vossiewulf

Another thing I'm guessing on, the height of the bulkheads vary from bow to midships and to stern. Either I have to use three full width planks with stealers bow and stern or four reduced planks with the top one varying quite a bit in width. And should inner bulkhead planking follow deck sheer or rail sheer? And why in God's name would the height of a gunport change from bow to stern? They seem to follow the rail sheer and it's going to change the field of fire of the bow and stern guns.

Unfortunately I think the upgrade resulted in Chuck swearing off the web for a few days, I'd like to hear his take on the Cheerful plank lengths and pattern. And thanks Mark for the additional info.

Thanks Mark!

Thanks Mark, I guess that means there's no consistency between hull plank lengths across RN ships. Cheerful as mentioned shows a consistent plank length across the ship and if the RN made lengths consistent across each ship, I guess they decided the plank length on a ship by ship basis?

So this will cover the fix to the lack of symmetry in the lower counter that needed to be fixed prior to planking it and the planking. That started with resawing more holly off the 1" turning blank. Just enough extra to flatten with some plane passes before sanding to final thickness. I was about to start cutting planks when I saw how assymetric the two sides of the lower counter were, so I put down the holly and as mentioned above, the worst part was I would have to build one side up, not cut one down. So I made a pattern, first soaking the area of short grain with thin supper glue and covering with with some as well so it wouldn't snap off during shaping. Bad angle here not clearly showing how much shorter it was than the pattern, and also it would need to be filled in well onto the fuselage to replicate the other side. And this was also a fun part- it would have been easy of course to use filler and be done in 10 minutes, but this will be a high-tension glue spot for the final planking, and filler isn't a good substrate for that, so I had to make a wood piece, and that wasn't easy since the surface being glued to was curving in all directions and the wood piece had to cover a convex and a concave curve. I filled the remaining area with other wood pieces and also some poor-man's particle board that was wood chips mixed with CA. I then started working it down to the right size. OTOH, a little bit of filler between two solid glue points is fine. And eventually with lots of file and sandpaper work I brought it down to intended size and now these two sides are much closer. I stopped here as the final shaping should occur after the planking is in place. So, on to planking. Here I decided it was a good point to stsrt cleaning up the rudder post, so I did so with 120g, removing all dings and getting the sanding scratches at least going in the right direction. Once that was done I taped it over before proceeding, and here we are near the end of the planking. As you can see, I turned the last pieces 90 degrees, and scarphed them into the previous pieces as it seemed like something they would do in this case, and I'm test fitting the final piece. Once that was in place it was time to sand and shape the planks down to the lower counter, and then do some final shaping on the lower counter. After careful work, planking and hull are continuous and sufficiently symmetric to pass muster. And now need to level and sand that planking so we taped over the previous planking to protect it as well. Once again I used my little scraper to first level the planking. And then sanded down and the lower tape removed again. Finally, that joint between lower counter and fascia looked like something that would have been reinforced, so I added to pieces beveled in out of boxwood planking, and dyed it black for contrast. These needed to go on now, and I'll just have to do my best to tape them over and protect them as much as possible during final planking and sanding of the counter and fascia.

You mean you won't change your travel plans to support a guy you've never met build a model?? MONSTER! I very much appreciate the help Rick but no apologies are necessary, I will just move ahead and blame you for anything bad that happens

Thanks Mark! I am confused by the first paragraph- did you mean that only the 13" width wouldn't be closely adhered to in unrated ships, or that both the length and width would vary more? Unless I'm well off, 24' seems longer than Chuck is using and I trust he has extremely good reasons for using those lengths. I'd always wondered about those 30 ships as I'd read it being attributed to using green wood and that made little sense to me- I'd think that would result in all sorts of internal stresses and poor-fitting joints but not full-out rotting. Thanks for explaining.

Good suggestion, I replied to a topic that has the info I was looking for but for French ships. Cheerful seems to use 15'-20' planks.

