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That's a good idea to keep subsequent strakes together and prevent some sagging, but not really an alternative to the fairing aid of fillers between bulkheads. If the bulkheads are not faired properly, you might still kink the planks.

Ordinary 'sewing-machine oil' will do (as per the recommendation by PROXXON at the beginning of the thread). You only want to have the outside of spindle lightly lubricated, but don't want to get it into the ball-bearings.

A good 40 years ago, when Dremel was not really available on the European market and PROXXON only just started to develop, I bought a cheap hand-held drill that basically consists of a 6V motor with ball-bearings to the axle of which a threaded brass sleeve is screwed. The brass sleeve serves as socket for spring collets. This simple tool has served me well through all those years. The key feature are the steel collets (similar to the one PROXXON offers), because they are much smaller than a drill-chuck, have less run-out and can bear side-pressure. The drill is run off a transformer with an electronic speed control. Now the Chinese are flooding the market with similar designs for hand-held mini-drills, but the quality seems to be inferior - basically they use brass collets of varying quality. Virtually all drill-presses for those hand-held drills I have seen are too flimsy to do real work. The most solid one is the one by PROXXON, but it takes up more space also. I don't have one, but would concour with Waldemar that the PROXXON hand-held drills have probably the best price/quality ratio , but may not be available in Mexico/USA.

I don't know this NRG-article, but the point about filling the spaces between the bulkheads is, that in general in POB construction, in particular in kits, is that the bulkheads are spaced too far apart. This makes fairing the edges of the bulkheads difficult and can also lead to sagging or kinks in the planks, if they are proportionally to thin for the distance. What you use as filling material is not really important, but it should not be harder than the material of the bulkhead to keep the effort of fairing at a reasonable level. Too soft is not good either, because than their is a risk of creating hollows, which defeats the object. Some kit manufacturers offer a sort of remedy for too far spaced bulkheads by providing for two layers of planking. However, you have to get the first layer right, otherwise it transmits all fairing issues to the second layer.

Are you sure that this is a steam-dome, that thing before the cab? To me it rather looks like the 'coffee-pot' housing for a double set of spring-loaded safety-valves that is seen on early locomotives (perhaps before the 1880s). this 'coffee-put' should be open on the top to let excess steam escape upwards. The thingy on its top looks very much like a steam-bell, rather than a whistle. Some early locomotives didn't actually have steam-domes, but the steam was taken from a high area of the boiler, which is why the boiler has a wider diameter near the cab - not a terribly good solution, as water might get into the steam-pipes on an incline. It is interesting to see that the sandbox sits, where on more modern locomotives the steam-dome would be located, i.e. in the middle of the boiler, where the water level would change very much, regardless whether you were going downhill or uphill. On the other hand, I have zero knowledge of US American steam locomotive practices ...

Up to you and what materisl you have to hand …

I suppose the configuration depends on what kind/size of projects you envisage to work. The island configuration may be useful for projects that are too big to shift easily around a work-desk or similar. Otherwise, like in a kitchen, it takes up a lot of floor-space. Check out the dimensional recommendation of the kitchen guys. You typically need 80 cm between working surfaces, so the size of island plus 80 cm around it on all sides. Normal work-benches/kitchen-tops are 60 cm deep, while shelves need 30 cm to 40 cm. My ideal solution would be to have 60 cm work-tops running all along the walls with 40 cm hanging cupboards to the ceiling above. The space in between would be used for hanging tools that have to handy. The space under the work-top I would subdivide into workstations, separated by chests with drawers. However, I am working seated on small projects and all my small machines. It's nice to sit in front of a window and ok for working on small parts, draughting etc., but it is not so good to have a large model between yourself and the window, as you would be working on the 'dark side' of the model. If you are mainly working with artificial light, this doesn't matter, of course.

One detail puzzles me a bit, that the timbers that carry the transom are sitting on the deck. That seems to be a somewhat unusual arrangement. Normally, deck planking goes around any structural parts.

Would be a pleasure, but have to see, whether I am around. Even during the summer I seem to have a lot of business travels this year. We should get in touch via PM a bit closer to the time. Sometimes I see the river cruises pass up or down the Seine from the kitchen window, but now the trees are gettting leaves again and begin to obscur the view ...

Just out of curiosity: are you talking about the Vallejo acrylic putty sold in bottles like their paint?

The purpose of 'joggling' of planks is to facilitate caulking: the point would be difficult to caulk, because it is likely to break off, when you drive in the cotton with the caulking iron. However, no 'real' caulking would be needed on wooden decks laid over steel-decks. I would be sufficient to fill the seams with pitch/marine-glue. The wooden decks are a sort of sacrificial protection of the steel-decks, make them less slippery, provide thermal and acoustic isolation for the spaces underneath.

I love making such mechanical things. Here my take in 1:60 scale, done some 30 years ago:

Looking down the steering mechanism, it looks more real than the real one 👍🏻

... you could use black decal strips, either home-made from decal sheet or commercial ones. I am also using increasingly soft artists' felt-tip pens with pigmented acrylic paint in them for such things.

So it kind of operates like the knee-levers on electrical sewing machines? Interesting mechanism. She now really looks like a hard-working vessel 👍🏻 I like these unsual workboats.

