Jaager

Would cold cause the components to contract?
I have a vague memory of an aerosol something that acted like liquid Nitrogen.

It seems like most any tree-like gymnosperm that did not have needles was called Cedar for colloquial communication.
 
We all share have regret of - if I had only known then....    But processing and storing that much wood - let alone having the time to do it   -  at a time in your life when priorities were different. 
 
A recent one for me is the realization that Blue Mold infected Holly is probably more suited for our use than the snow white stock that is sold.   No wood actually used in ship building was white.  The infected wood looks like a sun bleached deck.

Would cold cause the components to contract?
I have a vague memory of an aerosol something that acted like liquid Nitrogen.

It seems like most any tree-like gymnosperm that did not have needles was called Cedar for colloquial communication.
 
We all share have regret of - if I had only known then....    But processing and storing that much wood - let alone having the time to do it   -  at a time in your life when priorities were different. 
 
A recent one for me is the realization that Blue Mold infected Holly is probably more suited for our use than the snow white stock that is sold.   No wood actually used in ship building was white.  The infected wood looks like a sun bleached deck.

It is my postulation that it is that wood does not embrittle over time.  Rather, once it is seasoned and is in equilibrium with its ambient humidity, it is its basic nature that is expressed.
Cedar is just brittle.  It was old when it was cut, so sitting around as processed stock for a long time is not the problem.  Its structure will show the effects of it "breathing" water vapor.  
Wood will swell with 100% relative humidity and shrink in a Death Valley-like dry environment.  Lignin bonds may fail - over time.   It may crack along the grain as it moves under these stresses.
 
As an aside, AYC is not a cedar at all, it is a sort of Cypress.

There is a blade that is used by carpet layers - single edge - about 4" long - a bit stiffer - starts out sharp.  Stripper blade.

Dean,
NUTS!!  Going back a little over 50 years ago, had I known about this being a good wood to harvest I might have had 100 lifetimes supply (and would have happily sent you a few hundred board feet) when I sawed down an acre of the stuff then had the stumps backhoed out.  Some went into piles of cordwood and the rest went into a dozen or more wood piles all over the lot and then burned to ash before building our house..  These were Crataegus pennsylvanica, known as the Pennsylvania thorn, which is a species of hawthorn but I have no idea if it has similar properties to the other species of hawthorn.  These were all over western PA and most folks hated them because of the thorns and the little apples that dropped all over the yard.  Live and learn......
Allan

It is my postulation that it is that wood does not embrittle over time.  Rather, once it is seasoned and is in equilibrium with its ambient humidity, it is its basic nature that is expressed.
Cedar is just brittle.  It was old when it was cut, so sitting around as processed stock for a long time is not the problem.  Its structure will show the effects of it "breathing" water vapor.  
Wood will swell with 100% relative humidity and shrink in a Death Valley-like dry environment.  Lignin bonds may fail - over time.   It may crack along the grain as it moves under these stresses.
 
As an aside, AYC is not a cedar at all, it is a sort of Cypress.

There is a blade that is used by carpet layers - single edge - about 4" long - a bit stiffer - starts out sharp.  Stripper blade.

I checked my files of Blom and Emke - I partook of the same hallucinogen but recovered before I went out too far to make it back.😉  
 
At least there are not decades of port laurels.  For those, my first thought would be to carve a master.  Make a negative using clay.  Fill it with a wood flour-PVA mixure.  guild that.  I wonder if this would work for balustrades?
 
For the free standing and relief statues, what I would try for a carving substrate:
Boxwood - Buxus sempervirens - I bought a log long ago
Castelo
Hard Maple  just to see
AYC - Alaska Yellow Ceder - it is soft and buttery - probably wants short careful strokes with an exquisitely fine edge.
 
Then there is the wood I had to harvest
Dogwood  (Corus florida)
Apple
Bradford Pear
 
and wood that I wish I could have found
Hawthorn of any variety
 
For what you want, you have the advantage of looking in supplies of wood sold for pen turning, general turning, and bowl blanks.  Almost all of it will be very high cost per volume, but your volume need is small. 

The rigging tables in old books, contracts, ad plan margins are rope circumferences.  It was easier to measure than diameter.  Rope will crush, so even if they had developed a standard caliper, the diameter measurement would be ambiguous.
We live by diameter, so pi is our friend when converting to what is needed for a model.
 
Diameter is easy to determine at model scale.   A dowel is all that is needed.  A fat one works fairly easy.  Place two marks around the dowel that are 1 inch apart. A tight coil of the rope between the two marks.  Count the number of revolutions.   That is the diameter.  
Internally consistent in your shop is best, so measure everything yourself.  This is how you get the gauge for commercial thread.
 