A little late but thanks for that, Gerard! Another important data point for French ships to go along with your information on French deck planking practices (and plank length) in Mark's Licorne project thread. Chuck or someone else knowledgeable, what were the RN hull plank length constraints in the Napoleonic period? As below I am building the "Lady Nelson" cutter, so I was hoping to find information in Chuck's Cheerful instructions since he uses planks that look like maybe 15'-20', but there wasn't any discussion of the rules that I saw, just tells the modeler to cut the planks according to the plan. I'll assume Chuck's skip order is correct. But instead of just copying his lengths, I'd like to know what the constraints and considerations were and if there were practices like Gerard mentions with shorter planks at the bow and stern and long planks midships. Also it is interesting that besides having uniform plank lengths on Cheerful vs. French practice, they also all seem to be below the minimum length acceptable for French ships.

Ditto congrats on closing in the milestone, she looks great.

Question, how insanely more painful would it be if I did the final planking with proper-length planks? If I could do that then I could treenail and that's merited by the wood.

Had another mostly spinning wheels evening when I realized not only was my stern not particularly symmetric, but that it was there before I planked it. Still shrugging at how I seemingly am endlessly checking symmetry only to see things like this staring me in the face. The worst part is that is it was the low side that I felt was wrong, so I had the much more painful job of building one side up rather than cutting one down. I'll post pics tomorrow, but let's say we need to get moving on the final planking because the stern sure is ugly right now. It's the right shape, but it's so ugly that a little boy who saw it ran out the door screaming "BAD BOAT! BAD BOAT!!" and I haven't seen him since. Still wondering how that kid got in here in the first place.

Of course it's all extremely helpful Rick, already would have run face first into several other walls without you pointing them out. Yes, there will be considerable thinking before placing any furniture, as you point out if there's a pattern I ain't seeing it. And thanks I will check out the cleats as well

Good point, need to go address that, and thanks you are admirably fulfilling your role today It wasn't in just one, it was in both and that's what made me wonder whether it was intentional. You see one drunk guy staggering about that's one thing, you see two doing it in exact unison and you suspect something else is up.

Rick, I sincerely hope you didn't quote that part number off the top of your head, if so you need help even more than me And thanks, I will go look. Yes I'm going to remove those bulkhead tabs now and plank the inner bulkhead surface first to get used to the harder boxwood, as of now that will be painted red so I could make some mistakes. I haven't decided on continuous vs. leaving openings, probably the former as these are basically straight. If it were a trickier area with bending and twisting I'd be more inclined to use separate planks to separate those factors as much as possible into individual planks. Tony, I was going back over the photos of cutters you provided. The things I need to think about that I came away with were: Deck furniture issues with the boom pin rail and windlass and position of pretty much everything, the first model showing the companionway forward under the boom and facing aft with different grate/light positions. One question here is the second model showed 3 additional hand-cranked small windlasses, what are those and were they common? Topmast forward of the mainmast. Two sets of braces for main and top square sails. Only I don't understand why there are two sets, why not just run them forward to keep them clear of the spanker boom? Seems overly complicated to run them to two places. Am I missing anything else important?

