Bob Cleek

Yes, pumps. It is common for a carvel or lapstrake planked hull to dry out when a boat is out of the water and dries out. Depending upon how much the planking is opened, the boat can be launched and pumped for a few days or weeks until it "takes up," or it can be left "in the slings" if launched with a crane or travel lift or "on the stocks" if dry docked to prevent if from sinking if there is concern that the amount of leaking is more than the pumps can handle. Another practice is to put soft soap into the seams with a putty knife to stop or at least slow the leaking. As the planks expand when the boat is launched, they "spit" the soft soap from the seams and is eventually dissolves. In the age of sail, it was a regular practice to tow a ship's boats astern every so often, or in anticipation of making port, so that they would swell up and not leak unduly when it was time to use them. It may surprise the uninitiated, but a dry bilge is something of a rarity in wooden hulls and even in metal and fiberglass hulls, as water always seems to find a way somehow. Generally, most prop shaft bearings will leak a little bit as the shaft turns, if nothing else.

Most of these conundrums go by the boards once one becomes familiar with how wooden ships really appear. If one can't spend a lifetime on the waterfront, spending as much time as possible studying really great models in the better maritime museums is highly advisable, as is collecting as many books on the subject as one might have room for. The object of modeling is to create a convincing impression of the subject in miniature. If it doesn't look right, it isn't right. The trick is developing a trained eye for what a subject should look like at scale. The concept of scale viewing distance is important and often is overlooked. Scale viewing distance is best determined by asking, "If I were standing as far away from the real ship as would be necessary to make the real ship appear as small as the model, what details on the real ship would be visible? The most frequent mistake made seems to be models which have out of scale details that would not be visible at scale viewing distance. The biggest offenders seem to be copper plating tacks, deck planking seams, planking trunnels, rigging diameters, and most anything having to do with details on sails. If the model's scale viewing distance is seventy-five or a hundred yards, you certainly aren't going to be seeing much more than the most subtle hints of seams and roping on sails and certainly not individual coppering tacks. Reproducing the mere suggestion of those subtle details, where they are barely visible at scale viewing distance, is really where the modeler's artistic skills come into play and, generally, "less is more." If visualization isn't one's strong suit, a good rule of thumb is that at 1:96 scale (1/8" = foot)  any detail larger than one foot in size on the real vessel should be reproduced on the model and any less than one foot in size on the real vessel should be seriously considered for omission entirely if they cannot be reproduced accurately to scale. Similarly, on a 1:48 (1/4"=foot) scale model, details less than six inches in size should be omitted if they can't be reproduced to exact scale.  

“ However, in this hobby of ship modeling I think that anyone who is able to make their own drawings whether CAD or manual, is certainly a few steps ahead of someone who lacks these abilities.”
 
Well said, Hank!  Without these abilities modelers are limited to modeling a variety of subjects where kits or prepackaged plan sets are not available.

Thanks Bob, we all get sucked into this kind of thing now and then.  Personally, I have probably been taken in more often than most.  Stuff happens to all of us.
 
Merry Christmas.

I did buy the wood box set a long time ago.  I'm thinking they changed suppliers to lowest bidder and quality went out the window.  Looking at the price today... $25.... really? I think I paid a lot more when I bought my set.

Wipe on polyurethane is simply thinned polyurethane varnish or "clear coating," if you will. It's marketed for folks who don't want to go to the trouble of mixing their own and for that convenience they pay the price of polyurethane varnish for a can half full of far less expensive thinner.   The same result can be achieved using a mixture of half boiled linseed oil and half turpentine. Either way, the "preferred technique" is getting it on the wood however works for you, and then wiping off the excess before it starts to dry. It's really no different than any other oiled wood finish, save for the chemical components of the coating itself. As the man says, "Follow the directions on the can."
 
How many coats to apply and whether you feel the need to sand or not are matters of personal taste. As with all finish and wood species combinations with which the user is not completely familiar,  one should always test the application on a piece of scrap wood of the same species (and preferably the same color, if colors vary in the species) to ensure the result desired. Nothing's worse than ruining a work piece with a botched finish!
 
 
 

Pear is indeed an attractive wood.  It usually is somewhat expensive.  Covering it up seems self defeating.  The conundrum of planking, frames, or copper is more intense with scratch POF. 
The model will involve a series of complex and complicated surfaces.  Not protecting it by mounting it in a case, invites a relatively short life for it.  A case will limit how it can be handled and viewed.  One solution to the hull finish question is to do one side finished and the other with all wood on display.  In any case, to my way of thinking, you really made the choice to go with an all wood display by going with Pear to begin with.
 