For linen -  go to Etsy  - enter "linen yarn"  cones  and be prepared for frustration.  Not many want what we are after, so our stuff is at the bottom of a few thousand cycling offers.
Irish or Belgian would have better QA, but I suspect that neither have the slave labor needed for economical processing. 
The Asian producers who have the low cost labor, seem to want to sell in shipping container size lots - if the size of what they are selling can be deciphered.
Be aware that 16/2  is two 16 #   not  two smaller yarns that twist up to be 16.
The larger the number, the smaller the yarn.   When twisting up three yarns,  #40 by Lea is #24 by Nm  and these will make stay size rope  For running rigging - the larger number "unicorns" are the target.
Look up "rope walk" here.
 
If you had the acreage,  if you could find linen seed for varieties that have small diameter, long fibers in the stem,  if the weather does not bring rain when it will rot the cut and field fermenting plants,  getting the stems into the needed fibers and then yarn is a complex and finesse sort of operation that wants years of experience taught by older generations stretching back to infinity.
 
gauge -  old link  not looking  to see if it still is there:  info@baltic-flax.com
 
I suspect that hemp fibers are too thick.  I am not sure that I have seen much hemp cloth.  Investigate and experiment and report.
 
old links:
https://store.vavstuga.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Category_code=yarns-linen-lace
 
https://www.yarn.com/categories/linen-weaving-yarn
 
https://www.threadneedlestreet.com/       look for LONDONDERRY LINEN THREAD
 
 
 

I checked my files of Blom and Emke - I partook of the same hallucinogen but recovered before I went out too far to make it back.😉  
 
At least there are not decades of port laurels.  For those, my first thought would be to carve a master.  Make a negative using clay.  Fill it with a wood flour-PVA mixure.  guild that.  I wonder if this would work for balustrades?
 
For the free standing and relief statues, what I would try for a carving substrate:
Boxwood - Buxus sempervirens - I bought a log long ago
Castelo
Hard Maple  just to see
AYC - Alaska Yellow Ceder - it is soft and buttery - probably wants short careful strokes with an exquisitely fine edge.
 
Then there is the wood I had to harvest
Dogwood  (Corus florida)
Apple
Bradford Pear
 
and wood that I wish I could have found
Hawthorn of any variety
 
For what you want, you have the advantage of looking in supplies of wood sold for pen turning, general turning, and bowl blanks.  Almost all of it will be very high cost per volume, but your volume need is small. 

I checked my files of Blom and Emke - I partook of the same hallucinogen but recovered before I went out too far to make it back.😉  
 
At least there are not decades of port laurels.  For those, my first thought would be to carve a master.  Make a negative using clay.  Fill it with a wood flour-PVA mixure.  guild that.  I wonder if this would work for balustrades?
 
For the free standing and relief statues, what I would try for a carving substrate:
Boxwood - Buxus sempervirens - I bought a log long ago
Castelo
Hard Maple  just to see
AYC - Alaska Yellow Ceder - it is soft and buttery - probably wants short careful strokes with an exquisitely fine edge.
 
Then there is the wood I had to harvest
Dogwood  (Corus florida)
Apple
Bradford Pear
 
and wood that I wish I could have found
Hawthorn of any variety
 
For what you want, you have the advantage of looking in supplies of wood sold for pen turning, general turning, and bowl blanks.  Almost all of it will be very high cost per volume, but your volume need is small. 

I have worked a lot of Black Cherry (Prunus serotina) and it is OK for frame timbers, keel,  beams etc.  but I have not tried to scrape a mold pattern in it.
I seems a bit soft for micro detail, but that is just an impression.
I was a wood ghoul  and traded cleanup labor for the small trunk of a wind downed Sweet Cherry (Prunus avium).  I billotted and seasoned it and the grain is very similar, but the color is yellow green.
Not something that I would leave natural.  The Wood Database says that Sweet Cherry is harder.  It may carve better.
 
I think one of the many varieties of ornamental Pear (Pyrus calleryana) would work better.  Near ubiquitous street planting in some places.
 

I checked my files of Blom and Emke - I partook of the same hallucinogen but recovered before I went out too far to make it back.😉  
 
At least there are not decades of port laurels.  For those, my first thought would be to carve a master.  Make a negative using clay.  Fill it with a wood flour-PVA mixure.  guild that.  I wonder if this would work for balustrades?
 
For the free standing and relief statues, what I would try for a carving substrate:
Boxwood - Buxus sempervirens - I bought a log long ago
Castelo
Hard Maple  just to see
AYC - Alaska Yellow Ceder - it is soft and buttery - probably wants short careful strokes with an exquisitely fine edge.
 
