Norske Love by ZhangRenWing - Billing Boats - 1:75

[ZhangRenWing]

Having recently finished my second wooden ship kit, I have started the long journey to build this Norske Love kit from Billing Boats that I bought on Model Expo for around 260 USD. I noticed a lot of build logs of this ship have seemingly been abandoned and I aim to not be one of them. Updates might be infrequent but I will try to post weekly on the weekends. 

 

Before I did anything I firstly sanded away the laser scorch marks on the back sides of the wood sheets with 200-600 grit sandpaper, then I stained them with Minwax golden oak.

 

The keel lumber provided was oddly bumpy and required sanding.

 

Now for the problems I have with this kit: most importantly, the instructions are simply incomplete, and I am not talking about the sparse directions, but the fact that three entire laser cut sheets (1067L-A/B/C to be specific) were not labeled in the instructions at all, not even on the digital copies on Billing Boat's official website. I ended up finding a properly labeled copy of the instructions on Model Expo. Coming from a plastic modeler background where every single part was labeled on the sprue itself (meaning you did not have to flip between pages or write on the parts yourself) this was a huge disappointment right off the bat. Secondly, according to the instructions, the decks are to be made from 6 big laser cut parts, with pencil being used to mimic the deck's planking. I hope I am reading it wrong and the pencil was merely intended to be used as guide and that there will be enough wood for me to finish the planking. Lastly, the included blocks are all made from plastic, I read they have replaced these with wooden blocks in a different build log but evidently my kit was not new enough. 

 

As with the upsides, the kit does come with 4 sheets of A1 sized plans for the ship and sails which are also included.

 

Enough yapping and I will just end the first post with the current progress after a whole weekend's work. Progress is rather slow because sanding plywood seems to be a lot harder than I had anticipated. Next up is fairing the bulkheads and getting her prepared for planking.

[ccoyle]

8 hours ago, ZhangRenWing said:

I noticed a lot of build logs of this ship have seemingly been abandoned and I aim to not be one of them.

 

I hope you achieve this goal! But it looks like your 'helper' may be plotting an untimely demise, perhaps? 😉

[ZhangRenWing]

Week 2 update: I have finished fairing the bulkheads and attached the deck and first hull plank. I had to remove the two upper structural beams because I glued them before I had test fitted the deck, and they would not fit. I also took a bit of time to identify and label every type of strips included in the kit.

 

It was pretty much impossible to apply enough downward force to the beams as the glue dries while making sure the bulkheads are correctly spaced for the deck, so I ended up doing this using spring clamps.

 

After I made sure the beams are dried and the bulkheads are correctly spaced this time, I glued the deck in place and held them down using a bunch of pennies I had collected. 

 

Then after a bit more hair tearing with bending the planking strips, I have finally attached the first plank on the ship. My speed is much slower than I was expecting, the combination of thicker planks and obeche being harder than basswood that I have experienced with in my two previous builds meant it was very difficult to bend them by soaking. I might have to buy an electric plank bender if I want to finish this build in any reasonable time as it took me nearly an hour to bend just two planks by soaking them over and over. I am also still not sure if I will have enough leftover planks to actually do the decking on the ship, might be forced to buy them as well.