CiscoH

Glad youre back Kortes! Lovely work

Beautiful planking Siggi!

Any pictures of the carving process? you got a very clean bead on a curved surface going 90 degrees to the grain, which is pretty impressive.

I think it took me 3 months to plank my hull. Amazing job Mr Ensign it looks fantastic

can you post a picture of what youre trying to do? that would get you better answers

Good Evening MSW! Here in Delaware its snowing like crazy. Time for Main Deck Planking update #3. I got the last main deck planks in. No new surprises once the hooked ones were fitted. Only sad part is all the deck furniture will hide most of it. Here's the initial finished state. Some glue smudges, a lot of pencil marks, and the uneven thicknessed planks make it look pretty rough. I tried using this tiny scraper I got a while ago. It works surprisingly well - no tearout atall and it did the port side of the deck great. But after a lot of tiny shavings and not much progress leveling the more uneven planks on the starboard side I switched to small blocks of wood with 180 grit sandpaper. That got it leveled fine, so i switched to 220 grit, vacuum again, and first coat of water based polyurethane. I'll do another coat of polyurethane tomorrow and then move onto the cabin planking. thanks for reading Cisco

so this was your first build? i dont know which is more amazing; the quality of the ship and especially the carvings, or the fact you stuck with it for 25+ years. The natural edged wooden shelf and carved cradles work very well with the finished model too. Amazing job!

i went through the same struggle making the joints on my AVS stem. Every time i sanded the joint it changed the angles of the parts. You could have tight-ish joints but the stem off the lines on the plans, or the opposite, but not both. your job looks great

Thanks Hamilton. The bigger brass plane is from LieNielsen, the tiny one is from LeeValley. The marking tool is also Lee Valley- a string inlay cutter. Very heavy duty and astoundingly cheap at 115$. I use it and the tiny handplane (and their mini chisels) all the time. https://www.leevalley.com/en-us/shop/tools/hand-tools/inlay-and-veneering-tools/69874-veritas-string-inlay-tool-system

beautiful planking job

Good Sunday evening MSW. Another plank-the-deck update. I thought I'd recap my plank preparation technique. I have 2 billets of holly that I have cut aprox 1/8" thick slices from. These are rough on both sides and too thick to directly plank with. I don't have any sanding or thicknessing machines (and regardless prefer to do it by hand anyway). To cut my planks I use the below device to slice off a strip a bit wider than what I need. I really like being able to control how wide my planks are, as opposed to getting pre-cut planks that are all uniform. After cutting off a plank I thickness it with my handplanes; basically a few strokes on either side to remove the roughness of the bandsaw. Holly seems to be very forgiving and gives a glass-smooth surface even going against the grain if the tool is sharp. I hold the one end with my finger while planing; it pays to leave the strip long to start so you have more to grab onto. Both edges are planed in the same manner to get them pretty close to square; I also use sandpaper attached to thin strips of wood for final shaping. The long straight planks are easy. The tough ones are the wide miters and the hooked scarfs. After several holly discards I started making the weird shapes out of scraps first. This one was especially tough- a mitered section incorporated into an overall curved plank. But once I got the test piece done it was easy (well, a little easier) to trace it onto my holly stock and trim it close, then fine tune the fit. And here it the final holly piece after fitting. I hope it can be seen the whole plank curves as well, so you have to fit the 2 miters while fitting the curved section. I found it plenty challenging. And below is that piece glued in place on the port side of the main hatchway. But. As I mentioned before my main hatchway is a trapezoid, not a rectangle. I kept getting gaps that were driving me knutts until I turned the main hatchway 180 degrees and it overall fit better. Except now the port back miter was off a little so in the below picture I have removed the offending plank and once a new one was fitted it looked much better. But that now emphasized how off the rest were so the whole row of short planks clearly had to go. I think I've planked this deck 3 times by now. The miters around the main hatchway are (a little) different sizes but its as good as its gonna get; time to keep moving. And here's where we stand tonight. Some of you may be able to form planks perfectly so finger power alone holds them in place. I still like to place brass pins and wedges, like I did on the hull, to tighten up any "gaps." Once all the planking is in I will scrape it flat, then sand and finish it with water based polyurethane like the rest of the ship. Then its on to planking the cabin which will have NO HOOK SCARFS or MITERS. thanks for reading cisco

thank you Mark for the great descriptions. i have read many times that the sternworks and quarter galleries are not atall straighforward; your dissections are a great help puzzling out why

that stern lantern looks pretty darn good to me

i personally like the dark grey better. Maybe a mix of the 2 paints?

Mark your planking and explanations are great! keep up the good work cisco

Fascinating Dan! thank you for posting all your research. i visited the barge in its museum a few years ago and you really have to see it to appreciate how enormous the whole thing was. hard to believe it was laced together

