What is the best wood for second planking a hull ?

[Mike Dowling]

It would be interesting to know what opinions members have as to the besy wood for the second layer of planking on a hull are.

[allanyed]

Any hard non porous wood with small to no grain should be OK.  I would avoid walnut as it is very porous and grainy.  I know the kits almost all use this wood but they have to be concerned with getting out a decent product at a reasonable price.  

 

I love castello but it's gotten very expensive and hard to find these days.  Cherry and Swiss pear are good choices if you don't mind a reddish hull.  Maple could be good depending on the type and the amount of grain in the pieces you would be getting to work with.    Lately there have been more folks using bass wood and some types of spruce with very good results.   

 

Depending on the year of the ship, if it is to have a white bottom you can use holly for the lower planking or just go with painting.    

 

I am sure you will be getting a lot of good information based on members own experiences.

 

Allan

 

 

 

 

[Gregory]

Don't forget Alaskan Yellow Cedar..

 

I was really impressed with how the grain showed up on Glenn Barlow's Cheerful.

 

 

It reminds me of curly maple.  Of course the effect would depend on the way the wood is sawn.

 

Then not everyone wants to see dramatic grain patterns because they feel it is out of scale.

[georgeband]

It all depends on what you mean by 'best'. Other similar discussions approach the subject from an aesthetic or artisan direction where the aim is to show your skills to advantage. There is nothing wrong with this and it can lead you to any number of hard woods that have a fine grain. It becomes a matter of personal preference as to how much grain you want to see; for me I like to see a boundary between parallel planks but not a huge difference. These woods also hold a corner so that when you want a sharp edge it can be achieved by cutting or sanding and you don't get rounded edges. The colour is also a matter of personal preference and there are some fine models with yellow or red or white tints to parts of the hull. 

 

An alternative aspect of 'best' is realistic. A model at a viewing distance of one foot is equivalent in some ways to a real vessel at 48 feet or 64 feet or more, depending on your scale. At this distance the grain becomes invisible and a painted finish could (whisper it) be just as 'good'. But the convention for ship modellers is to have a wood finish and we would only paint a surface to look like wood if the model was made of plastic. So what does a real, wood surface look like? 

 

I came to this issue and found this thread when considering the deck on a Bermuda built schooner from 1805. The deck would be holystoned every day so the surface would be fresh, sanded wood. On most Royal Navy ships the deck was, I think, fir or a similar softwood (help me here Allan or someone else). Even if it was oak the surface would be pale and a 'white' wood would be suitable on a model. Jotika in their kits supply Tankanyika for the deck or you could use obechi or lime/ bass or holly. The schooner I am making was built from the local wood in Bermuda which is variously called cedar or juniper. It is now rare from over exploitation but Eastern Red Cedar from the USA is meant to be very similar. Some might call me obsessive, but I have now bought some of this wood and the shipping and import costs equal the cost of the wood itself. (I will use the wood to make the base for a display cabinet.) It is pink. In the photo below it is resting on some white paper. It is most definitely pink with white sapwood. 

 

 

The deck on my model schooner will be pink. My plan is to use the Tanganyika planks from the kit and stain them with a pink dye. 

 

Leaving the deck we come to the rest of the hull which was not sanded every day and the wood would age with time and sun and salty water. Old wood in my garden or elsewhere tends to be grey unless it is varnished or treated. It does not seem to matter what variety of wood it is, it goes grey with age. The next photo shows four pieces of oak which have been in the open for three years. I would guess that a typical, oak built ship would be a similar colour unless you want to portray it as being wet in which case it would be much darker. I do not know how the Eastern Red Cedar will age but I have already built the hull in walnut which is a bit darker than this oak sample. 

 

 

A question for other modellers or sailors. Do you have photos of a real, untreated wooden hull that we can use as examples? 

 

George

[vaddoc]

Personally, I try to avoid fruit woods for planking. They are a bit too hard to work with and a bit reluctant to bend, especially along the axis of the plank. I find maple and beech much nicer. Beech is much harder than maple and has a huge distinctive grain, both hold an edge very well. Walnut is terrible.

