the lights from scratch using the same method as for the stern and like the stern lights, they provided endless hours of ‘fun’ and frustration. Here are the stern gallery and quarter galleries in place on the model If on my next ship, I say that I’m going to make the gallery lights from scratch, tell me not to be so daft! I’m not sure that I have the perseverance or the patience to repeat the exercise. . I’ve been dithering a bit for the last few days about how to continue. I think that I need to fit some of the rails to make finally sure that the galleries line up. I’ve been playing with cutting scrapers to make boxwood rails rather than use the walnut kit versions. This is a work in progress and I also need to order some more square section boxwood. Part of the same exercise is making the entry steps and again I’ve being doing trials on bits of scrap to get a satisfactory profile. Not quite there yet As a further distraction, I’m also working on the oar port doors. The hinges have been blackened and the doors made from strip to match the hull. These are tinny and easy to lose in the various de-greasing and blackening treatments. I use Birchwood Casey brass black diluted with about 3 parts water which I find works well after a couple of treatments. I'll finish off the oar ports and then continue with trying rail and step profiles.. David

Beautiful work and a lovely model. I found your excellent log rather late in the day but there are so many useful tips and 'how-tos' that I will shamelessly be adapting for my build of Diana. David

Excellent tutorial Derek. I have bookmarked your method to refer to when I get to this stage on my Diana build David

Thanks Rob. If you don't mind, I will be taking a lead from your method of window framing Oh and thanks for the tip on the q & fore deck coamings. I've made a note on the plans for future reference

Stern and Quarter Galleries A cardboard template was made from the modified AotS stern gallery drawing and the alignment looks OK to me so I next added the PE window lights to check the overall look. I don't think that they look too bad but I would have to redraw the openings to make them fit properly so in the end I have decided to try to make my own from scratch. Trying to align the quarter gallery on the port side showed up another error in that somehow I had cut the sternmost starboard gun port 2mm too low. In the shot below you can see where I have added a strip to the bottom of the gunport. I made the stern gallery in three parts. The overall frame from 1.5mm boxwood sheet There is a step just above the line of lights and below the taffarel which I have added using 1mm walnut sheet and finally the taffarel is cut from 3mm boxwood sheet. I series drilled and cut out the lights and did the same for the two piercings in the taffarel. Partially painted in Tamiya Blue and my own mix of red. In between times I have been making the hatch gratings and coamings for the gundeck. The coamings are made from the 6x2mm boxwood guitar banding that I bought from Timberline some time ago and the gratings are from the kit. I've just noticed that the small grating and frame looked skewed but it must be the angle from which I have taken the shot and the fact the grating is not fully placed inside the frame!

Thanks to Beef Wellington, BenD and Rob for the likes and also to Rob for your very kind comments. I have read about the treatments available (both chemical and biological!) for toning down the copper but have decided to let nature take its course. Rob, your points on setting up the stern and making sure that stern and quarter gallery lights are aligned are well noted. Having read both your's and Jason's accounts, I am trying to construct something more representative of the plans in AotS. To that end, I have got my daughter to copy the stern gallery from the book and modify it to account for the angle (she's much better with image manipulation programmes) which I will use to make a template and with drawings of the quarter galleries to check alignments. I have also taken the liberty of downloading your drawings for the quarter galleries which I will make up in cardboard to see how it all fits together. David

Port side coppering is completed. Although this task is pretty repetitive, I found that once I got going, I wanted to see it completed. Learning from the starboard side, I decided to plate the gore line progressively as it occurred in the run of tiling. Again I ran three straight runs of tile and then marked the position of the gore line with white tape. Instead of then placing all the tiles along the line, I continued to add plates normally from the stern row by row and cutting tiles to the line of the tape as it needed. This resulted in a much smoother transition than I achieved on the starboard side After that, it all went quite smoothly but I am glad to have completed this part of the build. I am going to leave plating the rudder for a while because I the kit supplied part will need replacement so I’ve started to think about the stern and quarter galleries. David

Hi Schubbe, thanks for the compliment but there are definitely better examples on MSW. I started using a pattern cut from plasticard and then tried to make a crude jig for the top and butt planks on the deck but found both to be more trouble than they were worth so I just cut each on individually. I followed this route for the wale too. I think that perhaps if I spent more time and made a more refined jig that I would have got tighter joints. Maybe next time.

Starboard side is finished. On with the larboard...

