Polaris by Giddy Gibberish - OcCre - 1/50 - First Build

[Giddy Gibberish]

Hi!  Thanks for stopping by.  This is my first build.  I had ordered this and the Shipways series.  This came in first by one day so I jumped into it.  I've been working on it for exactly one month as of today, but not every day.  This post basically covers unboxing through the deck assembly.

 

This log did not go as intended.  I had originally planned to have one post for each day of work but life happened.  I'm almost done with the hull (up to the accessories) so some of this will be very retrospective.

I've made several big mistakes.  Despite reading the instructions and watching numerous build videos I still did some boneheaded stuff.  I'll call them out in each post.

 

The unboxing was uneventful and unphotographed.  All parts were present and in good condition.  I tagged and labelled everything as shown in the videos.  

 

For assembling the bulkheads I was worried about them being square.  There was more play in my joints than I expected so the individual bulkheads wiggled quite a bit.  I came up with a clamping mechanism that kept them at 90 degrees.  I also build a mounting mechanism for the hull.

 

 

My first major mistakes started occurring with deck planking.  I wanted to follow the individual plank method I saw in a YouTube video (the pirate ship version of Polaris).  I had made myself a little table saw for this purpose.  It took about 10 minutes to make all of the deck planks.  I clamped them into bundles and then shaded all the edges before cutting.  Each cut I would shade the ends.

 

Blanks being prepped for cutting:

 

Ready to cut:

 

I then cut the planks for the pattern and dry fit them:

 

This is where I started making mistakes.  First, I tried to plank beam to beam and that turned out badly.  I ended up getting jammed up at the 3rd row and had to create some cut-to-fit planks to straighten it out.

 

Then I made the biggest, most boneheaded mistake of the entire build (so far).  I didn't even notice it was a mistake until last night.  I cut out the notches in the deck from the deck planks!

 

So last night, after crying in my whiskey for a bit, I started trying to cover up my mistake.

 

For some reason it wasn't until I was working on placing the deck fixtures that I notice those notches were never going to get covered up by anything.  Extremely disappointed in myself.  In any event, I attached and finished the deck without realizing what I had done.

 

That's all for this post.  The next post will cover planking the hull.  Thanks for checking it out!  I appreciate any feedback or advice.

 

 

 

Edited 5 hours ago by Giddy Gibberish

[Giddy Gibberish]

Sanding the bulkheads and hull was stressful.  I tried wood model building ages ago and failed when I had to sand a balsa block into a specific shape.  I figured a monkey with a rasp would do a better job, so this step was my "is this really going to be for me or not" step.  Turns out I'm not as bad as I remember.  I still suck, but at least I'm better than a monkey with a rasp!

 

This was another area where I made a mistake but didn't realize it until much later.  I didn't sand the nose blocks enough.  The top and bottom were ok, but the middle was too steeply curved.  I was able to bend the first layer but a few planks on the second layer snapped at the bend.

 

I didn't want to use any nails so I bent the gunwales and planks to fit pretty well before gluing. I used PVA and clamped.

NB: Like many other builders, I found that the tail piece of the gunwale kept breaking off.  I ended up leaving it off until it was needed.

 

Photos:

 

 

Gunwales bent and ready to attach.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shaping port keel plank.

 

Shaped plank held in place by toothpicks.

 

Planking complete.  You can see here I clearly have something going on in the keel.  Bulkheads were not sanded down enough.

 

Sanded and prepped for next layer which will be my next post.

Edited 4 hours ago by Giddy Gibberish