Tonight is another mid-flight deck planking update. I had thought I was done with the Thinking Part but Lo I was mistaken. I was still happy with the curved outside and straight inner planking run. Then I tried to figure out my butt shifts. The Model Shipways AVS plans don't have any butts, the easiest way to deal with them I guess. I measured my hull planking and the longest plank was 7", or a scale 28' long, and a 3-butt shift. So I decided on 7" long decking, no problems, but what about keeping the hooked scarfs from being too long and not having butts in awkward places? A lot harder than it first seemed. A week later, after studying Cheerful, Comet, and Speedwell's plans and a lot of erasing I settled on a) 4 shift pattern, and b) where this pattern would start. This first butt of course dictates where all the other joints will be and I didn't want odd 2 foot planks at the ends OR a joint right next to the various hatches. (As an aside, I have been thankful I purchased so many of David and Greg's books AND plans, even if I never end up building those specific ships. They have been vital in helping me think through so many different tasks like this one.) I also had to figure out how to integrate the planking with the hatches and coaming. The fore grate is surrounded by notched planks. Fitting the next outer plank so it slides into the notched areas took some slow repeat sanding and many fittings but went ok. The port side went fine as I could leave the front end long and trim it later; the starboard side had to be fitted to the notches AND into the curved waterway. Pictured is my second attempt- it was all too easy to oversand the pointy part and leave a gap like I did here. Third time worked out though. Also shown above is me using the wrong wood. Both outer planks (the short ones) in the middle section are basswood, which is very hard to see. I realized it last night and replaced them no problems. The colour is very close! Here is a pic of the deck with most of the furniture in place. The big central hatchway is not square, its more of a trapezoid. At the time I didn't want to remake those darn mitered half lap joints and as usual its come back to haunt me. You can see the hatch skews to port a little when lined up with the decking (its even at the back, which can't be seen in this photo). One of the upsides of the basswood planks mistake was the opportunity to replace it with a wider one to help compensate. The fore grating fits well so now I'm notching around the companionway (which is thankfully actually square) and the large hatchway as my next steps. I made some jigs to help with notching 45 degree joints (laying on the deck above) with more accuracy as I eyeballed it my first go around. Well thats it for today. Happy Holidays MSW! thanks for reading, Cisco

welcome back Tadheus!

great planking job. dividing the hull into sections with paper tic strips is how i’ve done it as well

looks much better and you will thank yourself when you put on the stern planking. That Hump would have been very challenging to plank up to.

Planking the deck! A mid-flight update. After my last post I spent some time struggling with my planking plan. I liked the hooked scarfs and curved decking but worried I was making it too busy. The AVS also has that small extra grating, off center on the fore left side, that made life difficult. Version 2 of hooked scarfs is below on the Left. On the right I tried remaking the decking with nibbing and a margin plank (but still curved). It got uncertain on the port side where that extra grating is, which is placed to exactly interrupt the flow. Eventually I settled on the Version 2 curved hooked scarfs and by shifting the small grating a little I got it to line up with the planking better. I was worried I'd end up with some bizarre wedged hooked plank cut in half. I had drawn in the deck beams and traced the outline of each hatch and grate. But these were not perfectly accurate as all were wider by the thickness of a pencil tip. And they needed to be closely centered in a hull that (it turns out) is not completely symmetric. After some agonizing over my planking scheme (I want a 3 plank shift) and realizing that a mm or 2 either direction changed a lot of variables, I put having the plank shift finalized on hold until I was further along. Below I used my drafting compass, which is quickly becoming my most important tool, to find the center on the deck. It wasn't an exact straight line. Then i glued down the center plank. And now that I had a definitive centerplank to mark from I penciled the plan onto the deck. As I said before the sides are not perfectly symmetric so there will some fudging. Next up is adding consecutive strakes to either side and navigating the forward central grate. At present it looks to fit perfectly even with the next planks but we'll see. at least its not another darn window. Thanks for reading Cisco

complete with stunsl booms and hammocks in the hammock netting. very impressive effort by someone who clearly knew ships

Well on to planking the main deck. The kit comes with a detailed picture and the LaukStreet practicum follows this scheme closely. Basically all straight planks except the outside one which is curved to match the sheer. The fore ends of the outside planks are nibbed into a secondary plank called the Margin, or Nibbing, plank which parallels the waterway. I think this was done because its easier (all the planks are straight and the same width, again except the outside one), the Margin Plank nibbing looks cool, and maybe also because its how Dr Feldman did the original model. (Although when I looked at the pictures in his book he has 4 nibbing planks per side while the AVS directions show 3. Again, maybe to make it easier). I have always liked the look of curved deck planking and I never liked doing things the easy way so off I went looking to make it harder on myself. I have used Cheerful as a source of inspiration for this build and I really like the decking Chuck did which was curved and scarfed. After a lot of thinking and the appropriate "mmmm hmmm" noises I came up with the following: I changed from equal numbers of planks on each side to a center plank, shown in the drawing above as a 1/2 plank in the middle, and 9 roughly 3/16" wide planks each side. I was having a lot of trouble getting the hook scarfs to cooperate especially the aft one which was weird and too long. Then I realized the hook scarfs are only used at the bendiest parts of the hull. In the Cheerful there is no quarterdeck or cabin so the deck planking runs all the way to the stern. In the AVS the main deck is only 2/3 of the ship's length and the aft main deck section doesn't curve much atall so it probably doesn't need any fancy joinery. So I did another template: I like this one better. From above its not as obvious but when you sight down the length of the ship the planking clearly curves. I need the currently uneven hook scarfs to be the same length so a small adjustment pending there. I got rid of the aft hook and now the planks flow much better. And if I want it curvier I can make the central planks a little fatter amidships. Throughout all this I found both Chuck's Cheerful instructions (Chapter 8 ) and Eric W's super clean (and well documented) Cheerful builds very helpful. Next up is cutting the planking from my holly billets and not second guessing myself. thanks all Cisco

Get used to edge bending. Most of the remaining planking will need to be bent or it will gap upwards, as youve found. youre re-do looks perfect. I found Chuck’s planking videos very helpful, along with reading his Cheerful planking directions. He covers dividing the remaining space into Belts of planking that taper typically at the stem. I think most people also recommend putting in the garboard strake early. your planking is spotless, keep it up

it does look like a bit of a peak in your pictures. i think it will cause headaches planking the stern if it stays so pointy, so yes i would consider sanding it down like you said