Eddie

E J,
My first look at your SR. Yes is a huge ship. I have the Panart Victory 738. It too is a monster. The price of the case will exceed the cost of the kit. One thing I discovered in working on a kit this size is that the constant turning it around can become exhausting. A Lazy Susan or turntable is almost a must have for energy savings. They are easy to fabricate or cheap to buy.
 
Regards

Woot! I'm definitely pulling a chair to the front row here! SR has been in my wish list for oh so long time!!!
 
Thanks for sharing EJ

Happy New Year! Honestly, not much has happened on S.R. since the last update. I finished the layout and have her ready to go to start planking the lower hull. I am still planning on a two layer planking so this first layer will be out of lime wood. I intend to plank it properly but as everyone who has done plank on bulkhead builds, that can be tough as the frame spacing does not allow for the best curvature and supports. However, a nice planking can still be achieved and the practice is always good. 
 
So, to share with you all my plan so you are not kept waiting in the dark, I am building the mizzen mast on La Couronne and once it is stepped in place with stays shrouds and ratlines, I will be back to start planking. I'm hoping either this weekend or early next week depending upon how my free build time goes and how hard the crew is working after partying a little too much this past weekend. Once planking starts I plan on setting goals of every so many strakes I will stop and go work on a top mast on La Couronne. S.R.'s hull is rather big so this will still be a large number of strakes as I am thinking about 10 between breaks. I will try to photo document what I do well for everyone following along. 

Spent a little more time in the ship yard today and decided that it was time to start laying out the planking guidelines now that I know where my lower decks will be. As this is a double planked hull I know that I have room for errors in my planking but, I always try to do it right as this gets me extra practice. I will explain how I plank my hulls for anyone who is either still learning or looking for a new idea. As with most things, this isn't a right or wrong it is just my method to get the results I am looking for. This will allow you to have your planks laid down with uniform widths in a complete strake running the length of the hull with no drop planks or stealers.
 
So, to get started I established the lowest wale and marked it across all the bulkheads giving me a space to measure for planking between the keel and the wale. Next I measured the space along each bulkhead and wrote that dimension down on the wale at the intersection of the bulkhead. Repeat at each bulkhead. Next I measured the width of the planks that will be used. They are 6mm wide. I start with the widest dimension that I measured along the bulkheads. This was 155mm. I divided that number by 6mm and came up with 25.8 or 26 strakes. 155mm divided by the 26 strakes gives me a width of each plank at the widest point of 5.9mm or 6mm. Always round up as the sanding for tapers will eliminate that .1mm. Since this is my widest point, no plank will exceed that width. Once I know my plank widths I take a flexible tailor's tape measure and make tick marks down the length of the bulkhead from keel to wale line to establish guidelines for my planks. I am now in the process of repeating this step at every bulkhead on both sides of the ship. From here on out in both directions the planks will narrow. As you can see in the picture the spacing is shrinking, the number of planks stay the same and the plank widths decrease as the space shrinks. 
 
I will add more pictures as this continues. Let me know if there is something that should be shown as I can easily leave something out that I take for granted that someone may need.

This is looking really good so far EJ! I'm gonna pull up a chair.

Ooooooo, I got my front row seat and popcorn.
 
 
mike

Been busy working on the cabin layouts. The main problem that I have now is that to build the cabins the deck layouts do not align properly. So, now I get to redesign the decks to work the way they should. I guess when you are not planning on showing the inside, it doesn't matter if they physically line up. Maybe I am making this harder than it has to be but, I want it to make sense and look right.
 
So, here is a picture with the latest look. Basically the two horizontal strips that are clamped to the frames are where the decks should be. You can see where the false decks are designed. It really isn't bad until you get to the stern at which point nothing lines up right. I can adjust the gun ports on the false decks and shift the dummy blocks for the canon barrels for the new alignment easily enough. The upper decks and quarter decks will be a different challenge. I have a couple ideas on how to do it. More to come! 

Another advantage of working two builds at once is that I can more easily slow down and make sure I am doing things the way I want to. Just building the one ship, I kept wanting to keep on building and would settle or rush through something. Made a few mistakes that are still bugging me today on past builds doing that. Now, when I am at a slow spot do to research or waiting on supplies I still have another ship to work on that takes care of that itch to keep building. As crazy as it seems, I am more relaxed building these two huge ships than I was working on just one or even a small one.
 
Yes, there will probably end up being extensive bashing done on this build. I was already kind of thinking there would be but as I have already pulled apart work that I have done to completely redesign it and I am only on the framework, I think I will do this a lot. Truthfully, I am happy with doing it though. I would like to build a fully framed ship one day and so this allows me to start thinking of how to do that without having to do the entire ship. Scratch building something with no instructions can be frustrating but it also provides a great opportunity to learn a lot.
 
Thanks for all the support!

EJ,
 
Excellent forward thinking/planning! It will pay off for sure. Good start.
This kit - it looks as if you might "bash" it right from the start(:-)

Clean and impressive. Appears to be coming together well. Looking forward to next update.
 