Then there is the wood I had to harvest
Dogwood  (Corus florida)
Apple
Bradford Pear
 
and wood that I wish I could have found
Hawthorn of any variety
 
For what you want, you have the advantage of looking in supplies of wood sold for pen turning, general turning, and bowl blanks.  Almost all of it will be very high cost per volume, but your volume need is small. 

I have worked a lot of Black Cherry (Prunus serotina) and it is OK for frame timbers, keel,  beams etc.  but I have not tried to scrape a mold pattern in it.
I seems a bit soft for micro detail, but that is just an impression.
I was a wood ghoul  and traded cleanup labor for the small trunk of a wind downed Sweet Cherry (Prunus avium).  I billotted and seasoned it and the grain is very similar, but the color is yellow green.
Not something that I would leave natural.  The Wood Database says that Sweet Cherry is harder.  It may carve better.
 
I think one of the many varieties of ornamental Pear (Pyrus calleryana) would work better.  Near ubiquitous street planting in some places.
 

I came across one that is 1/16"  kerf and a 10: diameter,  but @~$200 I am not sure it qualifies as being something real.
 
https://www.infinitytools.com/10-laser-thin-kerf-saw-blade-1-16-kerf

I have worked a lot of Black Cherry (Prunus serotina) and it is OK for frame timbers, keel,  beams etc.  but I have not tried to scrape a mold pattern in it.
I seems a bit soft for micro detail, but that is just an impression.
I was a wood ghoul  and traded cleanup labor for the small trunk of a wind downed Sweet Cherry (Prunus avium).  I billotted and seasoned it and the grain is very similar, but the color is yellow green.
Not something that I would leave natural.  The Wood Database says that Sweet Cherry is harder.  It may carve better.
 
I think one of the many varieties of ornamental Pear (Pyrus calleryana) would work better.  Near ubiquitous street planting in some places.
 

As a theoretical solution:
Coat the "very fine" sanded varnish with shellac.  A worn out Tee works for application.  Then buy a small tube of white artist's oil paint. (Blick)  You can use a color wheel to determine which other colors to get to get a believable "white stuff" layer shade.  Dilute the pigment with mineral spirits and "boiled" Linseed oil down to as semi transparent as fits your goal.  You are in GA not CA, so the organic solvents and Linseed should be in your neighborhood hardware. 
 
Oil paint for a model size surface is not like using them to coat the walls and ceiling of a closed room.
 
I find the properties of Holly to be seductive.  However, the current price per board foot that I find on line is absurdly high.  To make matters worse, they are probably burning the off-white and yellow stock that we would really  want.

If you wish to do a serious recreation of a possible galleon then I think that you should use Kirsch  - especially the the reprint treatise  in the appendix - ( if there are gaps maybe some of the formula rules in Deane's Doctrine which is a hundred or more years later - but his rules came from somewhere ).  Design your own ship.  Do it on paper - I am not sure that any computer design program will allow you the tools to replicate the old line and compass method.
I suspect that some if not all of the available plans are of modern replica vessels.  Vessels designed for the tourist trade.  Vessels that include present day safety compromises.  Some of them look like cartoons of what the actual vessels probably looked like -  I am thinking Baker's Mayflower as an example.   All are just a modern author's guess - no more valid than something that you could generate from scratch .  And if some of your choices turn out to be wrong, only a bit of time is lost.  You can backup and redo.
 
Instead if thin plywood molds, if you do the design, your molds can be 1/2" (12.7mm) Pine and those be close together.  Then a single layer of planking would be well supported.

I think it would serve you to spend a lot of time with:
The Galleon  by Peter Kirsch  - the first edition is apparently written in German  - there is an English edition - I can find no information about a possible Russian edition.
Here is a post that describes the book:
https://modelshipworld.com/topic/20489-galleon-the-great-ships-of-the-armada-era-by-peter-kirsch/
 
I think that central spine  is more descriptive than false keel for what that part is,  but it lacks in pretense.
The same applies to mold (mould) instead of frame.  The cross section units in POB are definitely  not frames.
 
KHL looks too low to be  the LWL - floating waterline  and  #2 looks too high.  
With the float waterline  - there were rules about how high the gun deck sill should be above it.  There were rules about the distance of the deck to the sill.
It was all a complex chain of proportions and relationships starting with one or two or three beginning values  - such as the length of the keel (touch)  and the breadth. 

Jamestown 1844  corvette 
There is much detail for the class on the HIC plan for Germantown.

