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1/24th scale POF 36' French Longboat, Cherry wood version from Unicorn

Joined
Jan 25, 2023
Messages
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I got this kit from Dry-Dock (thanks guys) for $170 with free shipping. I received the kit yesterday, Friday, August 15th, 2025 and did not pay any tariffs or import fees. Mostly these are just random shots of the progress, but I do have a couple of notes.

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These are H6, they are meant to be used in the slots of the keel for frames 1 and 2 to locate them, but it's kinda hard to figure out how they go in..
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They go in with the clean wood sitting sideways, centered on the keel. I checked them against the frames and this was the way they fit.
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There was a small gap of maybe .2-.3mm in the skarf of the stem, I used PVA and sanding dust to fill it.
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One thing I noticed in the keelson is that the laser cutting seems skewed off 90°. This is actually two pieces glued together, but the slots for the frame members are skewed off perpendicular to the keel. It took a bit of work to bring them square, and the frames are just a little loose now, but the slots are on the bottom of the keelson so it shouldn't be noticeable. I think the makers laserhead is slightly skewed in one direction (let's call it the X axis) because the other direction is square (let's call it Y axis).
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I've spent about 10 hours on the kit today, ADHD win. It's been really fun so far.

Tomorrow I need to break out the disc sander and my Foredom rotary tool. I need to taper the keelson at the front and back, and then contour the insides of the frames I have built.
 
I finished out the first sheet of frames, used the Foredom to sand the flat ones so I didn't need to sand the char off later once the ribs were installed. I still need to countour the insides of the first 6 frames or so. Decided I needed a nap so 'll post early.

The ribs were kinda tricky and I did break one in the process (because I wasn't paying attention and tried to put a number 11 side piece with the number 12 center piece). But I found a good flow.
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And now I seem to have lost my side nippers which I planned to use to clip the wires. Still need to taper the keelson.

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Only a small update today. I nipped the wires off on the frames. I'm glad I found those nippers and I ordered a couple more just in case. Trying to work with the brass wire any longer than this and it'd be a nightmare. I also tapered the keelson on the Proxxon disc sander. Here I really wish I had gotten the Byrnes as the Proxxon table site just a little too far away from the disc and keeping the keelson flat was a pain. I also fooled around with fairing the number 1 frame, but that was more just me experimenting with the Foredom than a dedicated attack on fairing.

Oh yeah, I also finally figured out the macro settings on my Pixel 8 Pro so I hope the picture quality has improved.
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So something I was just thinking about was the sizes of this boat versus it's scale. This is a 36 foot long longboat in 1/24th scale, and anyone can do the math to see that scales to 18.01 inches. And sure enough, the keel's overall length is 18 inches. The one problem with that is those are in English inches. The boat was constructed in french inches, or pouce. And a pouce is 1.066 English inches. That means a 36 foot French longboat was actually 38 feet 4 inches in English inches, which scales to 19-3/16". I am not that concerned about it, but it just means this model is 1/25.5 scale instead of 1/24th.
 
So something I was just thinking about was the sizes of this boat versus it's scale. This is a 36 foot long longboat in 1/24th scale, and anyone can do the math to see that scales to 18.01 inches. And sure enough, the keel's overall length is 18 inches. The one problem with that is those are in English inches. The boat was constructed in french inches, or pouce. And a pouce is 1.066 English inches. That means a 36 foot French longboat was actually 38 feet 4 inches in English inches, which scales to 19-3/16". I am not that concerned about it, but it just means this model is 1/25.5 scale instead of 1/24th.
I ran into this same sort of question on my current project. What I learned was that in the late 17th century the French were definitely using the French inch (on my build I am doing all conversions based on that and building accordingly). But there was apparently a time that the French inch was abandoned, and the English inch was adopted (officially in 1824 but practically speaking considerably earlier). Anyway, I don't know the 'year' of your longboat so English inches may have been the standard. Or maybe not.
 
This version of the longboat was most likely taken from the ANCRE monograph for the 1680-1780 chaloupe, so I think it should have been in French inches, I would have to buy the monograph to confirm, though.

I have the Bonhomme Richard monograph and it explicit states that on the first page that is in pouce and once I figured it out it resolved a ton of scaling issues I was having (I put it in CAD and was taking dimensions from there).
 
This version of the longboat was most likely taken from the ANCRE monograph for the 1680-1780 chaloupe, so I think it should have been in French inches, I would have to buy the monograph to confirm, though.

I have the Bonhomme Richard monograph and it explicit states that on the first page that is in pouce and once I figured it out it resolved a ton of scaling issues I was having (I put it in CAD and was taking dimensions from there).
I would have to agree. Given that (potential) date range French inches seems most likely, Frankly, I find the whole thing a bit of a pain ROTF.
 
Hey, Ram,
Oh yes, nice Boat.

This looks to be a very nice kit. I'll pull up a chair!

Cheers, Günther. Ship-1
 
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