Mike Y

Just noticed how beefy the deck beams are! Also you make a really nice cutouts!

Lycka till!

Very nice build, somehow missed it before. The model looks great!

Interesting take, it would be great!

Oh, hope he would recover nicely. Best wishes!

Thanks a lot for your comments! It is becoming increasingly difficult to clamp. Soon it would be a time to try the CA+PVA trick (using CA spots to fix the plank, while the PVA wood glue is setting). And some magic tricks that a Hahn jig allows you to do I love it more and more, it is so easy to position the hull on an angle when planking, avoiding glue drips and just generally orienting things the way you need. The key is to have a vice that can hold an entire jig.

Thanks Carl, Mark, Pontus and Grant! Grant, Daria is stretching her time between school, friends and various hobbies - she got into dances, bead bracelet weaving (with really tiny beads that are too small for adult fingers), and now nursing her little sister Emelie. We are still working on her model few times per month, more like our own little thing. Soon she is planning to get a pet rabbit, so her time would be even more limited. It is a good problem to have I'll sort out my model on my own, somehow. Even a few sessions per month is better than nothing. Everybody should have a getaway!

Construction progress is not so fast, for a good reason - we got a second daughter a month ago (yay!). Everything goes well so far, we are a lucky parents and Daria (the youngest) helps us a lot. But, as expected, there is little time for anything... Though I still sneak a plank every now and then, so it is moving with a pace faster than zero, one streak per week on average! Each plank takes from 1hr (for a simple straight planks midship) to 2-3hrs (curved ones with difficult shapes). Sometimes a plank goes to waste, so overall it is not a fast process. It is a nice to get a bit of your own time and work on a model, even late at night. Makes for a good photos Back to the build progress. Got quite comfortable with heat bending, pretty low error rate. But I still feel that the plank made this way is more brittle than the one shaped with steam. Luckily it is not a big issue. Since I did a bad job in fairing, there are some low spots that are fixed by adding a filler underneath the plank: Or chiseling away the high spots: Slow but steady, I passed the equator - 7 streaks done (plus limber streak), 6 remaining! Nothing is sanded yet, and considering bad fairing I expect to spend a lot of time scraping and sanding to make the planks look smooth and fair. There are a lot of glue traces, they would be cleaned up after treenailing. I'm glad I started with internal planking - it is a good training exercise, that would be barely visible on a finished model, hidden under all decks and cabins. Hope to get enough skill to do a better job on external planking Consider this a practice piece.

Checked IDÅSEN in IKEA. It is actually very good from technical point of view - hard to shake it even when on maximum height, very stable. It is flipped upside down comparing to BEKANT - wide parts of the telescopic legs are in the bottom, narrow ones are on top: Nice design of the control buttons - instead of pressing a button you pull a small lever up or down, very intuitive. I like it! There are two problems though: 1) They do not sell frame only, you buy it with a table top which is too weak for our purposes, it is an office table. So you need to buy a solid table top, making it more expensive. With BEKANT you can buy a frame and put any top on it, a bit cheaper. 2) Leg design, the look a bit ugly for my taste, and I will hit them with my feet all the time... Comparing to a flat design of BEKANT:

... still hoping that Glenn is doing well and will have an opportunity to come back to MSW some day soon

Hi Lawrence, Thanks! I am happy to report that the build is progressing, few planks per week, but slowly getting there. The camera is just a phone, iphone SE to be specific. No extra lenses. It is not always focusing ideally on the right part of the model, but I just make a series of photos from different angles and then pick the ones that are focused on the right places. My wife's iphone 8 is making even better photos, but I am too lazy to borrow it when needed A "proper" camera requires much more fiddling with white balance and such, and can do wonders in hands of people who knows how to use it (see Gaetan), but for a simple build photos any decent phone should be good enough.

Fantastic project! And the garden

Neat! Very nice shape Please keep them coming!

Very interesting build, I am learning from your methods and jigs!

