Jaager

There is one factor with a single planked hull - kit or scratch - the structure that supports the planking must be close enough together to support a smooth run of planking with a secure bond. If a a double planked POB hull is supplied with the proper filling material between the moulds, a single layer of planking will do - if proper attention is shown to the scantlings. If a builder is lofting a scratch POB hull [emoticon with a painful wince] and if the complete lower hull is to be coppered - with proper lofting and filling between the moulds - no planking is needed below the waterline. The coppering can be laid directly on the support. It just must take the planking thickness into account. Many older plans for solid carved or laminated carved hull construction have this feature.

I forgot to comment on this. I disagree that bends - paired frames with timbers overlapping the butt joins of the partner - were not "real practice". It is a bit difficult to be sure how 1600- 1719 hulls were framed. But after that ( up until ~1860 ), I see bends as being the major framing structure. In France and North America, almost all of the frames tended to be bends, at least as far as the plans that I have explored present.. The English used bends where the stations lines are sited. The frustrating factor here with traditional model frame lofting is that the stations defined the shape of a bend at the midline. This makes it nit useful to define the shape of a glued up bend. For English ships, in the middle of the hull, the stations tended to define every other, or every third, or every fourth bend _ depending on how lazy the draftsman was. The English tended to use singleton free standing filling frames between bends. I do not see this use of filling frames as being done much in North America or France. For POF ship models, there are two commonly used touch stones - Davis and Hahn. Davis came from a background of wooden shipbuilding around 1900 era. I think there was a break with the traditions from pre-1860 and more influence from iron and steel engineering at play, and they framed all bends , but room = space. His books describe a method that is pretty much determined by his work experience. He was not an academic. Hahn had as a focus the time period of the American Revolution. There was a fad then of framing warship hulls with almost no space between bends or filling frames. Hahn wished to display the frames, by leaving some or all of the planking off. It would be pointless to display framing as a near solid wall of wood, so he omitted every other bend. It is a modeler's convention, not a reflection of framing practice at the time. From 1719 to the 1770's and after 1815 - if not earlier, the general practice looks to me as being ~ 2/3 wood and 1/3 space for everywhere but England. As an aside, I suspect that the effort expended on NMM plans showing the framing was because the framing was different from standard practice. To add to the answer to the OP"s original question: a serious factor to consider in your choice of framing wood is cost. If 1:72 to 1:48 is your choice of scale, there will be a lot of wood being used. No matter which style of framing is used, because of the curving and the beveling, there will be a lot of wood lost to waste. The Hahn style of bonding wood slabs for the timbers and fixing the pattern to it to free the bend shape involves the most waste. By dropping every other bend, it saves on a lot of wood so it becomes closer in loss to waste when compared to methods where the individual timbers are cut out and then bonded. But never the less, there will be a lot of wood used. My theory: A magnum opus of a large scale 17th century floating palace with museums' full of carvings and sculpture may rate a high cost exotic hardwood as the framing species, The more utilitarian and prosaic vessels and the run up practice models would do as well using a species that is economical and not difficult to obtain.

Your choices will depend on your goals and focus. From an academic and historical focus and in the realm of wooden sail , weathering and "pop" are factors to be avoided. Glue a series of three or more short strakes of your planking material to a flat piece of scrap as test subjects. After giving the deck a light scrapping using something like a sharp high quality single edge razor blade and a light 91% alcohol swab, a coat of 1/2 strength clear shellac (or if you "really" want it darker- garnet shellac). When dry, a Scotch Brite rub down and a tack rag. 0000 steel wool works the surface as desired, but the steel fibers that are shed are prone to oxidation and staining the wood and they very difficult to completely remove to avoid this.. Stop here or follow with a rub on coat of full strength. Make that all of the glue on parts ( hatch comings, bitts, deck houses, etc. are either in place, or their bonding surfaces are masked after scrapping and before the shellac. If you intend to continue with a follow on ship model, you might read this post Looking for the Correct Sequence and Terminology for Deck Plank Butt Shift It is a discussion and not a definitive "answer to it" but it servers as a gateway to the deeper aspects hovering over all this.

