Jaager

Don, I did "bodge one together" but it cost a lot more than "just a few bucks". The oscillation action was one that I could see no advantage in having and it provided the potential addition of a lot of precision problems with the up/down motion. . My primary use for it is to shape bevels on frames. A deck beam or stem needs a precise 90 degree to the medium working surface. Here, an accurate table is important. For frames, a table just gets in the way. I do not like using sanding sleeves. The medium is expensive. The vendors are limited, so too is the choice of grit. I do not trust the method that holds them. Compression of a hard rubber rod can produce an out of round cutting surface. I found a series of sleeveless sanding drums. The largest diameter is 3", but this size comes 3" tall and 6" tall. (4.5" is pointless) . There are others with smaller diameters - also 3" tall. There is a shorter one with 1/2" diameter and if the rubber backing is removed, it is 1/4". (Inside curves) For fresh cutting surface, I move the work, not the sanding surface. I built my first one using a seriously under powered motor that had on hand. It did not perform all that well, but I learned several things not to do. Things I learned: A 1/3 HP motor does the job, but any less power probably will not. A 1/2HP would meet any challenge. However, it is large, heavy, and significantly more expensive. (I was able to suppress my inner Tim Allen on this point.) This is where the expense comes in. TEFC, CW/CCW, a drum switch to reverse the rotation. A quality motor may well cost more than an economy spindle sander. What makes it worth the additional expense: The motor will have a 1/2" straight shaft. Adapters and chucks are easy to fit. Any cutter, burr, grinder, microplane, heavy duty flex shaft that has a round mount can be used with it. Being able to reverse the cutting direction is very useful. (I discovered that heavy duty flex shafts do not like to have their rotation reversed - from reading the lit, not burnout.) The commercial spindle sanders that I have investigated all use compression fit sleeves and the mount to the motor shaft is proprietary so no third party cutters will fit. The belt sander option is neat, but I bought a HF 3x36 dedicated belt sander for ~$50 with the 20% coupon. The process generates an unbelievable volume of dust. To save burning out the motor from wood flour in the windings I use a TEFC motor. Enclosing the motor in a box is a bad idea. The heat needs to get away from the motor. Two sides to hold the table. Two side open. Bottom plywood plate that mounts the motor has a big hole that is the diameter of the motor. I have a sheet of fiber board, with a 1/2" hole in the center just above the motor. It blocks sawdust from getting to the motor. A big drill press will hold the sanding drum, but I am tall and the motor blocks my view, so a motor on the bottom is necessary. A good sight line is important. Lots of light is important. A way to hold the intake nozzle port for a powerful shop vac in a dependable fixed position is necessary. A cyclone trap between the vac and the nozzle is necessary unless you like clearing or replacing Vac filters frequently.

Heavy duty bending equipment suggests serious bending is contemplated. I apologize for the inappropriate anthropomorphic terminology, it just is easier. Wood wants to bend thru the thin dimension. But for sharp bends pay attention to the grain, if it is not parallel it may delaminate. Wood does not want to bend thru the thick dimension. It will try to spring back forever. It will tend to twist. This means that for parts like rails, it is a better choice to follow prototype practice. The method is to spill the shape from a much wider plank and assemble it in pieces. Most kits do not supply the necessary wide stock, so a third party supplier is needed.

Focusing on the #11 shape cutter: This is about as individual preference and what you are used to subject as it gets. A quick view at Widget Supply comes up with: Fiskars 167000 Softgrip Ergonomic Detail Knife - comfortable in my hand X-ACTO X3254 Black Ergonomic Knife - Safety Cap - Type A X-ACTO X3627 Black Gripster Knife - Safety Cap - Type A Fiskars 167110 Heavy Duty Knife Excel 16019 K18 BLUE Soft Grip Knife These want a superior quality steel blades - usually sold per #100 Scalpel blades - sharp, excellent steel funky attachment. Several sizes of handle, but long term hand comfort seems a low priority in design. Sterility and not being a microorganism dispenser seems to dominate design. The ultimate is Violin-Makers knives Several widths no handles - sort of like holding a pencil It is as sharp as you strop. Expensive - once in a lifetime - several choices for cutting edge length

I apologize for any perceived insult. We have a lot of inexperienced modelers here and I was reflecting back to the time when I zero knowledge and did not know what I did not know. Now, about your possible block species in the UK, is the wood that makes briar pipes domestic for you? The sections they discard because it is not burl should work. Is there not some sort of weed hedge with really hard wood? Any of it close to you? Do you have any Dogwood species? It is really dense wood.