The representing a real ship:
First, by beginning with a kit,  with most mass market offerings, you are on broken and floating ice as far as any obsession with historical accuracy is concerned.  There have been compromises  made that would not be necessary with a scratch build.  So, the realistic option is to do the best with what you have and not obsess over a standard that was given up with the initial choice of subject.
Eugenio,  you are doing quite well working within the limits that the kit allows you.  You are pretty far beyond many of the barriers that defeat a beginner who is building a very complex vessel.  If the individual who suggests that you punt is a also a kit builder, consider his suggestion GIGO.   Your work has a strong flavor of Art to it, and that is not a bad thing.   An absolutely accurate representation of HMS Victory is not really all that beautiful.  While not as homely as mid 19th century warships that were purely functional, it was getting there.
 
Now as for coppering in general.  Pretty much any kit supplied method kicks you right out of any pretense to accuracy or historical integrity.  Getting a material that thin enough but works is difficult at best.
A coppering job that involves the new penny shine and or out of scale bumps that resemble nothing so much as an old photo of a case of severe Smallpox, is far into the realm of modeler's convention.  The overall look is mostly hideous to my eye.

I was always on the "academic track" and ended up in law enforcement and then a lawyer, but I had the benefit of a father whose motto was "If you can't fix it, you don't deserve to own it." Well, back then, that was possible! He was an accountant who'd been born on my grandfather's cattle ranch in Montana and there really wasn't much he couldn't do. I learned woodworking and painting and darkroom photography and general "Mr. Fixit" skills from him. That wasn't the end of it. We lived in the SF Bay Area where there was a lot of education going on, and still is. He put me in a "gifted kid" electrical engineering program on Saturdays between fifth and eighth grades. I got to play with the first transistors and lasers and learn about electronics. My mother stuck my sister and I as "guinea pigs" in a university program for the Defense Department designing what became "language labs" for an entire summer. I still remember enough of that to find a bathroom in Moscow! I took typing in summer school as a freshman in high school and also took commercial art and a couple of semesters of mechanical drawing. Like a lot of modelers, I loved those courses and remember always being disappointed when the bell rang when I was in the middle of a project.
 
I grew up appreciating tools and have amassed quite a collection over the years. I have to admit I've got more tools than time to use them. I never stopped using my manual drafting tools and, while I fiddled with CAD enough to appreciate it's advantages, I also came to quickly realize that I could do an awful lot with manual drafting tools faster and more efficiently than I could with CAD, in large measure because of the learning curve, but also because nobody's really been able to create a CAD program that will spring a fair curve as well as a wooden batten.
 
The more I started drawing boat parts and plans, the more I found I needed some mechanical drawing tools that were going the way of the dodo bird. The first tool I decided to treat myself to was a planimeter. (Planimeters measure the surface area of irregular planes.) Not something I'd need to use all that often, but it made calculating vessel displacement tremendously easier and more accurate than the old "rules of thumb" techniques. I couldn't justify the cost of such a specialized measuring instrument, which I knew to be really expensive, until I realized that eBay was chock full of what used to be drafting instruments I had spent a lifetime lusting after and could never have justified spending the money they cost and they were practically giving them away. CAD was king and I'd discovered that "brief fleeting moment" between "obsolete" and "collectable." I started monitoring eBay daily and buying "nothing but the best" I could afford. I started researching and decided to specialize in Keuffel and Esser's "Paragon" line, which was their top of the line. I ended up with everything I could ever possibly find a use for, and then some. Hitting the market at the bottom was also a good investment because the "good stuff" has appreciated significantly as it became more scarce over the past decade or so. 
 
There's still some bargains that come up regularly on eBay and "users" are priced fairly, if you take the time to google up the old catalogs and identify the models that are desirable. Then there's always the thrill of the "bargains" that you come upon. It does the soul good to buy a complete cased set of Copenhagen ships' curves for $100 when they often go for three times that. I bought my mint-condition "old school" Hamilton 4X6' oak professional drafting table from a lady on Craigslist for seventy-five bucks! I did luck out getting into collecting before it became a "thing," though. I haven't seen anything but the standard ISO LEROY lettering templates for years now. They used to make them in all sorts of fonts, but those have apparently all been snatched up now. (You really need those old fashioned fonts to make a drawing look like it came out of the turn of the last century!) The big 10" K&E "universal" decimal proportional dividers, which are so handy for modeling, do still come up from time to time, and once in a while one in a "beater" case will go for less than a hundred bucks. I find a German silver "Paragon" set of drafting instruments, with their matching serial numbers like a prize Luger, resting in their green silk velvet French-fitted case  is truly "jewelry" and I get a lot more use out of the drafting instruments than my buddy does out of his Luger collection!
 