Larry, You might consider deleting your email address from open view and use a PM instead. Web crawlers ... Nigerian princes ... phishing attacks ... bad actors

If you are US, explore the Hard Maple and Black Cherry that Wood Craft has available. Or, if you want a wood that is easy to hand fret saw, Yellow Poplar. The color... well it is used in furniture, but hidden or painted - it tends to be variegated in color. you can pick and choose the sections if you can stand the waste. It is very low cost as far as hardwood goes. To answer your first question: too soft, crushes too easily, poor at holding an edge, too fuzzy. If you switch to a better species, you will experience the difference, very likely. Boxwood is our unicorn. It is the ultimate wood that was used _ with Pear - in the original 17th century Navy Board models. For our purposes, it is essentially extinct. It is almost imperative that you harvest your trunk. I suspect that the varieties of Boxwood used for timber were taller, with long straight trunks. For your boat, it may be worth considering as frame timber. But it would be sort of overkill. For a ship model, the frames involve a significant portion going to waste. A small supply of Boxwood is better used to make the parts that stick out, are curved, are prone to being broken off. I would save it for those parts and for blocks and deadeyes. It is too good and not easily substituted for, it use it on high volume parts that other wood will serve to accomplish. Another factor: I have a piece of Boxwood that was originally a foundation/ border plant. The grain is really tight and too close together for a frame timber. In scale for a block.

Black Cherry is the common name for Prunus serotina. I see that you are west coast US. The growing range for the tree is, I think eastern US. It grows tall, straight and can have a fairly thick trunk. It is sort of pinkish when cut - or darker. Components (I think poly phenols) oxidize over time to a dark red. It is prized as a furniture wood. The fruit is not eaten often -small and mostly seed. The bark was/is used to make wild cherry syrup - an old time vehicle for liquid medicines compounded in local pharmacies. Birds do eat the fruit and spread the seeds. It often grows as a volunteer in fence rows. The tree that grows commercial cherries is usually too small to make it worth harvest as timber. I tree that I harvested - way back when, was similar to Black Cherry in texture and hardness, but it was yellow green and did not darken. It would serve our uses as far as its physical properties, but not yield the distinctive color of Black Cherry. So, to answer your question, it is likely that any hardwood lumber listed as Cherry is indeed Black Cherry. The seller that lists it as simply "Cherry" is missing a free selling point by omitting the "Black". As much as I like Black Cherry, to be fair, Pear (Pyrus communis) is a step above for our uses. The color is similar but I think less intense. The grain is less obvious. It does not have the very dark inclusions that are common in Black Cherry. It is my impression that this Pear has fruit that is only of interest to wild critters. It is primarily a European citizen that it is often a weed. And here in the US it is used as root stock for commercial Pear varieties. This keeps it short and likely smallish in diameter.

Well, Hard Maple and Black Cherry are among the species that are right for scratch building wooden sailing ship models. Maple can be a bit interesting in what figure is on display. It is low contrast and is generally only obvious up close. It can be controlled by paying attention to the orientation of the stock to the resaw blade. I see it as adding character, so it does not bother me. But it not one of Bob's "three or four now-exotic (over-harvested) species". It does not seem to rate as a species to be bragged about or score points in some informal contest here. It does however preform quite well when used for most any component of a scratch built POF ship model. By all means burn the Oak. Go ahead and burn any soft Maple species - even though the BTU of it is fairly low. Please burn any Sycamore - even though it probably stinks. Sassafras and soft Elm are not so good. But consider storing under cover any Cherry and Maple that is clear enough to be useful.

For kit builders, a scale preference is pretty much subsumed by the designer of the kit. In that situation, a scale preference of a modeler would only serve to limit the choice of kits. My prejudice tells me that a kit manufacturer starts with a small range of final model size and selects a scale that yields that finished size. No historical based factor is involved. (For one notorious kit, Mamoli's Beagle, I think they had the Bounty hull to hand and just changed the scale on the new plans such that it came out to be the length of Beagle. The shape is not even close to a Cherokee class brig.) When I began this, it was steel rulers and vernier calipers. The kits and plans still reflect the past requirement to work with 1/64" being about as close an increment as could be seen seen. This is why 1:96, 1:76, 1:64. The dominance of 1:48 is because the majority of available original plans are this scale. This heritage and now museum scale (1:48) allows for a lot of detail. A problem with it is that for rated ships, for frigates and larger, a model is an inconvenient size. For me, metric or Imperial became irrelevant with a availability of digital calipers. It can measure in decimals. No more fractions, so Imperial is just as useful as metric. I like the detail at 1:48, but not the size. I use 1:48 as my baseline, though. I figured that working in a scale that was 1/2 museum would still allow for detail but an easier to manage sized model. This is 1:60. The reduction in X, Y, Z is 0.8. The numbers are easy to keep track of. I just divide the full size data component value by 60. The volume of a model is 50% of a museum scale model. The more common 1:64 is very close - X,Y,Z 0.75 and volume is 42% of museum. Some other scales: 1:70 is 0.7 and 33% 1:72 is 0.67 and 30% 1:76 is 0.63 and 25% 1:80 is 0.6 and 22% 1:96 is 0.5 and 12.5% 1:120 is 0.4 and 6.4% 1:192 is 0.25 and 1.5%