Stem assembly required a bit of fitting and fairing, laser kerf was not taken into account when pieces were laid out. But overall the glue-up was going easy. There are some small gaps, but I decided not to be a perfectionist here Now the stem needs to be rounded and sanded: End result:

Yes, just bending a cold plank around the former would not work (tried it a few times) - the contact area is very small, so the plank can't get hot enough. So first I heat up the future bending area by using this aluminium former like a clothing iron, sliding it back and forth. Probably a clothing iron is even better, but I did not want to fiddle around with two hot tools at the same time. Only once the plank is hot - it can be hooked to the former and bent. Jorge, very nice solution! It is interesting that there are so many contraptions for the same job, and everybody have different preferences

Oh, right, thanks for clarification! Very well thought through, as the rest of the project. Always reading it with interest, it is a very fine balance between an obsessive overthinking and a careful planning and precision Please keep it coming, we are in it for a long journey, as you said!

Interesting idea with these curved blocks! Need to invest some time into making those as well... I guess they should give a better result then just eyeballing it and using flexible sanding pads to achieve a smooth curve. Have you considered making them from something softer, like a cork block? I made a few shapes with cork when fairing the hull, it is just the right softness level for fairing and it would not scratch the rest of the model if you bump it accidentally.

Practiced more today, and so far for edge bending a small clothing iron works better, takes just 15-20sec to heat up that boxwood strip (5mm wide, 1.6mm thick) to give it a slight edge curve. It is not powerful enough to overheat the wood, while a soldering iron is too aggressive. For the other dimension I had a good result with this soldering iron attachment - press it into the wood for 15-30sec, then when the area is hot enough - hook it and bend it slowly. The iron that is shipped with it is probably not powerful enough to make this big chunk of aluminum too hot, so no problems with wood burning and overheating. I do not have enough experience with heat bending really, just a few evenings and a dozen of planks bent in various directions. Thanks Chuck for promoting this method! It works so far, adding one plank per evening, trying not to miss any days The second inner planking strake is done. But I would still use my old preferred method for thick planks (like deck clamps or wales) - dunking them into a boiling (!) kettle for 30-60sec, then carefully bending by hand and just clamping onto a model overnight, with a slight over-bend. Works like a charm, allows for complex shapes with multi-directional bends, the only problem is a long drying period, can't just glue it right away. No steam box needed, but need to be sneaky so nobody sees you bathing wood pieces in a kitchen kettle, otherwise one would have an awkward explanation to do. My daughter knows though, but she keeps that secret

Thanks for the advices! It is nice to be back, spending a bit of time per plank every evening. Easier than trying to dedicate a long modelling session. Mark, I was trying to avoid soaking, because a soaked plank need to dry for some time, otherwise it will shrink and there would be a gap. The whole point was to be able to bend and glue the plank right away. Maybe it would become dry enough in the area that is heated, maybe not, but it would still be wet in the non-heated area. So I'll just practice more to find that sweet spot where wood bends, but haven't dried enough to be brittle.

Really like the first photo, interesting angle and reflexes on the wood!

Thanks a lot for the comments! They are inspiring Had a bit of a block before continuing the inner planking. Started improving my build jig by adding some magnets to it. Very simple and very convenient, now I can attach tiny plane/chisel/scraper right to it, and nothing will fall off. Just stick magnets to your work surfaces, they are cool! Decided to try dry heat bending (thanks, Chuck!), ordered a tiny iron and a soldering iron with some special tips (really nice way to bend a circle!). It takes some practice... Who knew that you can overheat the wood by heating it for too long? Had a number of planks cracked because of that: A lot of mistakes were made:I need some margin, because it was not easy to control the location of a bend. Will practice more. Unfortunately you can't practice on scraps, results really vary depending on a wood type, width and thickness. I had two identical boxwood planks, one 5mm, another closer to 4.2mm width - the narrower one bends so much easier! But I like the method, no clamping and no need to wait for the next morning. Hopefully I will master that skill and will be able to prepare a bunch of planks during one modelling session. Finally I realised that I do not need an extreme side bend, just a little bit goes a long way. The first bent and shaped plank is in place, made out of a straight strip. So nice to find a method that works! Now I can continue with the rest of the planks. The glue-up was a bit awkward though, since there was no way to clamp the front tip. Luckily it mostly stayed in place because of the pre-bending, so keeping it with a finger worked just fine.

Fantastic initiative!

May I pull up a chair? This is going to be interesting!

No words... I hope your spark will come back to you soon enough, and something else (Belle Poule?) will bring a joy back! Too young and green to really feel your situation, but desperately trying to add a tiny bit to that massive community support. Hope to see you onboard again, soon!