Time for a status update...
Barely one week into the project I can proudly state that I am able to provide the first expert advice:
Tutorials like the one from Ab Hoving I linked to in the first post of this thread are full of information and as a beginner, one should be humble enough to look at them
often.
I did not do that and ran into trouble pretty soon. I missed some important steps that Ab describes very well: I did not double the frames and I did not add the deck before starting to work on the hull. I also cut the frames on deck level instead of leaving some margin on the top.
As a result I ended up with a spine that was moving back and forth all the time and frames that would not stay in place while I was trying to glue hull strips to them. The fact that the frames were not doubled did not help at all under these conditions. In order to mitigate the problem I made a support structure which held the frames in place a bit better:
I was hoping that this would keep the frames in place and make it easier to glue the hull strips, but It turned out difficult to cut the slots at the exact locations needed and as a result the frames where still not positioned quite right.
So I ended up cutting the support structure into several pieces and only supporting the frames to which I was currently glueing a hull strip.
This worked out reasonably well and allowed me to get to the point where I had three hull sections in place on each side of the ship:
The spine was now a bit more stable. I then decided to add the deck to fix the spine's stabilty problem altogether. Again, I used the same drawing I already linked to above which provides a top view of the deck (or at least one half). So I cut two half decks, which worked out well while fine tuning the correct size. (Much easier to cut off a straight strip along the deck center line than it would have been to reduce the width of the full deck by cuts following the outer shape. Having two symmetric parts that could be harmonized by just laying them on top of each other also helped to actually make the deck symmetric.)
Here is a picture of the two deck parts glued on:
(Note that I did not even forget to follow Ab's advice to cut out holes for the masts... yey!)
The whole structure is a lot more stable now and the spine is reasonably straight:
So the good news is that while I was seriously considering to start over several times during today's session I now think I am back on track!
Looking forward to the next session, although I am afraid that the next two Thursdays I might be busy with other things. (Maybe I can squeeze in a session on another day of the week, we'll see).