On with the copper plates. Starting with the starboard side, I laid the first two rows of plates beginning at the keel and sternpost. Thinking that the overlap would be easiest if I used the dimples as a guide, I glued the first two rows. I realised at that this was creating too much of an overlap between plates making the joints look much too thick and as you can see from this photo, a lot needed re-gluing. On subsequent rows I reduced the overlap to the minimum which looks much better. I tried various methods of holding and placing the tiles, including using tweezers, and a piece of dowel with Blu-Tak on the end. Finally I settled on using a piece of scrap basswood just smaller in cross-section than a tile and cut at an angle. A piece of double-sided tape on the end provides just enough tack to hold the tile while a dab of CA gel spread is spread across with a piece of scrap walnut strip. The biggest puzzle so far has been deciding where to put the gore line. There doesn’t seem to be any formula for this, so based on looking at other builds on this forum, I just went with what seemed right. I ran three straight rows and then used tape as a guide to mark the line. So far it seems to be working out… Onwards and upwards …

Jason, Not a great fan of Dunnock's tea cakes but I quite like their caramel wafers! Interesting to hear that the roof is original. It's pity the ship is only open at the weekend currently, but we were constrained by the Northlink Ferrries' timetable of boats from Aberdeen to Kirkwall. Rob Thanks for the link to the item from the BBC. It's good to see that at least there is a plan for restoration of the ship. It would be nice to think that it could be restored in a similar manner to Victory, Cutty Sark and other classic sailing ships. I'm sure that it won't be the last time that I'm passing Dundee but next time I'll make sure that it's open for visits. David

It's been a while since my last post because I’ve been on holiday in Scotland and The Orkneys for the last 3 weeks. On the way up we stopped off in Dundee and went to see HMS Unicorn, a Leda Class Frigate launched in 1824. Unfortunately it wasn’t open on the day we visited so were only able to look around from the dockside. The hull seems to be in a pretty poor state of repair as these shots show but then it is nearly 200 years old; and it's fitted with a strange-looking cover where the masts should be to keep out the Scottish weather. Back to Diana. Before I went away, I had made a start on building up the deadwood to match the thickness of the modified sternpost. Now finished and sanded back, I’m hoping that it will be OK when it is covered in copper. I have also made some of the fixed blocks for the tacks, sheets and main brace from boxwood strip. I've fitted the all but the main sheet block but I want to check its position. The AotS has it sited just forward and about halfway up the second carronade port on the quarter deck. I’m not building up the quarter deck sides as it is shown in the book, so I am assuming that this block would just sit lower down nearer deck. As well as the repair, the paintwork on the wale had taken a bit of a battering so I have applied another couple of coats of matt black. Marking the waterline caused me some trouble, which I finally realised was because the base of my homemade version had to made more stable. Once I had added a piece of scrap mdf, it was quite straightforward. I have added a beading strip at the waterline to give me a border to copper up to, using some black boxwood strip from Original Marquetry. It’s only 0.5 x0.7mm and very delicate a but with careful handling it went on OK. So that’s where I’m up to and with a vapour mask just delivered (thanks for the recommendation Rob) and a bottle of acetone, I guess I can’t put off the coppering any longer. I will be using the Caldercraft plates as replacing them with PE sheets of tiles would be just too expensive.

Well thought out solution and neatly done. David

Hi Jason, I've started to do that on the port side just to try it out as a fix. I've also had to use a couple of layers in one area to build it up. I guess doing it on the first layer, it was easier to disguise. I'm pretty annoyed with myself as the second planking wasn't looking too bad overall. David

Thanks for your encouragement AJohnson . For me HMS Swan was quite an advance on my previous builds, and provided plenty of challenges and scope for adding extra detail. It makes a lovely model when finished. I think HMS Diana is a further step up with some new challenges, perhaps partly because the age of the kit means that the machining of parts is not so accurate as later kits but also coppering is something that I have not attempted before. I'm sure there will be plenty more 'learning opportunities' that will appear as the build develops. Having said that, your Bounty is looking great, so I'm sure that you could make Diana your next build if you wanted to. Cheers David

After planking, the keel/false keel should be 6mm deep and needs to be built up. I tried using four pieces of square section spruce joined with hooked scarf joints as shown in the AotS but couldn’t get a clean finish. In the end I abandoned the idea of authenticity as this area will be covered by copper plates and took the easy way out by using maple strip. I cut away part of the prow and built it back up to merge with the increased keel using 3 strips of 1mm thick maple. I also worked on the stern post which I had made earlier from 7mm boxwood and fixed it with carpenter's glue. However now that I look at it, I realise that earlier in the build, I cut back the deadwood area of the keel too far and the enlarged sternpost sits proud of the planking. I should have thought this through better at the beginning when I was preparing the keel and bulkheads. In my last model, HMS Fly, I needed to cut back the deadwood area to make the planking flush and almost automatically went the same way with Diana. Maybe it was later that I decided to cut off this plywood section of the keel to make way for a more authentic looking boxwood sternpost without thinking through the implications. Another lesson learnt. I’m going to have to have to decide on the best way of building this area up.