Based on the necessary mechanisms, to support a claim that their product can penetrate, at least part of the formulation would need to be a dye as well as larger pigment particles that intercalate with a surface polymerized binder. In theory, it should yield a higher quality result than a semi transparent paint alone. However, any surface coating of pigment in a binder seems like an insult to high quality wood. Wait a tick ,,,, given the quality of the wood species provided in most mass market kits, an obscuring surface stain would be an improvement there.

It is to scream in frustration! The use of jargon with this causes confusion about which agents to use. A stain - the noun - applies to a semi transparent paint. It does not penetrate wood. It sits on the surface. It is largish pigment particles in a binder. A dye - is near single molecule pigment. It actually enters into the wood and becomes part of it. As commonly found, the pigment is either dissolved in water or alcohol. The water based version penetrates more deeply but also can swell surface wood fibers (raise the grain). The alcohol based version penetrates not as deep, but does not affect the wood surface. Small boxwood blocks - depth of penetration is not something that can be seen, so alcohol is probably the more efficient version. If you buy a small quantity of red and black dye. An endless variety of shades of brown is possible by adjusting the relative ration of the two solutions. Even more variety is possible if a brown pigment is in the mix. In any case, a little black goes a long way. Test on scrap. This is both more tricky than is first imagined and messy - gloves - skin will dye too and it takes a few days for dyed cells to be shed. Once you have the desired shade, the intensity can be less by adding more alcohol. To finish, use a coat of clear shellac on the dyed blocks. Or you could leap to the final stage by doing what the original Navy Board modelers did. Use garnet color shellac on the raw boxwood. First coat, 1/2 strength, second coat full strength.

From your comments, it appears that you have a misconception about what it is that his being described. Deadflat does mean flat. It is about understanding what it is that is flat. At the midship - generally this is the frames about 40% of the distance from the FP. Almost never is the midship half the distance along the length. If a plank is placed against the outer face the frames here, it is parallel with the keel. There is no bevel, so it is flat. Beveling is tricky and bothersome to do, so it gained an accolade "deadflat: instead of just "flat". In old shell first hulls and early frame first hulls, the first inside reinforcement timber across the keel defined the inside bottom. If they were close enough together to walk on or had boards placed across them, they were the floor. If the inside of the frame timbers are covered with planking, this serves to seal the inside of the hull. It is a sealing. No Webster's or Oxford and imprecise spelling becomes ceiling. If you think on it, the layer of material fixed to the underside of the beams for the floor above a room does sort of seal it also.

Roger, I have a definite bias about this, but in all of my observations, I find that the stations more than match frame locations. They define them. In every instance that I have encountered, a station line is the midline of a bend (paired frames). For POF framing of a model, where the lofting methods in current general use is employed, the stations are all but useless. This is certainly the case if a bend is glued up before a pattern is mounted then final shaping is done. This certainly an incentive to discount the importance of stations I see that there was a major change in framing and lofting after about 1860. Most of the books that we reference about lofting and framing were written after this change occurred. Most were published near or after 1900. Iron and steel require a different level of precision than does wood. After 1860 iron and steel quickly began to rule. The old shipwrights who knew the old methods were no more. The methods required to shape and iron or steel frame had "infected" those who built using wood. At least those in the major industrial yards that influenced the book authors. My proposed explanation for how it was most often done, before 1860:: It is my thesis that lofting was more of a guideline. On the loft floor, what was enlarged to full size and used to produce the frame patterns was only the stations. For the midship bend, the pattern could be used to define the complete bend since both frames had no bevel. At the other stations only the down bevel frame was cut and erected. The actual bevel was cut on the ways using battens resting on each station as a guide. Once that was satisfactory, the up bevel frames were shaped using the same patterns and the eye of the experienced shipwrights. The intervening bends and (pretty much only in England) the single filling frames were preliminarily (rough) shaped on the ground and then finished on the ways using the battens. There was a note on one of HIC plans for a class of USN warships where the sisters were being built at different east coast yards. The frames patterns were to be made by the loft team at the lead yard and shipped to the other yards along with the plans. Patterns for 12-20 stations is much more practical to ship than 120-200 patterns representing both faces of every frame. With my first POF hull (Kate Cory - Hahn style), I came to really dislike point plot lofting. I found that getting a curve to connect the plotted points was error prone and inconsistent from frame to frame. For me, the Hahn method (forming a glued up frame horse shoe of wide timber planks and fixing a pattern) involves an unacceptable amount of waste of expensive wood. After a long search and several false trails, I developed a new way. The timbers are shaped as individuals, but include the bevels on both faces. There is also some extra needed for alignment of the stack of frames between each pair of stations. The spaces have temporary wood filling them. The space wood is cheap Pine and it is held by a bond that is easily released. The Old Boys would have used low cost and rectangular chocks to fill part of the spaces. My method of frame assembly that only needs the already existing stations to define my frame shapes. The logic of this process as probably being similar to actual practice became clear to me. I thought/think that those Old Boys, for whom time and effort was vital, would not miss the reduced time and expense that this way of doing it represents. I have an additional advantage over the batten guide method. Because the pattern is already on each timber, I can position a pattern with both stations on it in precise alignment on both faces of the stack of frames. The bevel for both faces is precisely in place. I can shape the stack off the hull as a unit. This is much easier and less error prone in lofting than the ca 1900 published methods.

