Thus Spake Russ

Posted By Russ Emerson on February 6, 2007 at 7:52 pm

I’ve been model-making rather than writing. I’m horrible. So anyway….
The hull planking having been completed, I next turned my attention to the deck planking.
The supplied material — .5mm x 4mm strips of something neither basswood nor walnut… maybe tanganyika wood — was a bit disappointing; the color tone was inconsistent, and the edges were somewhat rough due to the coarseness of the grain. I ganged the strips together and mass-sanded the edges, which got them close enough to what I wanted, but because (as usual) there was barely enough supplied to do the job, I had to be careful not to sand too much away.
I then cut all but one of the strips into 75mm segments (the length being decided upon arbitrarily) and, using a #2 pencil, blackened one edge of each strip to simulate the caulking that was historically hammered into the gaps between planks in order to waterproof the deck.
Using wood glue rather than cyanoacrylate, I ran the one uncut strip down the centerline of the deck to use as a starting point for the rest of the planking, and then filled in the rest of the deck, offsetting each row of planks by 25mm to create a “three-butt shift” — ensuring that no two adjacent planks ended at the same spot. I also made sure to trim out the holes for the masts before I completely covered them over.


I was correct about the amount of wood supplied for the deck planking; there wasn’t a single extra strip left over.
When the deck planking was complete, I sanded and scraped it smooth, and applied three coats of varnish, lightly sanding after the first and second coats.
I then rough-cut the gunports, bent and installed the waterways (sorry, too small to photograph) and then installed the inner bulwark planking and finish-cut the gunports.
Next: finishing the hull.

Categories: Black Prince
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