The planking is finished at last. It looks a bit of a mish-mash using walnut below the waterline but boxwood is expensive and as the walnut will be covered up, it makes sense economically if not aesthetically … But using different wood from different sources has complicated the finishing because of the various thickness of the strips. I needed to remove quite a bit of walnut to get it to run into the boxwood so I decided to do some preliminary work with my electric detail sander. I thought that I was being careful not to damage the boxwood but obviously not careful enough because, at the stern, I sanded away some of it through to the lime below. Luckily, this area is below the waterline and will be covered. I don’t think that it has affected the overall symmetry. I also managed to damage the wale but the one affected top &butt plank was easily replaced. Lesson learned – forget the electric sander next time and even though it may take longer, better to sand the hull by hand. and repaired. A lot of painting and touching up is needed but I will leave that while I concentrate on getting the hull ready for coppering.

Hi ECK, Good to see another Diana builder on the forum. DIana is a great kit with plenty of challenges: you have already identified one of them, but you'll find lots of help and ideas from previous Diana builders' logs on this site. You've made a great start, so keep going and enjoy! David

Thanks everyone for your likes: always encouraging. Over the three weeks since I last posted, I have been working on the planking below the wale. I started by reading and re-reading the various articles on planking techniques in the hope that I might be able to make a better job than usual, even if most of the planks will be covered by copper plates. I am using boxwood in the area above the waterline which creates a bit of a problem. The nearest boxwood strip to the kit walnut I could find in the UK is 4.5 x 0.7mm. The kit walnut that I will use below the waterline is a nominal 5 x 1.0mm but is actually 1.1 to 1.2mm thick. It will mean quite a bit of cutting in and sanding is required during finishing but I’m sure it will be OK. The garboard strake was the first to go on, made from a strip of 8mm walnut shaping it fore and aft and finishing at 7.5mm in the centre. After measuring the distance between garboard and wale at each bulkhead, I divided them into 5 bands using vinyl tape. The first band was divided into 6 strakes of 4.5mm boxwood and the other four into 5 strakes of 5mm walnut. After a lot of re-adjustment, this was the nearest that I could get to fair lines. The AotS shows the first six strakes below the wale are in top & butt but I decided that this was a complication too far for me and went with butt joints. It was slow work as every plank at the bow needed to be shaped. A card template above and the first spiled strip of boxwood for the bow below Continuing with the boxwood Boxwood nearly completed on the starboard side. A bit more to add at the stern. Start of the walnut planking The spiled walnut planks at the bow are cut from a 1mm sheet - and another thickness to add to the mix. This is as far as I have got, with three bands of planking down from the wale nearly completed. As you can see a lot of sanding will be required to get the margins between walnut and boxwood level. For the final two bands I will work upwards from the keel. I find I can do 2 or 3 complete strakes per day so a couple of more weeks should see the planking complete, a milestone I am looking forward to. However that it means I will be moving on to coppering, something I have never done before but hope that it is easier than it looks. David

Those ropes look very good compared to those normally supplied in kits. I'm very tempted to get one - maybe I can drop a few hints to the boss for my birthday along with the complete set of blocks for my Diana that's also on the list. Is there import duty to pay into the UK? David

I'm a long way off from doing the rigging on my Diana but the nail cutters I have been using are no longer very good so I have ordered some too while I the reference is freshin my mind. Thanks for the recomendation ... had to break off for a knock on the door - they have just arrived!