From the point of view of a home sawyer and saw miller, much time is involved in getting water out of wood and getting it equilibrate with atmospheric water concentration. Soaking a plank is undoing all that, if you even could get water deep into the interior. The natural glue that holds wood fiber together is not soluble in water in any case. It is heat that loosens the bond enough to allow the fibers to slide as individuals and then rebond when the heat as dissipated, Steam is more efficient than air at heat transfer. The hotter the steam the faster is the transfer. Liquid water does not exceed 100 degrees. It is probably a bad thing to actually cook the wood. There are more than a few threads here concerning the various methods and devices used to bend planking.

This inspired me to investigate my archives. For a time, I explored building a model of HMS Prince 1670. This was at a time when I was teaching myself some skills on the drawing board, so no wood was ever in danger. My first step is to gather up as much information as I can find. Long ago, I bought: A set of 1:48 lines plans of the ship (model?), I think it is from the Science Museum. It is a really large photograph - on two sheets. A set of 1:96 plans ID'ed with CM (Clive Millward?). A folder of model plans 1:60 (POB - ugh) in Italian Teconmodel . I think I have a series of photos of the Science Museum model - probably from their museum shop. At the time, I was working thru the design exercises in Deane's Doctrine. This made me aware of "touch" as relates to keel and ship length. Touch is what the dimensions in tables from the time list as the length of the ship. It is ~20% shorter than the length on the gun deck. I was corresponding with someone who was building a kit of HMS Prince. He was having trouble getting the deck gear placed. It turns out that the designer of his kit confused touch with LBP. The hull was too short. It could have been rescued early on by patching in an additional section of spine at the dead flat and duplicating or triplicating the midship mould. For your kit plans, it would be prudent to verify that the length of the hull is correct. A first rate 17th century floating palace is about as daunting a challenge as it gets for a ship model. If you are determined to forge ahead, but wish your first scratch project to have sufficient documentation and plans, ANCRE has a recent monograph of a French 17th first rate that is both elegant and magnificent. It is St. Philippe. But a really challenging aspect is that all of the frames are canted forward between 1 and 2 degrees.

In a parallel thread about downloading NMM drawings, there is a link to a Wiki commons site with JPEG of NMM plans. There are several for a Discovery 1789 including lines - They are for conversion of that ship to a bomb vessel. The vessel is not at all attractive.

All and all, I think a quote from one of your countrymen applies here: "You don't want it."

If the material presented for Discovery 1789 represents what you have to work with, and Discovery itself is a specific target, a bit of compromise in ambition may worth considering. There are no lines plans. Never mind Body, neither of the other two planes are available either. (A merchant ship, built in a private yard may have never had plans as we know them. If there were plans, they were probably viewed as disposable, either by the owner or his inheritors.) With a bit of obsessiveness, a reasonably accurate waterline model may be possible using the two NMM plans. The masting and rigging would be about as accurate most any of our models if you use the same references. What is available for HMS Chatham = ? There is another candidate for PNW. The Peacock II 1828 was a corvette that was eaten by the bar of the Columbia River. HIC redrafted (?) her lines, so they are available. So too are the lines for the other three squadron mates who survived their encounter with the PNW. They are Vincennes, Flying Fish, and Porpoise II and all are part of the S.I. collection. Well, Flying Fish is in a really grey area - the plans are John McKeon. To match the published dimensions of Independence (what the USN renamed as Flying Fish) I scaled the breath and depth up 110% and added 2" to each space. The overall shape of New York pilot schooners of the times was pretty well set - (adapted from a Norfolk developed model). Someone at S.I. thought it was close enough. For a first scratch venture, I suggest that a wise choice would be to limit the number of new challenges. I would start with a subject that has existing plans. Ideal is a monograph where the frame lofting work has been done and the details drawn. Now - removing my 'any pretense to faculty' hat and strictly in my curmudgeon hat: Presupposing that your objective is POF - a popular choice is the Swan series (but probably too oft traveled) or much less often done, one of the smaller ANCRE subjects ( with frame lofting already done). For a first outing, it may be prudent to give any attention to internal detail a pass. Totally plank the hull and deck and save fabricating the guts and really complicated bits like cant frames and butt chocks for a later project. (Assuming that you ever come to care about that sort of thing.) If solid (laminations) is your method there are many more possibilities. Something here that dismayed me at first is the popularity of scratch POB. The whole process is really ugly and an insult to the beauty that is a ship's hull. It may be a bit quick and dirty, but I can't get past how cheesy it looks. Once it is covered up, it does not matter, but I would always know if I did it that way.