Glad you guys liked the holly idea, as I went ahead with it Yes Pat, usually oils of some kind reacting with the alcohol carrier of the dye stain. And if alcohol reacts water probably will too, and that's the other option for aniline dyes, but I have never quite grasped the concept of a grain-raising stain so I have always stayed away. In the end natural is probably best, but if anyone following has any ideas boxwood stain options, please let me know, I still would like to see a light brown. Rick, being 137% responsible means also being responsible for ensuring I've read your advice It's a tough gig. I thought single piece didn't make much sense either, see below. I'm not quite sure what you mean about the cap rail but at least I'll remember I have something to figure out with planking thickness on the bulkheads and the cap rail. The planking stock says 4mm x 1mm, it looked thinner at first. I haven't checked it yet but width is 4.08 - 4.10mm so I assume it's very slightly oversize. Edges are also straight and clean enough to make planking joints as is. This was my first order from Crown Timber but it looks like Jason takes his business very seriously. So I took my holly piece above and machined in the tiller opening. My red paint has collected dings, will need to touch up. I frequently use my digital caliper as a marking gauge, it has sharp and fully hardened steel jaws after all. Instead of cutting planks and trying to cut in the tiller operning once installed, I cut the opening first and then cut them into planks as it seemed way easier. Or I will just walk it across the piece. Each time you move it you carefully and gently register the rear one in the mark you just made so you don't mar it, and immediately roll forward and put some pressure to make the next mark. If you practice you can get very accurate. I cut off the first two planks, but only scored this one. Because, you know, it's holding the rest together and I want those lines to be straight too. Once I had the cuts done I marked half of them to be flipped to the other side. Although holly has hardly any grain, it still will help to make it look like a series of individual planks rather than all cut in order from the same piece. As I cut them apart, I used the piece to mark the plank layout on the fascia. No pics here, but once I had everything laid out of course, random alignment check 12 zillion and eight found that the fascia was not as flat or as square as I remember it being. So there's about 40 minutes of knife and mini sanding block work in here first getting the fascia fully flat vertically and then relieving the port side so both sides had an equal slight curve. Once that was done, on with gluing. Basically cleaned up. I used my little baby scraper that I posted over in my tools thread to level out the planking, just like the big ones they can be highly precise tools if sharpened and burnished correctly. And completely done with inner tiller opening filled with CA and sanded down and painted. I'll do the lower tomorrow before moving on to the hull planking. Also I need to get the counter out and get that joint right too, as you see the top of the fascia has a slight cant. I made sure the fascia planking was square to the keel so it's right, the top curve is currently wrong. Rick is there anything else I should do before planking the hull? Not seeing anything.

I spent almost all last evening thrashing around trying to make final decisions on wood colors. I experimented with a whole series of browns and yellows on the boxwood final planking, and mostly found out that boxwood does NOT like dye stains, the results were consistently badly blotchy with no correspondence to surface quality - i.e. I'd sanded the whole plank carefully just to avoid rough spot blotchiness. So this is chemistry somehow. There are things you can try to do to make wood behave for staining, conditioners and the like, but not worth the risk to me as they don't always work. I don't really like pigment stains as no matter what they partially obscure the underlying grain and wood, but if someone has recommendations for boxwood, I'm listening. My original thought was a lighter than cocobolo milk chocalaty color for the lower planking. Crap now I want chocolate milk. So it wouldn't have to be a very dark stain. Assuming nothing works there, that leaves me two choices for the final planking, the natural yellow of the boxwood or black; the blotchiness goes away if you stain it very dark brown or black. And it's a nice look, black with none of the surface character of the wood hidden by a layer of paint. So plan B color scheme is black lower planking (it's a reddish black too, works with cocobolo) with or without painting the bottom white (haven't decided on that either), natural boxwood along the bulkhead gunports, then back to black for the top rail. There is boxwood stock for all the masts so I can blacken the yards the same way and have the mast natural. But as mentioned, if anyone has a good light brown pigment stain for boxwood, I'd still like to look at that option. Anyway here is the cocobolo with a mild red/brown stain to bring out its color and the boxwood planking in black and "white". I also have a small problem in that I thought the outside of the stern fascia piece was planked, and RICK WHO IS 137% RESPONSIBLE FOR PROTECTING ME FROM DOING SOMETHING STUPID LIKE THAT ( ) didn't say anything, so now I have a supposedly finished surface with paint and dings. So I need to cover that too. I could do it with the boxwood but I was considering using holly for the lower two stern surfaces while having the counter black. I'm pretty sure that will either look really good or really bad, but I'm not sure which. I'm soliciting opinions here too. Gave me an excuse to resaw one of my holly pieces, had them a while but never had a reason to use any. Holly looks all sweet and innocent sitting there, but take a saw blade to it and it instantly goes full-on nightmare beast. This is another advertisement for the Excalibur 16 scroll saw, with a new 12.5 TPI skip-tooth blade it was possible to resaw it accurately. And I thinned it down quite a bit with various small planes as the fascia piece at least just needs a veneer-thickness cover. And I need to try carving this, the detail possible would be really excellent.

