highflyingbison

I think the perspective is making it look more extreme, but I think you're right. Before I took it apart, I was thinking the sails just barely fit height-wise. Will look into the correct mast height and probably trim the bottom of the masts, or just insert them further into the deck, they werent that deep when I took them out.

Thank you all for your advice! As much as I wanted to leave it alone, I couldn't. Besides the color, the existing deck surface was uneven, a bit high on the port side, so I decided to follow Dziadeczek's recommendation to redo the entire deck. I sanded it down level and took the whole surface down a tiny bit to make room for new 1mm planking. Looks like the hull is all one piece, which surprised me. Ordered some milled boxwood planks instead of beechwood, because I found the boxwood in the size I wanted. Going to redo all three deck surfaces with planks, and also the bulwark. Depending how it looks when it is laid down, may not even stain it. Need to do some light finishing sanding while I wait for the wood, might start repainting the hull, though might do that after the deck. For now, it's just gonna sit here with some of the deck features placed on it.

Hi all, Bought an old schooner model off eBay because I liked her lines. She was in bad shape, needed all new rigging and various repairs. I had originally intended to just clean the wood and redo the rigging, but ended up removing everything from the deck so i could sand and refinish it (there were a few plastic adornments like lifeboats on the deck that I removed because they were ugly and broken, but beneath them the deck was unfinished and stood out like a sore thumb, and even the finished parts of the deck had issues like uneven/blotchy and "sandy" varnish, so I just dove in). I sanded the deck with 400 grit sandpaper and applied some Minwax clear gloss polyurethane, but the resulting color is uneven. May have overdone it on the sanding too, since I was trying to get the rest of the deck to match the lightness of the unsanded parts beneath the lifeboats. Had to re-mark some of the plank lines with lead, and I'm suspecting the deck itself was originally one piece, since some of the discolorations travel across many of the planks in a sweeping motion, as you would see in a large board (see pictures). I am new to all of this, never sanded, stained or varnished before, so I would be grateful for any advice. Would staining be the right answer to this? The deck sidewalls still have the original color, and since that didnt match the area under the lifeboats, I imagine some color must have been added during the original build. Could you identify what the original finish was, or point me in the right direction/technique to match it?