The open pore species are not species that work at all well for the scales that we use. That is Oak, Ash, Hickory, Walnut, Willow. The species that are useful, Black Cherry, Hard Maple, Yellow Poplar are not difficult to obtain. I am guessing that your source is a furniture or flooring operation and these are the defect sections. Were you a fellow model ship builder, you would be golden for your own supply. Now, if any of that is Apple and reasonable shipping is in play, we can talk. I can handle your stock as is. Even if you have the tools that Chuck describes and you were to open a Web business offering custom sized strip and sheet wood, unless you offer the species with cachet. it would be a struggle. Even if you could obtain true Boxwood, or its tropical substitute Castello, your net return would have be lucky to cover minimum wage, much less a reasonable compensation for skilled labor. If you supply your geographical location, there may be a near by scratch builder willing to pick over your stock and pay - say ~$3 bdf - less the defects.

When I first read this term, it was in a magazine dedicated to modeling plastic kits. The negative term bashing fit, because it involved the intermixing of two or more kits of wildly different subjects - aircraft mixed with autos and/or ships or military. Using the verb to bash to describe what is augmentation, improvement, and is semi scratch or the exploration of scratch hits me as being a bit hyperbolic and self indulgent. There is no bash involved. It is a natural progression of improving skills and a result of a deeper knowledge of this field.

Sounds like a fun project. To repeat a current theme in parallel posts: your project will proceed more smoothly and with a more enjoyable feedback if you use a species of wood with characteristics that scale appropriately and is properly hard and crisp. Unfortunately, the Fates are conspiring against convenient acquisition of the proper species at an increasing rate. The mass market species are generally poor candidates. In North America, Wood Craft offers two or three veneers of species that would fill the need, but the range of thicknesses is limited.

Roger, I get a continuous/ daily stream of email missives from these guys, but they do have some useful stuff= Woodworkers's Supply. I did a search for casters, and this product might could solve your mobility problem for ~ $40. https://woodworker.com/2-12-diameter-total-locking-casters-mssu-166-751.asp

I am more than confident that what you say is true. In the lab, we had a rule on rinsing the soap off of just washed glassware. The first rinse removes 95%. The next rinse removes 95% of remaining 5%. Each subsequent rinse does the same. It will never be 100% removed. Like we had to decide when we had done enough rinses, for precision on wood stock, we need to decide when it is precise enough. I would not be surprised if there was not a rule to the effect that the cost for each increment that increases precision: that much more, has an inverse cost to the additional fraction towards absolute precision that it provides. We need to decide for ourselves when close enough is good enough. For me, a hand feed Byrnes machine is close enough.

1) Are you flushing out dips between the moulds? 2) Are you filling gaps between the planks of the first layer? If it is the first, a yellow PVA glued piece of wood veneer that is then sanded to a smooth run would be a sure way to go. If it is the second, why bother? It will all be hidden by the outer planking layer. I can't imagine that it is going to float, so what is the problem with there being gaps? For the real planking, a mistake or two is fixed using wood flour from the actual planking species mixed with PVA. In this case, white PVA cures clear and not the amber of yellow, so if maybe being a tad darker is a problem, use white PVA.

Roger, My question: how will you secure the wood stock to the constant feed? I see a lip at the bottom as pushing it, but i suspect that the stock will want to cant and if the angle becomes a critical one, it will come flying back at you. My bandsaw leaves an unsmooth surface on my stock. I have to sand both sides. It takes several passes to get to spec. Finding the sweet spot for bandsaw slice thickness is an ongoing challenge. Thick enough that the final product is 220 smooth on both sides, but that not many extra passes at 80 grit are needed. I flip and/or rotate my feed. I do that as I get it thru the drum. An auto feed I see as dropping over the back cliff. There is no way to do a proper flip/rotate. I use Best Test rubber cement to hold paper backed medium to my disk sander - double coat. It holds well enough, is easy to peal off, and cleans just using my thumb. The no skid backing on 10X Norton is chemically incompatible with rubber cement, so big volume big box store stuff I cannot use. I have a similar home made thickness sander. It is a box and I made the mistake of enclosing the lower motor chamber - it becomes a right oven so I can't lock on and run for a long session. I use cloth backed Klingspor - long rolls - direct from the company. But, I did not find the courage to try rubber cement for it. I still used contact cement - double layer - it holds well enough - boy does it hold - I can use naphtha to clean it up, but it does not dissolve it, just denatures it and not all that quickly either. I did break down and purchase a Byrnes machine. The media is much easier to change. It does not overheat. My old machine has clean media and is ready to go, but the Byrnes is so much easier that it staying in storage. My suggestion - go with the Byrnes. Alternative - fix casters on your old units and pull it out into your shop floor and give the feed improvement experiment a pass. Oh, the 12" disk sander will still be there. I have a 10" on my old and retired 3 wheel Emco Meyer band saw, but I have never mounted it. I also bought a disk that fits the arbor of my 10" tablesaw - an on sale thing - that makes it a disk sander - still in the box. If my 5" Byrnes will not do it, the Harbor Freight 4x36 belt sander will.