No, I have reached the standoff phase where he's not shredding me to pieces while giggling, but I haven't even brought the saddle out of the house yet. Until then he's waiting for me to lose focus for one second

So here we were after adding a few more planks on both sides, making sure we were now fully with the program and the planks being added were fully aligned with the universe before moving to the next. I've now reversed order and have the garboards in on both side and am planking downward from there. Rick, had no issues with twist. What I adid was sweep upward those four final planks at the stern such that the garboard ones, if taken to the rudder post, would be two planking widths above the keel. That leaves stealers simple and at the bottom corner of the keel. I will do something similar with the final planking. I just bent the planks sideways for my sweep, twist over that length doesn't take much force. Finally had to move to concave tools to cleanup theses planking sections. I guess some people leave that entirely to the end, I cannot And here we are fitting, gluing, and cleaning up the final plank on this side. By the way I really like that flat and concave Veritas detail palm planes for this. Almost perfect combo of small footprint and precision and control with it in your palm. Clicky to go see how unhappy your wife is going to be. And here we are basic side view, which can best be called pedestrian. On the other hand, I'm very pleased with the what is the real purpose, which is establishing the final shape of the hull and after careful work here I'm very pleased with the shapes and the symmetry. Almost perfect fair curves. Fit into the rabbets all the way around also is good. As mentioned lines look good. Then last step for the evening was cleaning up the stern counter for the planking it needs prior to final hull planking. Since those ends were under considerable tension at gluing this was the one place I was using lots of glue and accelerator to set a good hold quickly. I shouldn't have, at least you should never do that however tempting on anything you'll have to fiddle with later. So endgrain reinforced with gobs of glue... where is my rotary tool? Then finalize with a good medium-sized file. All done ready for planking. That's going to help me get used to the boxwood, first place I plan to use it tomorrow is here on this nice simple straight planking area. Then since he'd been on his head for a while I decided to let him sit on his feet overnight. Starting to look like a cutter.

Thanks folks. This evening I put in those two planks, sanded down hull to final shape, and trimmed and flushed the planking ends and made the counter ready for its planking. Yes, I learned several lessons on what not to do and that there are not stages of planking anything that should not engender constant paranoia as to whether something - anything - is getting out of alignment. Also the last 8 planks use the technique I plan to use on the final planking, every single one of them has an invisible glue line. The way I had been doing the planks, which was beveling the plank I was about to glue on, just wasn't getting me the totally consistent results one needs here, there continued to be long stretches of good glue lines with a couple minor but noticeable wiggles. I finally decided that trying to do a fit that complex while working on a loose wiggly bendy plank was a bit trickier than I'd prefer, so I switched to beveling the edge of the plank that is already on the ship that I am about to glue to. With it being glued down, I had no issues using a sharp knife to bevel and true the edges such that they are always perpendicular to the bulkheads, followed up by some straightening with a straight flat rectangular #2 cut needle file. Goal was to make it just that a straight square edge on the plank you're about to glue down should fit perfectly. Also stopped using glue on the edges except where absolutely necessary, no matter how good your joint is it will be made slightly less good by glue that's thicker than water, I remembered this trick from something I did a long time ago. Also pretty sure I like having them able to move a bit independently in terms of long term stability, I think more problems will be incurred by locking them all together. Before I forget, a nice thing about my Mk.I Advanced Rope-Powered Keelalator it that is sounds like I'm working on a ship. Every time I put stress on it gluing or whatever, the lines creak against each other and the wood, unintentionally very nicely atmospheric. To go back all the way to fixing the problem I had.... First was an extensive and detailed post-mortem analysis, something I do at work every week on some issue or other. So I spent some time figuring out how that had happened while wondering why I didn't notice it. Once I understood that it was time to redraw the plank lines as necessary to be what I wanted them to be from here, and then that told me what I needed to do to fix the two sides. Those fixes involved cutting 4 or 5 inch curving pieces to change the current line into the line it should have been at that point. So I took some tracing paper, not to trace the curve but because it's thin and easily bendable, put it over the location where we needed the repair plank, and use a finger to bend the paper to give me a nice crisp line of the curve that I could see, then used that to draw the line, then glued the paper to a piece of planking stock. It looks considerably more messy than it is, I actually had a good line I could see. I also bent the plank to make sure the curve transposed correctly. Then trimmed it down to fit the curve with knife and sandpaper. Now that I had the curve I needed to mark the heights it needed to be at each station. Trimmed down, you can see it's now to shape. Even though it looked fine dry fitting it, I spazzed gluing it in and it ended up with a less-than-stellar glue line but it was a repair and I could deal with it. Note I'm just bringing myself back to the original plan, which itself was poorly conceived in that the bow planks should have more upward sweep for a graceful look, but considering the second planks have a different width and therefore a completely different scheme will need to be created, I didn't see any value in trying to fix this. It looks goof from all angles but beam on. Before I resumed planking though, as you saw from me reinforcing planks already installed, that I just wasn't happy trying to plank and then correctly fair planks that are floating over large amounts of empty space, so I decided I was going to fill all 6 remaining holes in some way, and while I was at it was going to try different methods for future reference. First for the biggest gaps was plan solid basswood. Here we fit, install, and clean up. For the back hole, I decided on a simple cross brace made from some basswood and a planking scrap. Here testing it for support with fair plank line, this one needs to come down still. The final hole got bridges of plank scrap covered by kit spare plywood, with them placed to go under the edges of two planks. Here they are all done. Will post this here before bringing us up to date.