Make friends with a nearby pharmacy tech. Some pharmaceuticals still come in small glass bottles and they are just pitched into the trash - unless the Rx is for the amount in the bottle. There are Science "surplus" web vendors who sell a variety of small glass bottles. I share your sense of wastefulness with your present process. But step back and look at a wider perspective. The variables involved with an alternative probably make it make it more "expensive" overall.

Here there are two types. Black Locust - I think it is a legume and is able to grow in poor soil. I had some in my fence row. The seed pods resemble 5x large butter bean pods. If lawn litter is an issue, you do not want one. One Spring I was in the parking lot at Shakertown, and there were closely planted rows of Black Locust in bloom. Their perfume was bliss. The wood is resistant to rot due to ground moisture or termites - fence posts. As a wood for ship models, it is not very desirable. Honey Locust - I have a minor supply from a dealer in wood for smoking meat. I think it has great promise for frames and such, but I did not score enough and the supplier was defeated by the economics and could not sustain the business. Hully is a superb wood for modeling. Hard, tight, almost no grain and has no peer at bending. The commercial supply is very white. This requires extraordinary effort to maintain when the wood is harvested, the tree is not large so it comes at a high price and is generally in short supply. Old time writers mentioned decks being holystoned white. This was poetic exaggeration. No tree that is used for decking has white wood. But it is a modelers convention to use Holly for decks for some of us. Holly is prone to infection by Blue Mold. It invades quickly when the tree is cut. It turns the wood grey or light blue. The wood is just as sound as the white wood, but infected wood is not sold. The infected wood would probably make for a more realistic deck color. I scored a supply from a strain of Holly that has yellow wood. I am happy with it. My cousin, who supplied it, has a tree farm, but there is no market for yellow Holly. Holly takes a dye very well. Dyed black, it should rival Ebony. It bends better and does not generate the awful sawdust. With the right shade of dye, it can be any color desired. My cousin also sees it as a problem that Sweet Gum is wide spread and prolific on his land. It is considered little better than pallet wood as far as how much he can get for it. He had none cut to let me try.

I made an inquiry at The Mariner's about what this species is. They sent a copy of data about Washington Hawthorn. Here, firethorn is a name for Pyracantha. This is usually a foundation planted species. It is in the Rose family and is hard enough to serve for carving, but does not usually have much bulk. It is a stick most often. I planted a mail order lot of Washington Hawthorn while living in KY, but I only heeled it in, lost interest and sold the 5 acres it was on before the plants grew to any usable size. I have not found any since.

AYC has slight grain, is tight,straight, no open pores, holds a sharp edge, the fibers do not roll - but is very soft, but it is harder than Basswood Red Alder seems to have an unobtrusive grain pattern, you would have to work it to see how well it holds a sharp edge - similar to AYC in hardness. ( As firewood, I suspect that a log does not last long and the ash to heat ration is not that favorable.) Hazel - a search yields ambiguous results as far as what it really is like as timber. One fork leads to Birch - which is close enough to Hard Maple in hardness and texture and reasonable grain figure (depending on how it is sliced off) to warrant a prime position. Another fork leads to Hornbeam (American) harder than Hard Maple, a texture that is at least as favorable. If this is it, it would rate a higher position. A third fork has no data - you would have to explore its possibilities. Impish humor is my intent from here on. I prefer hard, so I would investigate Hazel first in your place. If it is everything that can be wished for, horde it, get way more than you think you will ever need. Ideally, you would stumble across an old farm with large sound but past their prime Apple trees, do a Canadian chainsaw massacre, seal the ends, debark, billet, and sticker enough to fill a walk-in storage unit. But since Apple sap has a lot of sugar, kiln drying it is probably prudent. Unless you go meshugena as far as scale (Gaetan, do you have a walkout garage door, or will you have to blast a hole in a wall of your basement to get that 74 out?) or prefer large versions of small craft - 1:48 should be the upper range of your scale. Look at a piece of Oak and imagine what the grain and surface would look like were it 50 times smaller - there would be no grain pattern and the surface would be tight and smooth. This is the ideal. If going with natural wood, the color of the wood for your model falls into the world of artist's choice. Aniline wood dyes offer the possibility of a wider pallet - usually darker - than just wood as it comes - but I do not see anyone using them. To dye wood is not the same thing as staining it. A stain is a type of paint. Using a stain on quality wood is like tagging the Mona Lisa. Erase the thought of using a stain from your mind.