So, now that I've got mine and aren't worried about the competition, I'd encourage any modeler to "go for it." You don't have to go back to school to learn to draw with instruments. Just find an old high school mechanical drawing text book and start reading it. It's not rocket science... but tee-squares and slide rules did put the first men on the moon!
 

 
 

  And it's not just drawing plans, either. Check out this thread discussing the use of draftsmen's ruling pens for striking lines on models themselves. 
 

Yes. I would not advise using CA adhesives at all, although there are a few applications for it when nothing else will do. One big advantage of PVA adhesives is that they can be softened and "unstuck" with isopropyl alcohol. 

Application of penetrating epoxy sealer will retard the speed at which moisture is absorbed and will repel water soaking, but epoxy coatings are all moisture-permeable, contrary to common belief. There are many reasons why one hull might crack and another not, so I'd hesitate to certainly ascribe the lack of cracking to the epoxy. I'm not a fan of edge-gluing planking in any way because if there is going to be significant movement, and if the adhesive is any good at all, the wood will break before the glue line does.
 
According to scientific testing, one of the best moisture barriers available for application to wood is thin shellac (one or two pound cut.) It is very nearly moisture impermeable. It also soaks into soft wood species, hardening their surfaces and makes it possible to sand them very smooth without any "fuzzing." I make it a practice to coat all bare wood with thin clear shellac. It makes an excellent base for paint and also makes an excellent sealer for wood which is not painted.
 
It should be added that glue alone should not be relied upon if one expects a model to last well. Every pieced joined to another should be mechanically fastened, If one is interested in ensuring an archival-quality result, planks should be mechanically fastened with glued-in scale trunnels or wire pins. 
 
See: https://thenrg.org/resource/articles/specifications-for-construction

Yes, pumps. It is common for a carvel or lapstrake planked hull to dry out when a boat is out of the water and dries out. Depending upon how much the planking is opened, the boat can be launched and pumped for a few days or weeks until it "takes up," or it can be left "in the slings" if launched with a crane or travel lift or "on the stocks" if dry docked to prevent if from sinking if there is concern that the amount of leaking is more than the pumps can handle. Another practice is to put soft soap into the seams with a putty knife to stop or at least slow the leaking. As the planks expand when the boat is launched, they "spit" the soft soap from the seams and is eventually dissolves. In the age of sail, it was a regular practice to tow a ship's boats astern every so often, or in anticipation of making port, so that they would swell up and not leak unduly when it was time to use them. It may surprise the uninitiated, but a dry bilge is something of a rarity in wooden hulls and even in metal and fiberglass hulls, as water always seems to find a way somehow. Generally, most prop shaft bearings will leak a little bit as the shaft turns, if nothing else.

So, to sum it up, any type of CA glue is best only used as an anchor point, but not for a complete application of, such as, planking a hull. This arose out of CA being sold as gap filling glue, which now understand is not a best use of the product. It’s PVA all the way. 

Try different methods with some scrap material and see what works best for you.  Perhaps this type of CA is a good way to go for you, but gap glue is just a thick slow cure CA.  As it is a slow cure, it is just as easy to go with PVA.    Gaps on a first layer of planking, if tiny are no issue.  If large, mix a little saw dust with the PVA, fill the gap, let cure for a few minutes and sand.   Easy, and none of the toxic fumes and stinging eyes.
Allan

I don't think it was "plain" water.  Most likely a mixture of glycol and fresh water.  The glycol displaces the water and helps to preserve the wood.  The same thing was done with the Vasa amongst others.

Wipe on polyurethane is simply thinned polyurethane varnish or "clear coating," if you will. It's marketed for folks who don't want to go to the trouble of mixing their own and for that convenience they pay the price of polyurethane varnish for a can half full of far less expensive thinner.   The same result can be achieved using a mixture of half boiled linseed oil and half turpentine. Either way, the "preferred technique" is getting it on the wood however works for you, and then wiping off the excess before it starts to dry. It's really no different than any other oiled wood finish, save for the chemical components of the coating itself. As the man says, "Follow the directions on the can."
 
How many coats to apply and whether you feel the need to sand or not are matters of personal taste. As with all finish and wood species combinations with which the user is not completely familiar,  one should always test the application on a piece of scrap wood of the same species (and preferably the same color, if colors vary in the species) to ensure the result desired. Nothing's worse than ruining a work piece with a botched finish!
 
