Pilar by CPDDET - 1:18 scale - Hemingway's Fishing Yacht

[CPDDET]

I'm building this from 1:12 RC plans created by Pat Matthews. His design called for plank on frame as he needed below deck space for things like motors and batteries. I have decided to build it plank on bulkhead. His plan also called for 1/8 inch frames but I decided to go to 1/4 inch bulkheads to aid in butting hull planks.  Using Baltic plywood I have about 95% of the bulkheads completed (just 6 more to go). My aim is to build the model as close to the 1934 version as possible (even while on the hard in Cuba some changes were made during refurbishing).

 

 

 

Edited July 9 by CPDDET
Spelling error

[Nirvana]

Interesting build which I will follow.

[CPDDET]

7 hours ago, Nirvana said:

Interesting build which I will follow.

It's going to be a slow slog as I'm not sure exactly what I'm doing. 🤔

[CPDDET]

All 19 bulkheads are now complete, next will be making a build board.

 

The process used by Pat M is a bit different than my previous builds in that the bulkheads are attached to the keel with the ship upside down. I'm used to having the keel laid first and the bulkheads set onto it. Pat's method is the reverse of that.

 

As you can see from the picture I posted previously, the bulkheads have legs which they are set on. Pat used small pieces of wood, notched to hold into which the bulkhead legs would fit and hold them upright and then the keel was placed onto the notches on the bulkheads. The hull is then planked, the model turned upright and the bulkhead legs cut off. 

 

I suppose I could do this the more traditional way by cutting the bulkheads legs off, lay the keel, attach the bulkheads and plank the hull but I'm worried that if I don't follow Pat's build log I might run into problems later in the build. 

 

Right now I'm tryin to decide how the make the bulkhead supports that hold the bulkheads upright. They will be 1/4 inch thick for sure. The question is should a cut a bunch of 3/4 inch  by 1 inch pieces and use the mill to cut a 1/4 inch center slot for the legs of the bulkheads to fit into or cult a bunch of 1/4 inch by 1 inch pieces and place one on each side of the bulkhead, making sure its a tight fit. 

 

I think I will run a test on a scrap piece of wood and mill out a 1/4 inch slot just to see how tight of a fit I get with the bulkheads inserted into it. If that works, I could make a jig to hold the 3/4 by 1 inch piece and lock that into the mill vice. I could then mill the slot, pop out the piece, drop in another, mill the slot, pop it out, load another and so on. I need 38 of these pieces. 

 

Three choice here:

1. Cut and mill the pieces

2. cut thinner pieces and sandwich the bulkheads between them

3. Lay the keel and set the bulkhead onto it as normally done.

 

Decisions, decisions..........

[CPDDET]

So I decided to cut the pieces and mill the 1/4 inch groove into each piece. Please excuse the color cast in the photos, incandescent light source and I forgot to use my flash.

 

I first set up my saw, clamping a piece of wood to the fence and using the miter gauge to guide the piece through the blade. This way I could quickly cut one piece after another without any further measuring or adjusting.

 

 

Instead of making some kind of jig I just used the vice on the mill to hold the piece of wood I cut on the saw. Once the vice was aligned properly with the mill bit and I put a stop to keep the length of the cut the same for each piece, it went fairly quickly.

 

 

While I needed 38 pieces, I decide to make a few extras. So 42 in all.

 

 

Here is a pic showing how the pieces will be used to hold the bulkheads.

 

 

It will be a few days before I can get back to this. Next will be the build board.

 

Dave

[CPDDET]

Things are moving along. Picked up a melamine coated shelf (12"X36") and cut what I needed from the build plans. I used 4 rows of double stick tape to mount the build plan to the board. Not the best way to do this as the areas between the tape still lift a bit. It isn't much but spraying the board with an adhesive would have been better. But going forward with what I have.

 

I decided to glue a 1/8 strip of wood to the centerline to assist in getting the bulkhead supports square to the keel. All the bulkheads are cut and all the bulkhead supports have been made so I began gluing the supports to the plan board. This is a large model, about 30 inches long, and with my small work space I decided to dry fit and align the supports one bulkhead at a time. When all looks right I mark the location of both the port and starboard supports but only glue in the port side. Then I can turn the board around and glue in the starboard supports without trying to reach over and do the side furthest away from me. About halfway done with the port side.

 

The slotting in the supports allows me to "slide" the bulkhead back and forth across the beam and will allow me, in the next step, to properly align the bulkhead keel notch to the centerline on the plan.

 

 

[CPDDET]

All of the bulkhead supports are now in place.

 

Next up was prepping the bulkheads. I want to tack the bulkheads in place once they are correctly aligned. So I needed to remove some of the paper plans that I glued to them to get wood to wood contact. My thought is to place a small drop of CA to tack them in place and when the time comes I can use acetone to break down the glue or just cut them off, which will have to be done eventually anyway. I had used Elmer’s spray adhesive to stick the plans to the bulkheads and found acetone easily removed the paper and glue.

Then I locked a piece of the keel material in a vice and checked to make sure the notch in each bulkhead would accept it. They all needed a slight sanding to widen the slot.