 

Maple hull, later painted. The stains were caused by aliphatic glue that I did not bother cleaning...

Beech hull, fate yet unknown.

[Jaager]

Vaddoc,

 

There is Maple and then there is Maple.  I am guessing that you can source Sycamore Maple - which is J-1000 and Soft Maple (awful stuff) J-700.

Hard Maple is J-1450  but Beech is also J-1450  which makes it pointless for you to pay the extra for Hard Maple.  Over here, it is the opposite.  Hard Maple is reasonable in cost and available in quantity, but Beech is a premium cost and requires effort of find.  Hard Maple also has what may be a distinct characteristic:  a variety of grain presentation.  Fiddleback, flame, birdseye, fleck, clear - all can be had from the same log.  I depends on where along the log, and the orientation of the grain where the slice is taken.  For frame timbers,  getting pieces with compass grain is all but impossible, so a timber at the turn of the bilge gets into end grain and the color gets darker.

 

Mike,

A literal reply to your question would make this a sort of contest with one winner.  There is no "best" wood for exterior planking.  There are excellent species.  Many of them.  There are good enough species,  depending on how finished.  Paint - stain (bad) - dye - natural (paint with wood).   The species supplied with mass market kits all look to me as being not suitable, looked at objectively: inappropriate.  They are however low cost, have a reliable supplier and are available in quantity and are soft enough not to tax the edges of their cutting tools.  The colors are appealing to those whose prior exposure to wood is furniture.  You just have it ignore the course grain, open pores, rolling fibers. and brittle tendency.

( The boutique kit makers, most based here, tend to use excellent wood for their kits. ) 

[Beef Wellington]

The other consideration outside of the wood itself, is where the wood is sourced from, and in what form.  I don't have any tools to mill my own sheets and strips, and as a result I'm dependent on suppliers of strips.  My experience with finding consistent maple (for example) has not been a good one, and have found many cases where I've been supplied a wood clearly not what it should be.  I've also seen huge variation in Tanganika, some looks very similar to maple, some has very conspicuous orange-brown stripes in it which is far less satisfactory.  Walnut seems to be a similar challenge, it seems be of an acceptable quality in some kits, but in others it splinters and snaps just looking at it...

[allanyed]

George

 

I am glad this subject came back to life as I learned something new today, thus it is a good day.

 

In response to your question, as seems to be the case in so many instances, the type of wood for the decks depended on which era and which deck.  Some decks had two different types of wood and even two different shapes of planks.   The orlop and platforms were  generally made with Deal rather than oak and often made into pallets with battens on their underside as they were not secured permanently to the beams.  Rather, the pallets were held down with battens or rested in mortices that were as deep as the thickness of the planks,  sort of overlapping (overloop from the Dutch)  the beams, thus the name orlop, the slang abbreviation.  (I never knew the origin of the word orlop until today🤪)   In the late 18th century, gun decks sometimes were laid with top and butt or anchor stock planking for two or three outboard most strakes rather then parallel strakes.    As oak became harder to find, elm was used on some gundecks as well.  Elm was strong and  had a great advantage of not splintering when hit with cannon shot, but rather broke into chunks.

 

For the hull planks, whatever floats your boat as the saying goes.  Oak on a ship does not work on a model as it shows grain so much it looks as odd as the walnut found in some kits.   I prefer softer woods if it is going to be painted, otherwise hard woods are my personal favorites.  In my experience I have not found that fruit woods such as apple or pear are any more difficult to work than castello or padauk, all of them being between about 1660 lbft and 1810 lbft on the Janka scale.   Once the plank is cut to the proper shape I have been able to bend all of these with water and heat.    Poplar and basswood  are popular and much easier to work but the softness is troublesome for some people.   I have seen a lot of models planked with yellow cedar in the past couple years that are absolutely gorgeous even though it is soft by comparison (580 lb ft).  

 

Allan

[Gregory]

4 hours ago, allanyed said:

...absolutely gorgeous even though it is soft by comparison (580 lb ft).  

... which is really important to keep in mind. It has been mentioned before that it is easy to make visible dents with your fingernails.