 
 

Ooops! My bad! So sorry about that, Allan. I thought those Model Expo boxed bit sets were the same bits they sell in the tubes of five by size. There was some discussion later in the thread about problems we had getting the wrong bits in the tubes and how they promptly made good on that PIA. I'm a big proponent of buying the best tool once instead of the cheap tool you have to buy twice. I should have known better. I've found the bits I bought from Model Expo in the tubes of five by individual sizes adequate for wood and soft metals but I wasn't expecting them to be suitable for precision machining. It's no surprise the pin vise wasn't "Starrett quality," but it should have at least been suitable for all of the bits in the boxed series. Another example of the "China Syndrome," no doubt and another reason to steer clear of "hobby" tool catalogs. 

One should carefully consider the downside risks of gluing planking seams, whether by application of adhesive to the seams, or by coating the inside of a hull with epoxy resin adhesive which soaks into the seams from inside. As noted correctly, wood moves with changes in the ambient humidity levels of the environment it's in. This movement is primarily across the grain and its amount varies depending upon the wood species and, within the same species, even the location where the wood is grown. This is called tangential movement. Most woods will shrink tangentially six to ten percent when dried and will swell back depending upon the moisture content absorbed. The amount of movement is relatively small, assuming properly dried wood being used to begin with, but can still be considerable if the distance you are dealing with is relatively large. 
 
So, if you are building a model using vertical grain stock, as one should, the tangential (cross grain) side of its planked hull can easily total six inches. That's six inches of grain to shrink tangentially and even at a rate of movement of one percent, you are getting close to a sixteenth of an inch, which would be a quite noticeable crack in a model's topsides. If the planks are not fastened to each other, each will shrink individually and if you have maybe 24 1/4" planks, that shrinkage will only amount to 1/24th of a sixteenth of an inch. (You can do the math to get an exact fraction... a good example of the advantages of metric measurements!) That amount of movement isn't going to be noticeable at all and most coatings will allow for such movement without cracking at the seams. However, if the seams are all glued together, they all move as one, and the "weakest link law" takes over. In that case, a sixteenth of an inch crack along the weakest glued seam... or a crack in the wood itself... is going to occur at the weakest point. Conversely, swelling will push the glued sheet of planking for that sixteenth of an inch against everything it butts up against, again potentially causing a structural failure at the weakest point, or tend to buckle the "planking sheet" outward, breaking the glue bonds... or the wood... at the frames. 
 
Now, with prime wood species which have low movement factors and with relatively stable humidity, you may not run into any problems at all, but theoretically, the potential is there and I've seen its results in more than one model I've restored. More often than not, parts, cap rails, for example, start popping off and nobody knows why.
 
Monocoque wood hull construction is tricky. For my money, I prefer to give the wood as much opportunity to move on its own as possible without concentrating swelling and shrinking stresses within the structure.
 
Others' mileage may vary, of course.
 

Ooops! My bad! So sorry about that, Allan. I thought those Model Expo boxed bit sets were the same bits they sell in the tubes of five by size. There was some discussion later in the thread about problems we had getting the wrong bits in the tubes and how they promptly made good on that PIA. I'm a big proponent of buying the best tool once instead of the cheap tool you have to buy twice. I should have known better. I've found the bits I bought from Model Expo in the tubes of five by individual sizes adequate for wood and soft metals but I wasn't expecting them to be suitable for precision machining. It's no surprise the pin vise wasn't "Starrett quality," but it should have at least been suitable for all of the bits in the boxed series. Another example of the "China Syndrome," no doubt and another reason to steer clear of "hobby" tool catalogs. 

I have all my drafting equipment from the 70's and care for it like I would of anything of value. I find today's drawing equipment lacking in quality of construction compared to some of my German made equipment. I am also surprised as I said at how inexpensive some of the quality equipment from the past is being sold as used on eBay.  Its a dying field I suppose. 
I feel that drawings done on vellum/mylar in ink or pencil or blueprints from the same have more of an art quality vs. the sterile appearance of a CAD drawing. In school my main field of study was in the style of Queen Anne and Victorian architecture and those drawings can get quite busy. I too have collected blueprints of many different subjects over the years. I like the idea of knowing how much work it took to accomplish each drawing and as I have said I find them to be a form of art.

These are only my observations on CAD and CAD users: 
 
The economics of my time as a hobbyist is blissfully void of the "How long?" and "How much?" demands of commercial production.  I can comfortably answer these questions with: "As long as it takes." and "I'll do with or without."   On the other hand, commercial economics demands these questions be addressed and in business, CAD gets the nod.  CAD is faster than work made with pencil or pen and ink.  In my hobbies, plans are made with pencil on paper, on a drafting table with an arm.  I have no practical experience nor personal interest in CAD.
 