Thanks to all for your continued encouragement ! Slow progress due to business travel-related absence from the workshop ... ************* Planking the bulwarks The planking of the bulwarks follows the same procedure as that for the hull, but had to be handled much more careful, as the inside will be visible and there will by no adjustments possible by sanding or scraping. The main reason for the latter is, that the planks are of scale thickness (0.25 mm) and profiled. Section through a bulwark drawn by Friis-Pedersen (1980). As can be seen from the two images above and below, it was not uncommon to give the edges of the planks a decorative profile by using an appropriate profile plane. Bulwark of a Swedish jagt, photographed in November 2023 in Stockholm I had been exploring various ideas for creating these profiles on tiny 1 mm x 0.25 mm styrene ‘planks’ uniformly and consistently close to the edges. In the end I decided on a simple and rather makeshift solution: a steel ruler was taped to a small cutting-mat to serve as guide for the very flexible strips. The chosen tool is an old-style ruling pen, of which I have several knocking about in my drawer of draughting utensils. This was set so that it creates a groove close to the opposite edge, when run along the edge of the strip. This works only for strips of uniform width. It was important to prevent the styrene strips from softening too much during gluing, therefore only tiny drops of liquid styrene cement were applied to each stanchion. Somehow the alignment of the bulkheads was not as perfect as I was hoping for, resulting in some bulges. I hope I will be able to correct/hide this somehow. Another problem is that the styrene strips of scale thickness are rather floppy, so that edge-alignment is rather difficult. I hope that I can also sort this out. Once the planks were on, I installed the hawse-timbers between the stem and the cant-frames in the bow. Next on will be the rails. To be continued …

Yep, have all three, but not the 'Kleber'. The Museo Storico Navale in Venice has a rich collection of Boat models: https://www.maritima-et-mechanika.org/maritime/venezia/museonavalevenezia-2.html and real boats: https://www.maritima-et-mechanika.org/maritime/venezia/museonavalevenezia-3.html from the Venetian lagoon and surrounding waters.

Somewhere in the deep space of YouTube I saw a video on building one. I remember another video on restoring one, where one can see the construction. Sorry no links. In any case, it's a quite evolved piece of equipment. In case this is too expensive or a too daunting task, there are other solutions for holding irregular objects. In the old days the manufacturers of water- or steam-armatures used two-jaw chucks with removable top-jaws that could be milled/turned to fit the object. A low-cost option would be a pot-chuck filled with some heat-softening plastic (hot glue may do), but it only works with metal objects, not wood.

The second link points to the Web-site of Gilberto Penzo, perhaps the authority on Venetian boats (and a nice guy), where you can buy his drawings and books. A few years ago he published a comprehensive book on the trabaccolo: PENZO, G. (2020): Il Trabaccolo.- 230 p., Sottomarina (Ve) (Il Leggio Libreria Editrice).

I had discovered decades ago that making half-hitches eases the seizing of blocks etc. a lot and keeps the rounds in place. The only issue is that one can see this on one side, so strategic placing of the 'hitch' to become mostly not visible is a good idea. If you are averse to using an organic solvent-based varnish (e.g. diluted clear nail varnish) for securing rigging, you may want to try the cement they use in nail-studios to stick artificial nails to ladies' real nails. I recently discovered that this is a mixture of CA and metacrylic monomers: it sticks quite fast, but you have several minutes to adjust things before it fully cures. It is not as 'nasty' as pure CA and forms strong bonds. It should be readily available in your part of the world.

I thought that she already was part of the museum's collection and that's why you are restoring her in the museum ... Excellent work anyway 👍🏻

Indeed, nice attention to and rendering of details! If there was no voice-pipe or telegraph, how did the bridge communicate with the engine-room then?

When there are eye-bolts, blocks would be shackled or hooked to them. The blocks would be either internally stropped in metal, or there would be an external strop in rope with an eye for the shackle/hook. The splice or the whole strop could be served and there would be a seizing between the block and the eyelet. I suspect that on a boat like this there may be a few windings of wire replacing the shackle …

This is a problem sometimes encountered with plans for modellers of vessels with tumble-home. On ‚real‘ plans two lines would be drawn that may cross each other near the bow and near the stern: one for the outside of the top of the frames (or the rails) and one for the edge of the deck or covering board. They would be marked accordingly.

We had this discussion in another thread already. Don't mess around with other solvents. Alcohol is the normal solvent for shellac and the cheapest alcohol you can get is normally denatured alcohol. It's being sold under various denominations and depending on country in supermarkets or hardware stores. There should not be a problem in finding it even in alcohol restrictive areas of the world. Shellac solution is not the same as sanding sealer. The latter normaly contains 'fillers', typically either pumice or some sort of clay. The fillers serve to fill the pores of the wood. The 'binders' in sanding sealers can be shellac, some nitrocellulose solution, or more recently also metacrylic acid solutions. So, shellac on its own is a varnish, rather than a sanding sealer. However, on hard woods no filling may be required, so that pure shellac can form the basis for building up a varnished surface. However, you don't want 'varnished' decks normally. Therefore, it is a good idea to rub down the wood treated with sanding sealer or neat shellac using fine steel-wool. This results in a smooth surface with a satin finish, but without an obvious layer of varnish.