You do not provide your country  but a search jn the USA produced the following possibilities:  
 

https://sigmfg.com/products/sig-silkspan-tissue
 
https://brodak.com/silkspan-medium-white-only-2-sheets.html
 
https://brodak.com/silkspan-lite-white-only-2-sheets.html
 
https://shop.matuskataxidermy.com/products/silk-span?variant=39663254962222
 
and a possible substitute - low cost and a ton mole of it:
 
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256804663477441.html?spm=a2g0o.detail.pcDetailTopMoreOtherSeller.3.3509mRpbmRpbIS&gps-id=pcDetailTopMoreOtherSeller&scm=1007.40050.354490.0&scm_id=1007.40050.354490.0&scm-url=1007.40050.354490.0&pvid=edfe09b8-85c3-4f7a-bae5-4624bd4987ee&_t=gps-id:pcDetailTopMoreOtherSeller,scm-url:1007.40050.354490.0,pvid:edfe09b8-85c3-4f7a-bae5-4624bd4987ee,tpp_buckets:668%232846%238110%231995&isseo=y&pdp_npi=4%40dis!USD!6.23!3.22!!!44.55!23.03!%402101fb1917063199411381635e53ae!12000030735931987!rec!US!!AB&utparam-url=scene%3ApcDetailTopMoreOtherSeller|query_from%3A

 
 

The rigging tables in old books, contracts, ad plan margins are rope circumferences.  It was easier to measure than diameter.  Rope will crush, so even if they had developed a standard caliper, the diameter measurement would be ambiguous.
We live by diameter, so pi is our friend when converting to what is needed for a model.
 
Diameter is easy to determine at model scale.   A dowel is all that is needed.  A fat one works fairly easy.  Place two marks around the dowel that are 1 inch apart. A tight coil of the rope between the two marks.  Count the number of revolutions.   That is the diameter.  
Internally consistent in your shop is best, so measure everything yourself.  This is how you get the gauge for commercial thread.
 
For linen -  go to Etsy  - enter "linen yarn"  cones  and be prepared for frustration.  Not many want what we are after, so our stuff is at the bottom of a few thousand cycling offers.
Irish or Belgian would have better QA, but I suspect that neither have the slave labor needed for economical processing. 
The Asian producers who have the low cost labor, seem to want to sell in shipping container size lots - if the size of what they are selling can be deciphered.
Be aware that 16/2  is two 16 #   not  two smaller yarns that twist up to be 16.
The larger the number, the smaller the yarn.   When twisting up three yarns,  #40 by Lea is #24 by Nm  and these will make stay size rope  For running rigging - the larger number "unicorns" are the target.
Look up "rope walk" here.
 
If you had the acreage,  if you could find linen seed for varieties that have small diameter, long fibers in the stem,  if the weather does not bring rain when it will rot the cut and field fermenting plants,  getting the stems into the needed fibers and then yarn is a complex and finesse sort of operation that wants years of experience taught by older generations stretching back to infinity.
 
gauge -  old link  not looking  to see if it still is there:  info@baltic-flax.com
 
I suspect that hemp fibers are too thick.  I am not sure that I have seen much hemp cloth.  Investigate and experiment and report.
 
old links:
https://store.vavstuga.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=CTGY&Category_code=yarns-linen-lace
 
https://www.yarn.com/categories/linen-weaving-yarn
 
https://www.threadneedlestreet.com/       look for LONDONDERRY LINEN THREAD
 
 
 

You do not provide your country  but a search jn the USA produced the following possibilities:  
 

https://sigmfg.com/products/sig-silkspan-tissue
 
https://brodak.com/silkspan-medium-white-only-2-sheets.html
 
https://brodak.com/silkspan-lite-white-only-2-sheets.html
 
https://shop.matuskataxidermy.com/products/silk-span?variant=39663254962222
 
and a possible substitute - low cost and a ton mole of it:
 
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256804663477441.html?spm=a2g0o.detail.pcDetailTopMoreOtherSeller.3.3509mRpbmRpbIS&gps-id=pcDetailTopMoreOtherSeller&scm=1007.40050.354490.0&scm_id=1007.40050.354490.0&scm-url=1007.40050.354490.0&pvid=edfe09b8-85c3-4f7a-bae5-4624bd4987ee&_t=gps-id:pcDetailTopMoreOtherSeller,scm-url:1007.40050.354490.0,pvid:edfe09b8-85c3-4f7a-bae5-4624bd4987ee,tpp_buckets:668%232846%238110%231995&isseo=y&pdp_npi=4%40dis!USD!6.23!3.22!!!44.55!23.03!%402101fb1917063199411381635e53ae!12000030735931987!rec!US!!AB&utparam-url=scene%3ApcDetailTopMoreOtherSeller|query_from%3A