Yes I did Mark, and if you go back you'll see I went to the lengths of marking it all out on the hull. I just didn't execute said plan correctly. After the first three planks the problem was not very noticeable, it would be more so to me now. I decided my plan was working and put on 3 more each side, focused entirely on the side to side joints and geometry, playing around with tools to determine how I was going to do that part, and it wasn't until I was done with that that I realized there was an increasing problem. I have a bit more control of the planking lines now. Obviously almost done with this planking, will post something "real" when I am. Finishing with those planks is intended, since I started at bulkhead as required by the kit, finishing in the middle was inevitable since I wasn't going to try to plank into the rabbet at the keel with the garboard being the last strake. So I got to four left and reversed direction, placing the garboard and working down.

Thanks Gerard! Crap! I'm threadjacking! AGAIN! AAAAUUGGGH (still screaming as disappears over horizon)

Gerard, thanks. Could you estimate the average length of deck planks?

This came from a discussion that turned into threadjacking on Mark's Licorne build log, as he was discussing his use of his laser to cut pre-fit deck planks for the Licorne. That made me think of something I've been wondering about, every single kit build you see 1) kit bulkheads fitted to keel, 2) blocks of some kind inserted at the bows and sterns at least because every single kit has way fewer bulkheads than it should, particularly around the bow and stern. What I've been wondering is why someone doesn't make quick 3d hull models of major kits (this really would be quick to anyone experienced) by using the kit bulkhead shapes placed at the correct locations on the 3d model. Once that model is skinned, you can slice it at any particular point and there's the bulkhead outline at that location. Add a little to allow for sanding to fully fair the hull with proper curves the whole way and there's the shape you'd need to cut with the laser. Only other factor is looking at the fit on the keel/keel plate to figure out what kind of fit you need for these extra parts. Doing versions with 2 or 3 or more bulkheads between each kit bulkhead would be trivial, with best results probably being variable, with many at the bow and stern, and a few less at midships, with the goal being that once sanded every plank should lay in a continuous curve as the real ones did and all are supported sufficiently so there are no problems with planks flexing under sanding. Anyway, since every kit build includes this step it seems to be a viable niche market for someone with a laser to sell into. I'd certainly pay a reasonable amount of money for pre-made parts that made this annoying step easier. And it's not like you'd have to maintain a big stock, you just make sure you have the files you need and when you make a sale, run what's needed through the laser and ship. Mark suggested we take the idea here to see if there are any takers.

About 6" across. I keep telling everyone these are too big and damned inconvenient to carry, but do they listen to me? Nooooo Real answer - .750"/19.05mm