Dupree

You have my curiosity going now, looking forward to more 

Well, I did it. I pulled the stern apart and cut away all the filler on the aft bulkhead so that it would more closely resemble actual framing. I realized to do the cabins the way I want to there was no way it could remain as designed. In fact, a lot of the aft portion of the ship may be getting redesigned as the decks and the cabin windows are not lining up properly. I am still trying to determine if the error is just in the supplied layout for the windows or if it is in the structure itself. I hope it turns out to be in the window layout as I am scrapping that one anyway to make my own. The reason for this is that the supplied layout is for a 5 window configuration and I am going to go with the 6 window configuration as seen in the below picture. While I do not know for certain which is correct, I like the look of the 6 window and the balcony layouts as well as the quarter galleys make the most sense to me this way. After viewing a lot of pictures of models built both ways as well as the various prints of her stern, I think I have settled on this.  
 
Ok, now to figure out how to build it.... Good thing there are a couple of holiday weekends ahead of me!

So I have found these pictures of the various cabin layouts on SR. I am hoping that someone may know where a clearer scan of these plans may be at as the writing is blurred to where I cannot read what it is saying. I am going to post this in a couple of places and hopefully someone will be able to help. This isn't something that is critical to construction but is more for knowledge. Thanks!

I'm sorry E.J that I'm late for this build.
The give me the wrong direction....
And the popcorn machine is heavy!
If you don't mind I wil put him down....
There is a nice seat in de back, I will sit there and watching....
 
You are on the right track, that's what I can see.
The only thing is that curve at the stern.
Looks like a swan ???
 
 
Sjors
 

I got a lot done tonight and the great cabin takes on more life! Exterior bulkheads are up, doorways to the quarter galleys cut in and built a couple of bench/storage lockers. Next up I am going to try to build a table and a couple of benches and then I will be ready to run the wires to the lights. I plan on trying to design a couple of small hanging lanterns for the lights to go in. I bought flickering LEDs in hope to simulate candle lighting. We shall see. 

Light bleed through is another reason why I am building the interior walls before planking the hull. Once the walls are in place, I plan on sealing off any and all cracks/gaps in the wood work and then I will paint the backside that will be in between the planking layers black. That is what I do on model buildings for my railroad that have lights and it seems to work great. Last thing I want is to turn on the lights and have a glowing ship!

EJ,
For some reason I had forgotten, or missed that you will add LED's. That is an area that certainly requires much forethought. Any "leaking" lights would be unfortunate indeed once you could not go backwards. Great idea. The other builders whom I have seen here adding lights seem to be very successful indeed. Adds a huge extra dimension to a ship. Good luck (:-)
 
PS: your SR is looking quite good so far....
 
Cheers,

I have not tried the meet in the middle approach but it might be something worth trying.
 
As for being able to see inside the cabins, S.R. has large rows of windows on her stern that will allow people to look inside. Combined with the LED lights that I will be placing inside you should be able to see most of the details fairly well. The real challenge to see inside will come when/if I decide to case her when she is done. Being able to get up close and look will make things easier but if you are several inches away due to the case, I do not yet know how well you will be able to see the interior. I will play around with this as the build progresses and for the next couple of years this will not really be an issue!

I've done that as well......and it works particularly well with the second planking.   it melds the plank well at the turn.
 
I hope you make provision in regards to visibility........you don't want to go all out,  only to close it up,  never to be seen  

A possible solution may be, plank some going down from deck line, and then some from keel up, and meet at the middle?
 

I have always planked from the keel up on the lower hull. The upper hull I usually do first from the lowest wale up. (See my La Couronne build log) On S.R. I had to do it a little different though due to the extensive modifications to the cabins. With needing access to the interior to run wiring and to install the bulkheads and furniture, I had to hold off on the planking. While I do see the advantage of starting from the top down in that you can hide screw ups on the bottom of the ship, if your layout is drawn in properly and you take your time, either way works fine. I do think that if I was trying to do the planking in a single layer I would go from the top down.
 
Thanks for the compliments Popeye! Hopefully they will only look better as they go! The best part of modeling the interior is no one really knows what it looked like. There are a few sketches of the interior dimensions and layout but as far as decorations and the actual furniture I have not yet found anything. So here I can definitely take creative liberties and design the spaces as I think they possibly could have looked.

Looking good E.J., she certainly is a big one

there are quite a few folks,  who will plank from the keel up.   I tried it and found it hard to hold the straight line.    deck and aft quarters is looking real nice E.J.

Hi EJ i like the idea of planking upwards and the finish line growing easier rather than harder I think I will adopt this on my next build 

The planking continues to go on and on and on but, it is growing as the port side has now reached the lower gun deck. This is a good place to be as at least on that side there are no longer any crazy curves to deal with.
 
The real story of this weekend though is that I have started to build the interior of the great cabin! In order to run the LEDs before the hull is closed up I had to know where they needed to be and in order to figure that out I had to have cabins to put them in. Also, it is far easier to build the cabins now while the hull is open and I actually have room to work. I had though about just leaving the stern off and working the inside from there and while some final details and touch ups may need to take that route, the floors, bulkheads, and many of the other details I want to add can go in now.
 
Thankfully S.R. has a lot of windows on her stern to allow people to see inside her and combined with the lights, I have hope that all this work will not be completely wasted. If I'm wrong then at least these pictures provide proof that I am in fact partially insane.