Desertanimal

OK got some more work done. Started shaping the oars. After sanding the first one to shape I decided we could speed things up with carving them first. Here are some pics of the process. The carving is not for the feint of heart. It's very easy to carve to far into the oar. ld I made up a cradle to hold it. Saw it on another build. Here one of them is shaped. Then I made a crude attempt at ageing/weathering. Have to admit I have no idea what I'm doing here. Hahaha. These aren't even the colors they stayed by the time I finished the base. I made a base and copied a deck planking pattern I found online. No idea if it's period correct etc. but figured it was good practice. I'll call it mostly done, but I have some smaller rope coming for the beckets and I am still going to try my hand at building a tub to hold trawl line. So a few questions for you that are following. I can't find a suitable color for the thwarts and oars. They are supposed to be ash. I've tried a natural danish oil, essentially no change. I tried a provincial maple stain, too red. I have renaissance wax but would like a color on them first. What method do you use to recreate the trunnels? I simply drilled a small shallow hole and put a dab of glue in it then sanded the area so the glue would grab the dust. After staining they took the color a little darker. You can see I still had some glue squeeze out that I didn't catch when sanding. I cut the deck planks by hand I made them 10 mm across. Also what's your preferred method of cutting planks to length? I used a straight edge and sharp blade. Still tough to get the cut square and vertical. I've seen the "chopper" style of cutter and I've also seen cheap Chinese electric chop saws. Any thoughts on either of those? I don't know if those questions will get lost in this build log. Where is a more appropriate forum for those questions? Thanks for all the comments, the Norwegiansailing pram arrives tomorrow!

So starting back at it we have the inside painted. After a few rounds of touch up back and forth it's painted. I decided to paint the bands green also. I like it. I'm happy with the detail on the bow and stern. I looked at a lot of pictures and they're all just a little bit different from each other. Haha. Just don't like the heavy looking paint job at this scale. When it came time to fit the thwarts I needed to deepen the slots for the frames. My #16 blade was really helpful here. I guess my dory was a little thinner than most? I had to trim down most of the thwarts but not the middle couple very much. This shows one slot trimmed but not the ends yet. Still need to shape the oars and the thole pins, I'm having a great time with it for sure. More to come... Chris

Rob, that sounded like excellent advice on the sanding sealer. I’m used to working with hardwood, so this soft stuff is foreign to me. Sure sands and carves easily though! Anyway I sprayed it with Deft sanding sealer then gave it a nice light sand. Seemed like a nice finish for paint. Another lesson learned; I need to pay more attention to glue cleanup during construction. I spent quite a bit of effort cleaning up dry glue on the inside of the hull. Used 91% IPA, worked pretty well. My point though is that you can still see plenty of it after the paint. I’ll be posting some pics here soon and I’d appreciate more opinions and guidance. Thanks! Chris

So this part isn't easy to document, a lot of sanding and shaping. Question- Did I lose the false stem? I never saw one so I used a piece of scrap and shaped it... Bands on. I notched the frames for the gunwales, but I guess I should have gone farther down. I only cut back 1/16" since that's the size of the wood. Well with the angle of the sides after I sanded them mostly level there isn't a lot of thickness left on the inboard edges of the gunwales. Did I do something wrong? I sanded the faces a little to give them the look of some thickness. Breast hook shaped and glued in. I think I'm going to call this pretty much ready to paint. I may do a little more shaping of the bow after I look at some photos this evening. Need to pick up some sort of primer in the morning so paint will have to wait anyway. Overall I think I'm happy with the planking/beveling and shaping of the bow. A couple of questions for those reading all this. If I make a rope bucket what size of rope do you think will look best? (I did shorten the handle on my water bailer substantially after finding JacquesCousteau's build log. Thanks for that!) Having a great time with this little kit. A few more and better pictures in the instructions would be helpful. Especially regarding the bands, gunwales and bow shape. If it wasn't for all of you that have posted your logs newbies like me would be lost. Thanks!! Chris

One thing that helped me keep the planks in order was to mark the bow end of the pieces before I remove them from the sheet. There is a hole on the bow end of the garboard plank, so I just made a pencil mark on the bow end of each plank. I'm pretty sure I saw this pointed out in the instructions, but I believe I read a post that this issue was a problem for someone. So I kept an eye out for it.

OK time to update the post. Starting off with gluing up the bottom onto the frames. Shaping the bow... Moving on to sanding the bevels. Wow, those are tiny pieces of wood! Patience is the key here that's for sure. I made up a tiny down draft table that I plugged into a shop vac to control the dust. Works great. Pop in the ear plugs, shut the door and off you go. The next step will be to move the shop vac into the garage and just have a hose coming into the craft room... Gluing the garboard plank onto the frames. Broad strake glue up, now the clamping was getting pretty fiddly. You need to be careful not to damage any wood that you have already sanded to shape. I made up these little clamping jigs out of scrap. They worked really well but were not very robust and barely survived all the way to the sheer strake. My big nut makes a great helping hand! It was a perfect angle to hold against the transom. One thing I've learned is you need to be flexible in your planning. First, have more than one plan. For example, gluing the planks onto the forms. One time I would use an awl to apply PVA glue where I needed it, clamp it and wait. Sometimes you're going to need to hold that joint with your fingers, so make sure the other parts are clamped so you can pinch that part again. On one side I had the broad strake soaked and clamped up for shape and it lined up so well that I didn't want to touch it. So after it dried I used watered down glue with a brush and painted the joints from the inside then let those dry. So once I removed the clamps it was right where I wanted it. I guess you just need to do whatever that situation requires. I see some people struggle because they have one method of glue up and it's giving them trouble and they get stuck because they can't clamp this one like they did the other one. While stuff was drying I made a little water scoop from scrap. No idea if the scale is correct I was just following some photos I've seen on the web. Based on my ruler I guess the real size would be about 18" long. Hahahaha Looking forward to hearing your comments! Chris

Frames glueing up. A little fiddly getting them all lined up. Did a little sanding on them to knock the hard corners off.

So I’ve compared the #3 frame and crosspiece with the plans in the book and the plans I printed. Well… the crosspiece is slightly larger than the image on the plans in the book and slightly smaller than the “full” size plans I printed. I’m going to proceed by splitting the difference.

First ship build. Not much to say so far, but here’s a picture. One question though I’ve seen discussion regarding the width of the frames on the plan not being correct. I printed the plans so that the OAL is exactly 10”. So now my frames should be the correct size, correct? 😉 I’ve yet to cut out the frames and compare to the plans. Thanks! Chris