And, if you can pull this off, in your place, after looking back at missed opportunities, situations that I thought would always be there but were really a one time chance, I would be greedy. I would be very, very greedy.

It might help if you visited this link: For Beginners -- A Cautionary Tale Kurt Van Dahm reviewed the following two kits as a relatively painless way to begin this business of building wooden ship models in the current issue of the Journal: New Model Shipways Shipwrights Series! Model Shipways Lowell Grand Banks Dory Model Wooden Model Ship Kit 1:24 Scale Your Price: $29.99 Model Shipways Norwegian Sailing Pram 1:12 Scale Your Price: $49.99 All of this is quite a bit different from building a plastic kit model. Balsa is a species of wood that is of little or no use in what we do. A multi deck ship of the line involves highest technological abilities of the civilization that built it. It also was a significant outlay from a treasury. The investment in time and skill to build a model of one is also of a similar degree when compared to the smaller and more numerous vessels of its time. I suspect that kits of these vessels defeat most of the beginners who attempt them . It takes more hard won skill and experience than is at first imagined.

I have just skimmed this log. I am going with the thought that you are still trying to do this using Basswood and or plywood, since I did not see different information. You are making this much more difficult and unrewarding by using a species (Basswood) that is no joy to work and lacks the characteristics that you need. Plywood makes for a stable base for a tool or a baseboard on which to assemble a hull. It is just ugly as an actual part of a hull, and no fun to work either. If I am correct about the species of wood, it is fighting you and makes for a serious handicap from the start. It does not need to be this difficult. I see no location for you, so I have no clue as to the species of suitable wood near to you. Using an appropriate species makes the job easier and the right wood is a joy to shape and assemble. A frustrating factor is that it is becoming increasingly difficult for those who are not their own sawmill to obtain the proper wood species.

The following is what I have learned over the several years that I have been involved with model ship building. It is just easier to write using the emphatic verb tense Reqardless of how it reads, I know "it ain't necessarily so." Looking at what functions a mill performs, I see very few that are of a direct use for fabricating the components of a wooden ship hull. It could cut a rabbet - but that is not one long notch that is the same for its entire length. It can cut mortises for the lands of carlings, knees, and ledges. A sharp chisel will also do this for a lot less money. A mill can also double as a drill press. But a drill press can be had for much less. I have had more than enough duty from a EuroTools DRL 300 clone to pay for itself. Although the quill bearings are not designed for lateral stress, I am thinking that it will serve to cut a notch in wood, if a sharp cutter is used and the cuts are light. To my way of thinking, a mill is primarily used for working metal. If you are not intending to fabricate your own metal tools, then a mill and a lathe will prove to be a frivolous expenditure. If you get to a point where you really need either, you will know that you do. You will know the specs that either should have. As a corollary to the Yacht Rule: if you have to ask, you do not need either a mill or a lathe. (If you are building a liner - a ship with a lot of guns, I can see using a mill to shape a block to the shape of the truck sides and using the saw to slice each one off. The necessity of grain being in the correct orientation will limit the width of the block. The kerf from each slice will be about the thickness of the truck side, so the waste is significant. Unless you are building a fleet of liners, this is not worth what a mill will cost.) For what you list: A source of wood stock that is precisely the necessary thickness is needed. My answer is a 14" bandsaw and a Byrnes Thickness Sander. I buy 8x4 rough lumber and have it cross cut to 2 foot lengths. That is 120 feet at my scale. This is cost effective if you are POF and building at a scale of 1:72 or larger. A Byrnes table saw and thickness sander will do if your bulk stock is 3/4" thick or less. You will want planed stock (4/4 (1") rough is 3/4" after it is planed). For planks, Saw with the big fence - for the smaller stuff, the sliding cross cut table. I also like the Byrnes disk sander. It does the butt joints of my frame timbers quite well and is very powerful. It has no speed control. so it is not meant for plastic.