It looks closer to Oak than Maple to me, but not either family. A bit coarse looking, I would use a lens and poke at the white streaks with a sharp awl point to determine the hardness there. I would be concerned that the white was a destructive fungal intrusion.

What I would do is: Check each mould against the pattern on the plans. If they match, see if these patterns are presented as a true Body Plan. Is there something wrong there? If there is no true Body Plan. scan the patterns, [adjust the scale distortion of the scan, a factor with every scanner, how much is unique to each machine, but for any single machine, it is internally consistent.] Align the layers to make a Body Plan and check the shape. Bluenose was a greyhound, a thoroughbred. Fine, sleek lines with no hollows in her run. But then, no ship had hollows. Once you determine which moulds are incorrect - are some too fat or others too lean? - fix that. Thin built up layers of hardwood veneer used as scabs if it is lean. Looking at these moulds and POB moulds in general, and how much support surface is present and how unforgiving it is, I still echo the plea of Lt. Orr "You really ought to fly with me."

I suspect that that at the time there was money, rank, and prestige involved with the classifications. Time makes that irrelevant. For our purposes, I think "lumper" is by far the more useful course. My focus is on hulls. One particular vessel that I have spent time on is Porpoise II 1836. It was one of two vessels that completed the U.S. Ex. Ex. It was originally rigged as a brigantine, and converted to brig while on the mission. But regardless of the rig, when I look at the lines, it positively screams that it was designed to be a schooner. There are many hulls that say "I am a schooner" no matter how the sticks are arranged.

My news sources are too awash with domestic news to feature this, but has the UK pretty much finally cut the painter and is floating alone as a market? I see an opportunity for UK members form a co-op here to see if a single mass purchase of Sea Watch books and Byrnes machines would reduce shipping costs. This is an idea fraught with danger for the one advancing the money. There tends to be some who start with enthusiasm but back out when money comes due. Up front money first is probably the safer way. An ideal situation would be if one of you had more money than sense, and became an authorized wholesaler/ distributor. "Depending on the kindness of strangers" is a really bad idea for a wholesaler when determining how much to order. This sort of comes down to -how badly does a bunch you want this? It only will cost time to explore it.

This is a bit of data that does not seem to rate being written down, back in the day. One solid number is from the Warren and Falmouth contract in HASN. The decks were to be Southern Yellow Pine and 40 feet long by 10" max wide. This is not just any sort of Pine. It is now near extinct and certainly nowhere near the size then. It was hard enough to turn nails. I suspect that it was a species with a short term availability resource that steam powered saws getting to GA and SC made practical. So 40' for decking = the outside upper limit and probably a lot shorter for most other times and other places. For hull planking, I use 20-25 feet for length. That seems to be a sort of consensus here. I can provide no reference and I did not originate it. Now, if the choice is a short section near the bow or stern ..or middle to complete a strake, or fudge the length and go a bit longer, I vote cheat on the length.

This may be something that I have assembled in my own imagination when mentally organizing all this. I am wondering about something in post #1. The square sails: I have been thinking that if the yard at the foot of sail #10 only supported the lower corners of the topsail it would be a topsail schooner. If there was a sail hanging from it and it was on the foremast, then it was a brigantine. If both masts had a sail #9 then it would be a brig. If either mast had a main course, then there would either need to be a Spencer mast for the gaff boom or there would be no upper boom or it would float and in either of the latter cases no mast rings? If the main yards had a sail, it could not be lowered to the deck with boom parrels and rings in the way. Or the booms lowered first? But then, I am trying to remember if I have ever seen a main yard lowered to the deck? Or maybe, if a lower boom is present on all fore and aft sails, it is a schooner? If the fore mast had no lower boom, it is not a schooner? And a non sequitur = it seems to me that the Antebellum USN took any and every opportunity to re-rig a schooner over to being a brig. I wonder why? And merchantmen seemed to do the exact opposite?