Following high-school drafting classes and a 12 month, trade-school, mechanical-drafting program, I worked for a while employed drawing maps with pen and ink on vellum or starched linen.  I had at my disposal an enviable set of jewel-tipped Rapid-O-Graph pens.  The job was a pleasure and my maps were beautiful.  I was there when talk of transition to a computerized system began but no one knew what form it would take.  I consider myself lucky I moved on before the transition took place.  It amounted to an upheaval, the increased productivity of CAD put people out of work and I may have been one of them.  A Luddite view?  There is some of that, but I never went as far as tossing a sabot in the works.  I had moved on.
 
My shop was designed with space for a 40 x 60 inch, tilt-top drafting table with a Mutoh Model 6, straight-arm drafting-machine mounted on it.  I had gotten them at an auction some time before for $110.00.  I had to bid against one other guy who wanted them too, otherwise I could have gotten them for the opening bid of $20.00!  In the shop, I also provided space for a 40 x 60 inch, six-drawer flat-file.  Some people admire them.  Devotees of CAD usually view them with distain, as a waste of floor space.  Conversation then usually segues into the merits of their CAD system.  CAD adherents seem to carry  a sort of militant allegiance to what ever system they are invested in.  I detect their divergence away from pencil and paper carries another defensive element.  I get the impression the most vocal CAD adherents would be hard-pressed to draw a three view plan or and isometric view.  But with CAD, they don't have to know how.  That's a shame.
 
Done free-hand or with a straight-edge, drawing is a tactile art-form.  Drawings are an artistic extension of the object being made.  Drawings carry the imprint of the maker as much as the object they represent.  Even when drawn with a straight-edge,  drawings of one object made by different people will show characteristics of their makers.
 
2H, 4H, 6H, HB, B.  Does anyone care?
 
 
For the Season:
 
Excerpts from Robert Service's "The Trappers' Christmas Eve".
 
It's mighty lonesome-like and drear.
Above the Wild the moon rides high,
And shows up sharp and needle-clear
The emptiness of earth and sky;
No happy homes with love a-glow;
No Santa Claus to make believe:
Just snow and snow, and then more snow;
It's Christmas Eve, it's Christmas Eve.
 
Stripped to the buff and gaunt and still
Lies all the land in grim distress.
Like lost soul wailing, long and shrill,
A wolf-howl cleaves the emptiness.
Then hushed as Death is everything.
The moon rides haggard and forlorn...
"O hark the herald angels sing!"
God bless all men - it's Christmas morn.
 
 
 
  
 
     
 
            

Your choice of books depends on what you want to do.  Are you satisfied with buying kits and assembling them using kit supplied parts?  Do you want to replace some parts with those that you make yourself?  Are you interested in “kit bashing” to produce a more historically accurate model?  Are you interested in scratch building?
 
Different approaches to modeling require different reference and research materials.
 
Roger

I agree with Wayne, but if you know what model you want to start with, be it scratch or kit, POB or POF, rigged or unrigged, and approximate year of the vessel, that would narrow down the list to something a lot more affordable.
Allan

Ooops! My bad! So sorry about that, Allan. I thought those Model Expo boxed bit sets were the same bits they sell in the tubes of five by size. There was some discussion later in the thread about problems we had getting the wrong bits in the tubes and how they promptly made good on that PIA. I'm a big proponent of buying the best tool once instead of the cheap tool you have to buy twice. I should have known better. I've found the bits I bought from Model Expo in the tubes of five by individual sizes adequate for wood and soft metals but I wasn't expecting them to be suitable for precision machining. It's no surprise the pin vise wasn't "Starrett quality," but it should have at least been suitable for all of the bits in the boxed series. Another example of the "China Syndrome," no doubt and another reason to steer clear of "hobby" tool catalogs. 

I bought the drill bit set with pin vice loss leader that Bob Cleek recommended. DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY!!!!  The only good thing about the set is the box and even that has issues as the tubes have covers on each end and several of the ends that are in holes in the bottom of the box stick so when you pull the tube out, the bits fall out, thankfully into the box.    These bitts are so bad I have had trouble drilling through hard wood with the ones I have tried, forget about copper or brass.    Maybe I got a bad set, but these are the worst I have ever tried to use.   The pin vice is terrible as it will not hold the smallest bits tightly.   You get what you pay for most of the time, but this time I did not even get that much.   Back to HSS jobber bits.
 
Allan
 

As far as pin vises go.....Starrett.  Not cheap but they'll last a lifetime and the drills won't fall out.  Moody also used to make a good set if they're still around.  
 
Jim