Endeavour's Longboat - Artesania Latina
Hello all,
Since introducing myself a few weeks ago I have been reading through a great many references on this site and elsewhere on t’interweb, trying to glean and understand as much knowledge as possible on the process of wooden ship kit building.
Replies to my initial post offered a warm welcome, encouragement, and links to various ‘where and where not to start’ posts and I am grateful to all for those.
Taking the lead from a link to a list of kits suitable for a first venture into sticking bits of wood together rather than bits of plastic, I chose the Artesania Latina Endeavour’s Longboat kit. I’m guessing that this is a popular embarkation point if the number of returns a search for the subject on MSW is anything to go by, so apologies if it’s all too familiar to you, it certainly isn’t for me.
I acquired the kit via a well known online auction site and as I had some Nectar loyalty points stashed away got it for a modest £38.00. In addition I had to buy a couple of tools and some wood glue, but I pretty much have everything I need from fettling plastic, so the overall outlay for the introduction to wooden ship/boat kit modelling was very palatable.
The kit duly arrived and inspected……a kit of parts.
The instructions, as expected, having read other’s build logs leave a lot to be desired, colourful and well printed, but not very descriptive or even accurate.
And so to the build; The basic frame was constructed without the aid of a jig, keel clamp or safety net but care was taken to ensure that the frames were square to the keel, the vertical and the horizontal, I have to say however that the frame to keel location slots were a little slack on my kit, especially at the very stern (Transom) which required that I shim out the keel evenly on both sides to ensure that I had mating surfaces to actually glue.
Once the basic frame was glued and set, I roughly filed and sanded the bow and stern strengthening blocks and then in-filled with some balsa and filler and more accurately sanded to the correct profile, at the same time I started the process of fairing the frames.
With the fairing complete I had to bite the bullet and decide on which method I was going to employ to make the planking wood more malleable, even though it is only the first layer I wanted to make sure I was being as accurate as possible not least because this is a model of an open boat so the first layer is partially visible from the inside. I settled on soaking the planks in pairs in freshly boiled water rather than just heat. Annoyingly, despite drilling pilot holes for map pins both initial planks split so clamping had to be used at the bow. The planks were left clamped over night to dry.
Once dry and the clamps removed, I used CA to affix the plank at the bow then pinned and clamped before gently easing the plank onto the next frame, gluing, clamping, and moving onto the next. Both top planks were completed in the same manner, other than one side was glued entirely with CA whilst the other was a combination of CA (at the bow) and Titebond II on the frames just to see if there was any noticeable difference in general flexibility of the bond….none discernible.
First two planks glued and set. Onward and upward, sorry downward.
Any comments, observations and suggestions are most welcome.
Cheers,
Mark.