Paul Le Wol

She looks great when resting on the guards playa

That would be a great project. I hope that you are able to start on it one day.

Thanks very much for the offer J. I’ll be sure to let you know if I need some advice. Feel free to jump in if you see me messing up!

J. Snyder, welcome to MSW! Whenever I hear Wapama I’m all ears. Good luck with whatever you decide to build.

Hi Jacques, perhaps the owner of Quenita had the open stern to make deck cleaning easier?

Hi Gary, thank you very much. The HAER drawings, photos, and documentation are incredible and don’t leave much to the imagination. When you download the TIFFs and convert them they turn out very clean and clear. Hopefully this will become a reasonable facsimile of Wapama.

Hi Phil, thank you for sharing your memories. She must have been a sight to behold.

Thank you Jacques, it is kind of up-sized but I have a 40” wide display cabinet that needed filling 😀

Thank you Chris, @ccoyle, I’ll be looking at that photo a lot.

Thank you for your support vossiewulf. It will be needed!

This will be a waterline model of SS Wapama, built by Kaiser Shipyard #3 in Richmond California and launched in 1915. She plied the waters of America’s Pacific Northwest bringing lumber from the mills to markets in California. Passengers and general goods were also transported. I am using the Historic American Engineering Record drawings from the Library of Congress website. These drawings are scans of drawings produced by Don Birkholtz Sr. of Tri-Coastal Marine for the National Park Service. The TIF files were downloaded and opened in an old version of Adobe Elements. They were then cropped and converted to high quality PDFs. The PDFs were opened in a free version of Foxit reader and printed using the tile function. Lots of cutting and taping together. I wanted to use my 36” build board so the drawings ended up being 1/71 scale which results in a model approximately 36.5” LOA and because it is waterline, it will be about 17’ high. I had a very difficult time trying to source basswood plywood locally so I ordered 1/16” and 1/8” basswood plywood from Amazon that come in 12’ x 12” sheets. The 1/8” sheets were 7/64” x 11.75” x 11.75”. Overall it is of good quality. The bulkhead former is made from two layers of plywood and one layer of 1/32” basswood sheet which results in a thickness of 1/4”. The non-destructive tracing method was used to trace the plans onto the plywood. An awl was poked through the drawing and the resulting holes were joined together with a ruler and pencil. I’m using a retractable knife with the 1” black blades to cut the plywood so eight pieces of plywood were cut and then glued together. Notches for the masts and Samson post were cut into the former and then 1/16’ plywood spacers were glued on each side to register where the bulkhead sit . They also box in the slots for the masts and post. After cutting the plywood with the knife I used the Ultimation sander to square up the sides. Here is the former ready for the bulkheads to be attached. Next will be prepping the board for mounting the former. Hope to see you then.

A celebration is well deserved Jacques. Your planking is outstanding!

Gary, the stern rail and deck planking are exceptional. Wow!

Looking good Andrew. There are builds of Miss Adventure at “rcuniverse.com” and “ rcgroups .com” . Not sure if they are finished but they were well on the way when I looked.

Hi Keith, welcome to MSW. When you start a new topic, I think you have to click on the drop down arrow to the left . Only it is selectable on my iPad

Andrew, congratulations on completing your Lobster Smack! Very nice. Looking forward to Miss Adventure.

Beautiful work Harvey!. The crow’s nest is superb

Thank you so much Gary, @FriedClams your Comment is very kind and I appreciate it a lot! I’ll definitely be starting another build log. A build without a log is like a day without sunshine. I think that’s how the saying goes 😀

Hi Jacques, totally agree with the previous comments. Beautiful planking.

Thank you @druxey and @Thukydides . I appreciate your Comments very much. I would also like to thank everyone for their Likes and for dropping by. I forgot to mention that before.

Hi Everyone, my thanks to @JacquesCousteau, @ccoyle, @kurtvd19, @davec, @Glen McGuire, @Keith Black, @Jim Lad. Your generous comments make this effort so worthwhile. Thank you Chris for updating the title. Not sure what comes next Jacques but it will probably be another work boat of some sort. Watching everyone scratching together their builds has been a great inspiration!

Hi Everyone, hope you are all doing good. Thank you for the Comments and Likes! Well I finally got the lead out and finished the shroud lanyards. Here’s a few pictures of that process. The lanyards do lean on the upper slat of the fences a bit. When you look at the high resolution photos of a sharpie on Alamy you can see that the lanyard straddles the top slat and the middle slat has been trimmed. I didn’t think it was bad enough to make those modifications to the fences. I also decided to leave off the oar locks and the oars. They might be added at a later date. So on that note I shall declare this build finished. Some photos of the completed boat starting with the imaginary anchor. I realize that there are probably more than a couple of historical inaccuracies present so it anyone has any ideas on how to make this a more accurate representation please feel free to share your thoughts. I won’t be changing anything but perhaps future builders will be able to benefit from them. Thank you to everyone for joining me in this build. You have made this project very enjoyable.

Here is a chart of the wood strips that Joe sells.

Dave, congratulations on completing this wonderful looking Dory!

Glen, what strikes me most about this SIB is the difference between the tranquil presentation and the chaos going on inside the bottle. Congratulations on finishing this amazing project!