I understand, but for a couple of pieces of Aluminum angle - ~ 1/4" x 1/4" all that is needed is a hacksaw to size it and a 3/8" or 1/2" power drill and a bit that fits the size bolts that seem right. If you explore the tool section of this site and stumble across the threads discussing the merits and usefulness of a lathe for the wood part of model ship building, I am pretty sure that a 1/2" power drill securely mounted in a frame that holds it horizontal will work well enough to shape any spars. So keep that to mind - read the site postings - if you have to decide on a power drill purchase. As far as a lathe, unless you know from experience that you really need one, then it is very likely that it you do not need it. It will be a very expensive door stop.

The battens could be made of angle Al. That would not bend. It would need holes. Being metal, it would require using epoxy to bond it to the spine. If you fancy doing an experiment in public, I can write you a way to build the hull in way that will remove the need for the first layer of planking. If you do a bit of fudging, and you intend to copper the bottom, no planking will be necessary at all. It is a different way of filling between the moulds. It will require additional wood, a proper drawing program and power tools.

This is why I offered the battens as a solution. A stout stick -that is straight - on either side of the central spine - glued to it - ( and I would use bamboo skewers as thru dowels for mechanical hold) -should pull/push the plywood back to flat. Maybe two rows of them. Now, if this is done before the moulds are fixed into place, they block the moulds from sliding down their slots in the spine. This means that the moulds are first to fix in place. Now the moulds block the battens. Holes are needed in each mould exactly where the battens go, so that they can be slud ( Dizzy Dean ) in place. All this will be hidden. The holes in the moulds can be larger than necessary. The spine needs to already be straight before the moulds are fixed. The baseboard is meant to do this. Once the spine is placed in the slot in the center of the baseboard, it should not be removed until the moulds are placed, the battens are placed and the first layer of planking is completed. In my mind, I see the following: Planning is necessary in where the battens are placed. later trouble with where masts go or any later parts should be taken into count. There is a reduction mating surface for the moulds at the spine - what with the holes for the battens, so corner blocks to reinforce the join with the spine are more important. The battens mean that those blocks are two or three pieces instead of one. With wood, an end grain bond is many times weaker then a side grain to side grain bond. Plywood end grain is flat out awful when compared solid wood. Even without the disruption produced by adding battens, the bond of a mould with the spine is not a strong bond. I see the corner blocks as being prudent.

We crossed paths in the dark there. The sequence in your picture ... too busy And, I had not seen a 5 strake repeating sequence before that post. A 4 strake is enough. And at least 2 beams for adjacent strakes. My shipyard would have a better planking timber supplier with longer planking and I would have 3 beams between adjacent butts If you are going to color the caulking seams, give serious thought to walnut instead of black. And I think it was Bob Cleek who wrote that there is no caulking between butts. The length does not change - not matter the conditions, just the thickness, which does no matter, and the width which does.

No, there is no link attached to that comment. I was being lazy about that. I did a quick forum search using: deck butt shift and among the many results is ... lets see if this works .... Looking for the Correct Sequence and Terminology forDeck PlankButt Shift OK, I am not sure if this will work as a link, but if it does not, do a search for this title in the Building, framing, Planking ... forum good luck, it gets kind of twisty.

POB is not my thing, but I offer the following: The curved spine is seeking its equilibrium shape. A quick fix reshaping is essentially pointless. After whatever reshaping you do, it will try to go back the where it is now. The trick is to make that impossible, by using a mechanical repair. That is add wood to the spine that will not let it bend. A 1/2" or better 3/4" plywood (AA hardwood Birch) base board is a good start. Make a centerline that is straight. Place blocks on either side of the line that are a tight fit for the spine and will hold it straight. As long as the spine is in the slot, it will be straight. When the moulds (bulkheads) are fitted, four square sticks - one at each corner where the mould and spine meet, will hold each square and 90 degrees. I would cut out a hole in each side of each mould to allow a strong stick (batten) to run the length of the spine on either side of it - to keep it from bending. But this does not seem to meet with much favor and if done well, the first layer of planking will probably supply all of the necessary resistance to the spine regaining its curve anyway. I am belt and suspenders and tend to over engineer. Now, about this kit - there is one thing that is really awful: the supplied deck. I do not know where they got the unrealistic deck butt pattern, the way too dark seams and chalking, and silly choice of which trunnels to show and which to leave off. You should consider either laying a new deck using individual planks - Maple is good - or using the supplied plywood piece and adding an individual planking of very thin veneer - again Maple is cost effective. Read here about butt shift rules and if you wish to show deck trunnels ( I like them, but know that it is a modeler's conceit - and not realistic). Be a lot more understated in the color contrast. This kit really is based on a Cherokee class 10 gun brig. It is close to the Marquardt book. It is a good choice.