FlyingFish

HNY Hakan, and all the very best for 2025. Looks to me as if you are a man with a purpose - love the workshop, and your 'organic' sanding station - just my sort of thing. If you carry on tidying you may well come across those parts that you lost many years ago.

The gingerbread turned out very nicely Keith, and the paint finish works well. Lovely picture of the dolls house - many happy hours of play ahead!

Great Job!

Thank you Keith, same to you and apologies for the tardiness in replying. We went to our daughter in Scotland for Christmas, and just returned.

Wonderful! Bet her face was a picture! I'm sure it will be passed down the family in years to come.

Great job Håkan; your workshop looks pretty tidy to me.

..and that boat at first just ghostly, turned a whiter shade of pale. Nice job Mark.

Build two; paint one and..... no wait. You'd be as mad as me if you did that.

Lovely joints - such tight work. Love the idea of the banana - looking forward to seeing it in the next post!!

To be fair they have been very generous with their time and letting me visit the Yard occasionally, and very supportive. Couldn't do it without that access, for sure. The timber supply was serendipitous - we had a new drive to the house build through a stand of shelter belt trees we planted when we moved here in 1998. I have enough drying for many more builds yet!

Just caught up with your build Mark - which I had neglected, 'my bad' as they say now. It's looking really good; so enjoying your skills.

Well it certainly doesn't show in Atlantica Hakan! Your work sounds very exacting, so I understand where you are coming from when it comes to relaxing in the workshop, but your joinery is so skilled, you are clearly a very talented woodworker. I do spend ages researching - maybe because this build is all about absolute fidelity to the original - it will be the only model of the original as she was built, so I want to do my due diligence. I have some experts looking over my shoulder! This does mean slow progress, especially as I am far from expert myself! Once the planking is done, it should all speed up a bit.

More ramblings... Planking - setting out the battens. I’ve set virtual ‘battens’ every three planks – as the Yard did and set a width for the garboard and top five planks at each of six frames down the length of the boat. Then added the positions/decisions determined in the last post (magic line) we end up with the following lines, this on Vigilance I. I’ve flipped this photo to allow a rough comparison view, (the hogging is now obvious even if the angle is not quite right!). Maybe run of planking in the stern quarters is a tad wider, but it’s marginal. Designing the planking under the elliptical counter is challenging and required a bit of head scratching, as discussed in the previous posting. The planking twists as it passes aft under the counter, particularly the sheer strake which has a severe twist of almost 90° for the last few feet. It requires some very creative clamping. The inside face is bevelled flat to provide a surface which is level to the cover boards. Then we know plank 13 terminates at the top of the sternpost centreline as below; so planks 14 to 20 terminate along the sheer from the centreline back to the sheer strake along the counter sheer line. Mapped all this int CAD to try and get something to transfer key points onto the boat. Care needs to be taken that the sheerstrake is not allowed to terminate too far forward (as it would like to do as it twists) as this would expand the area for plank 14-20 to fill. Triangulating from the plan view, and profile view onto the sectional at frame 34 it's possible to plot how the planking passes under the counter over frames 36-40. It will need fairing as we go, but at least it is a rough guide to work with. I’m grateful to Stirling’s Shipyard Manager, Richard, who helped with some useful reflections on how they did this. There’s no textbooks or tutorials on counter planking so no-one knows how this was done by Uphams. Presumably just passed down from one generation to another. After a little tweaking we have a satisfactory set of lines. Then copied all these lines onto the profile framing plan of Vigilance II so that I can plank both hulls together. Stock planking is from timber we planted in 2000, and since thinned. One is maple, which is pale, hard and fine grained. The other is poplar, which is faster growing, but still very clean, straight grained and stable. Both have been seasoned for 4 years and dried in stock lengths for a further year inside. They measure 11° on the moisture meter. They were cut into stock size on the band saw, then cut to size on the micromark table saw before thicknessing down to 1.9mm and 2.15mm. So now over to the model to lay some planks on the frames to test the plan we’ve come up with before finalising it. ('At last!' I hear you all say...) Started by transferring the lines using a combination of direct measurements with the dividers, and then filling between the batten lines with tick marks in the usual way. The garboard is dry fitted first, then the first few up over the deadwoods to establish the lines. Nothing glued yet, but tick marks at the batten points can then be checked for fairness. It’s looking OK at this point, but very slow progress. This image is of Vigilance II, which is the easier of the pair, and I can copy the planks to make a second set which can be used for Vigilance I which is sitting in the background. It's been a long time coming, but some real progress at last. All for now!

Super eye for the detail Gary. Just love the little touches of wear and shading. Nice substitute for the copper wire too. Like it.

Did you consider using the scroll saw with a spiral blade? Advantage is that you can eat away pockets of metal rather than cut a straight line, but you'd need a saw with vairable speed to get the thing cutting just right. I must say the planking looks wonderful, and the varnish really shows off the mahogany, but for me it would have to be fidelity to the real thing, and that lovely dark green/black paint just asks to be copied.