Many thanks Rob for your feedback. Looking at your Diana, I take is a great compliment. I have no affiliation with Original Marquetry, but I must say that their service and quality of wood is excellent. Ordered on Sunday arrived on Tuesday so no delay in planking above the wale. Planking has proceeded slowly but after completing the first few strakes, I realised that I hadn’t allowed for setting back the edge of the planking around some of the sweep ports. Cutting half mm strips away from the edges was tricky but I think that they look ok. Cutting the ventilation scuttles at 4 x 2 mm was tricky too. These are also lidded but I haven’t lined them so I haven’t set back the planking from the edges. On reflection, this might be a mistake but if I change them, they will look too big. Some spiling of planks around the bow was necessary to get them to sit anything like flush. I continued planking up to the level of the waist on both the port and starboard sides before pausing to consider the quarter deck gun ports. The sheer strakes between the top of the gun ports and the gunwale at the waist are wider according to AotS and the one directly under the gunwale are joined with hooked scarf joints. This is the unfinished planking above the wale which is looking a bit rough but I hope will clean up well before I move on to planking the rest of the hull. Before then, I will be reading up on the many articles on planking techniques, particularly those by David Antscherl and an article called Simple Hull Planking Techniques for Beginners by Dirk De Bakker and Greg Brooker. The latter sums up my situation and needs pretty well.

The main wale is finished and I have started the second planking above the wale line. I used the kit walnut and first glued 6 strips of 3 mm wide, followed by two strips of 4 mm and 2 strips of 5 mm. My idea was to avoid having the joint lines correspond between the two layers but I applied the second layer in the sequence 5, 4, 4 and 5 mm thus ensuring that the centre joint line corresponded perfectly! Each layer was sanded in between and the top layer of 0.7 x 6 mm boxwood from Original Marquetry applied. The boxwood was applied as 115 mm planks cut top and butt in a pattern as close to that shown in the plank expansion in AotS as I could get. The wale was finally painted with Tamiya matt black. I needed 4 or 5 coats to get a good finish. It has a slight sheen, perhaps more of a satin then a dead matt. It’s the first time I have used Tamiya acrylic paints and I was surprised how thin it was although it did cover well. I assume the paint is designed to be spray applied but having no spray gun, I used a 1/2’’ Daler brush. First layer of the wale Second layer of kit walnut Top and butt in boxwood The finished main wale I have made a start on planking above the wale using 4 and 5 mm boxwood veneer. The thickstuff above the wale was first applied with a layer of 5 mm kit walnut followed by 5 mm boxwood. In the planking expansion, the lengths of plank varied considerably, perhaps based on the timber available at the time. I have cut planks to a nominal 115 mm but used other lengths where joints would come in an inconvenient place. The ventilation scuttles were fiddly and I hope that I have cut the planks around the lidded gunports correctly. I will continue planking above the wale before starting below. I notice that the first 6 strakes under the wale are in top and butt planking, although I think that they will only be mostly visible at bow and stern, the rest being covered by copper plates. Nevertheless I will probably have to order more boxwood.

Thanks to Theodosius and Black Viking for your likes and comment and to Rob for advice on the gun ports. I went ahead and the lidded ports are now also lined using 6mm wide lime strips. They are set back from the edge by the thickness of the lid plus second layer of planking. The lower counter has been planked with 3mm kit walnut. The ports are marked out to the sizing in the AotS rather than the kit plan. I’m not sure what these ports are for. I don’t think that they can be gun ports and in the AotS diagram B3/1 they are identified as false lights, (the key for 17 and 21 being transposed I assume). The picture of the model on page 16 shows them as open cut-outs but they are obviously meant to be lidded as photographs of other models in ‘The Sailing Frigate’ clearly show. The helm port has been cut out to accommodate the thicker sternpost and the rudder that I have still to make. The Main Wale… The position of the wale, as others have said, is critical to the look of the ship and how other elements, particularly the quarter gallery relate to it. I plan to start the second planking by completing the wale using 3mm kit wood to build up the thickness and then to finish off with 0.7mm boxwood veneer. I’m contemplating making the top veneer in top and butt although after painting black, it might all be hidden. I started by marking the waterline using a pretty crude rig of block of wood with a pencil clamped to it and then followed up with masking tape. The position of the top of the wale was marked using measurements taken from the centre of the lower edge of each gun port. I used the AotS drawing, although the measurements on the kit plan are similar. Once marked, I taped a strip of kit walnut to the hull to check the line and its position relative to the waterline. I feel pretty happy with the look and how it will sit with the quarter gallery so I can go ahead and plank the wale but I think first I will fix the boxwood knee of the head which I have marked off to simulate the pieces that make it up and cut a rabbet to take the planking. I am hoping that this will give me a neater finish than adding the stem after planking.