OK, let's see if we can get you some traffic for this: First off, I have never built a POB hull. I would never entertain any ambition to do so. With my prejudice against POB, I probably should not be discussing it. However, I have framed hulls from a pilot schooner to a 118 gun first rate. I can try to help you with the concepts needed to finish your project. On nomenclature, there are two misleading terms that apply only as POB jargon. What is called a keel is actually a spine. A little bit of it is where the keel is, but it is otherwise nothing like a real keel. What are called bulkheads are actually mounds to define and support the hull planking. If western wooden ships actually had water tight bulkheads, there would have been fewer sinkings. It would have also been much more difficult to store cargo and manage guns. If you read anything about real ship building, the difference in what the terms mean could cause some confusion. Your moulds: For support at the garboard, and what/where it should be,, lay a plank at the rabbet. If there is no support from the moulds at the position wanted, add veneer to the mould to flesh it out. The moulds are either plywood or MDF? MDF is beyond the pale. Plywood is just terrible about the working characteristics of the edge faces. End grain is bad. It might be stronger if yellow PVA is infused into the open end grain. Let it dry for a couple or three days. Doing this will not make sanding more difficult. Probably stronger still, would be to infuse two part epoxy. But that probably would make it difficult to sand and planking glue may not like it. The mould plans represent the shape of each mould at the face closest to the midline. Except at the midline- the deadflat - the actual shape is a knife edge on that face. The rest is beveled to match the curved run of the planking. The bevel curve has a continuously changing slope. The slope increases as it approaches the bow or stern. If you cut the bevel such that a batten is a straight shot to the next mould, too much has been removed. The planking is not a series of facets. It is a smooth curve. A batten is laid across several moulds. The cut of the bevels should be what is needed to support a sweet run. Sand, test, sand, test, there are no shortcuts here. The way plywood is, if it is cut or abraded with a tool or material that is too course, it may peel or split out on the downhill face. If you have sandpaper with a simple paper or cloth backing, a sanding stick or batten can be used to support it. Just coat both faces with Elmer's or Best Test rubber cement, let it dry and press the two faces together. The Norton 3X or 10X no-skid backing hates rubber cement. You could try doing this: Buy a pack of Midwest Basswood sheets, 1/4" x 2" x 24" @ Blick ~$ 25.00 Glue on a pattern for each side of each mould on the sheet. The inside shape can be as deep or shallow and as ugly as you wish as long as it has some depth. If you do not have scroll saw, a hand fret saw will do well enough to free the shape from a 1/4" Basswood sheet. Glue the appropriate Basswood section to the fore side of the bow moulds and the after side of the stern moulds. If the moulds are not attached to the spine already, the patterns can drawn so that there are guide holes that match up the Basswood with the mould. Bamboo skewers from a grocery store make excellent locator dowels and provide additional hold. This provides a wider land for planking and a real hold for certain types of clamps. There could be an identical 1/4" support on the midline side of each mould, but the shape of the next larger mould would be needed and the beveling there would be much more interesting to do. If you use your imagination, you should see that the entire gap between each mould can be filled with a continuous series of these 1/4" layers. With this sort of support, only a single layer of planking is needed. But, this pretty much needs a power scroll cutter ( scroll saw or 9" bandsaw ) and a disk sander or drum sander to perform that much work.

Well, a stain is actually a semi transparent paint. A USN corvette from a little later was described as having a "pearl" for bulwarks and deck structures. In my limited perception of color pallet: off white. Mineral pigments are possibilities. ochres, sienna, umber. for interior colors. Read up on scale effect as far as how pure and intense the pigment should be. Having brass and the species of wood that is supplied with mass market kits as a base, your degrees of freedom are a bit limited. Mostly paint is your choice. As far as a stain, something intended to make lousy looking wood (in it natural state) look more attractive and appear to be of better quality than it really is, I would be worried that its binder is developed for wood alone. It may not adhere to brass for long. The brass would need to be oil free (really clean) in any case and probably needs significant "tooth". Doing that sort of manipulation to what is essentially foil will require care. If you have an ambition to paint with wood, and desire quality, the choices are scratch or the products of the small boutique kit companies featured here.