 

After some thought I came up with an idea that would make it easy to properly align the bulkhead notch over the centerline as well to make sure the bulkheads were perfectly vertical fore to aft. I took a piece of scrap wood and cut a 1/8^th grove down the center. This will allow the piece of wood to ride on the 1/8^th strip of wood that I glued on the centerline to align the bulkhead supports. Kind of like a sled. On the top side I glued 2 pieces of wood to hold the square centered.

 

 

Lastly I took a small piece of the wood that I will be using for the keel and cut a grove that would ride on the upright portion of the square. The thickness of the upright was just under 1/16^th (the size of the groove I cut) so I wrapped one layer of painters tape around the upright to make the fit just snug enough. Now the wood piece can be slid down into the bulkhead notch. Now I can easily get the bulkheads aligned correctly.

 

 

 

I’m now contemplating if I should fair the bulkheads before mounting them on the build board.  Matthews, the creator of the plans, has dotted lines on the plans showing the amount of fairing needed. I'm not sure of the angle of the fairing so it might mean some trial and error. Of course I could mount the bulkheads first and then fair them as is usually done. Ill have to think about it.

Probably won’t get any more done till next weekend as the coming week is going to be busy for me.

[mandolinut]

Looking forward to following your build. Patrick Mathews did a fantastic job on his Pilar which inspired me to also build a scratch Pilar.  I was happy with the result but it was not at the level of Patrick's. 

[CPDDET]

18 minutes ago, mandolinut said:

Looking forward to following your build. Patrick Mathews did a fantastic job on his Pilar which inspired me to also build a scratch Pilar.  I was happy with the result but it was not at the level of Patrick's. 

Patrick did an expert job. I'm hoping to get close to his level of perfection. Going to be quite a ride!

[CPDDET]

It has taken me a bit to research the building of the transom but finally got it done.

Installed the upper, middle and lower transom support pieces. When Mathew built his RC model he double planked the hull and transom. So he first planked the transom vertical, which gave him plenty of surface area for the final horizontal planking. But I’m only using one layer of planking so I decided to add filler blocks to create more surface area.

 

I used balsa wood for the filler blocks which worked really well. Never used balsa in the shipyard before but I will know keep some on hand. Cuts very easily, sands down very quickly and easy to shape. Only drawback is its softness, so have to go easy on clamping as it dents quite easily. Lucky for me all of this will be covered with cherry planking. I will plank the transom prior to installing it on the build board as the hull planking will overlap the exposed edge of the transom planks. This is easily seen on photos of the original boat in Cuba.

 

The original boat was built with a forward cockpit as seen here in Mathew’s build.

 

Sometime in the past it was decked over, leaving just a deck hatch. I understand that Hemingway got tired of the forward cockpit taking on water. In any case the original boat has undergone numerous repairs and modifications over the years due to wood rot, water and hurricane damage. Mathew has done extensive research on the boat and included a lot of documentation in his build log.

 

When he was building his model he didn’t originally include the forward cockpit and decided to add it later, lucky I caught this while reading through his 32 page build log. It was a tricky thing to do but, as always, he did a beautiful job. I want to build it before planking the hull so I can get my hands in at it. I didn’t have the exact measurements but found them on the line drawing which I noticed while reading his log.

For some reason I didn’t rescale and have printed Mathew’s line drawing of Pilar. So it was back to the printer to have that done. This will be a big help.

 

Another issue caused by my decision to build this plank on bulkhead instead of plank on frame. Obviously the top of the bulkhead has to be lower in the area of the rear cockpit to accommodate the sole. I forgot to allow for this, but the line drawing will be a big help in making this adjustment on several bulkheads. I haven’t glued any bulkheads onto the build board yet, so that will make this adjustment much easier. As well as building the forward cockpit before hull and deck planking.

[CPDDET]

Started off by trimming bulkheads 24 through 36 to allow for the rear cockpit floor. Having the line drawing of the ship made this trimming quite easy, In order to get the undercut, I made several small cuts and then used a chisel to remove the excess material.

 

 

 

Then I cut bulkheads 4 and 6 to accommodate the sole in the forward cockpit. While these bulkheads are right next to each other, the drawing has them numbered this way. Again, the line drawing made this quite easy to do.

 

 

 

I decided to make a shallow cut in the bulkhead extensions where then will eventually be trimmed off. Two reasons for this. For one it will give me a slots for the saw when the time comes. Second, it will mark the trim line if the glued plan comes off or if I wish to take it off. I used a hold down board I made years ago to hold the bulkheads as I cut them with a small pull saw.

 

Last thing I got done today was to remove the glued plan sheet from each of the bulkhead extensions on all the bulkheads. A touch of acetone made this a breeze. 

 

Next will be cutting out the keel.

 

I have cherry wood ordered to plank the transom, something I want to do before getting it on the build board. Once I have the wood in hand I’ll do some test strips with a variety of stains and try to get it as close to mahogany as possible. Research show that the boat was built with mahogany from the deck up as well as the transom.