Dood! I wanna piece of THAT!!!!Happy birthday Kurt! I hope you have a great day celebrating with family and friends!
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RE: your build. At least you'll have mastered a technique for drop planks when this is all done...
Good morning Kurt. I have been super impressed with your work from the start. How you get such beautiful planking with such symmetry without a predetermined planking chart is beyond me. This is great work. Cheers GrantSince we got 3" of snow today, aside from running the store for some groceries for the family, more work was done on the Sovereign. The gap on the hull planking is slowly narrowing and the end is in sight. After gluing on every couple of planks, the planks are lightly sanded to remove glue and smooth rough edges. I can't wait to see how smooth the final sanding will turn out.
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The gap at the stern has parallel sides, ensuring and easy finish for covering the buttocks with planks that require little shaping. I finally got smart enough to cover the stern chase gun ports with tape to prevent sawdust from entering.
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Thanks for the compliment! As the builder, I can tell you where all the flaws are. This is true for all builders. Two of the planks today are not symmetrical because of mistakes. Not a big deal though. It's like trying to pick out one tree in a forest.Good morning Kurt. I have been super impressed with your work from the start. How you get such beautiful planking with such symmetry without a predetermined planking chart is beyond me. This is great work. Cheers Grant
Kurt, did you concern yourself with where bulkheads were? I tried to get my drop planks and butt planks to end where the treenails would go. I’m not sure that’s where they were supposed to end, but I’ve seen it that way on other models.Thanks for the compliment! As the builder, I can tell you where all the flaws are. This is true for all builders. Two of the planks today are not symmetrical because of mistakes. Not a big deal though. It's like trying to pick out one tree in a forest.
As you can see, I add planks starting at both the keel and at the bottom wale, and the process is such that the gap between the planked area shrinks, until the planks meet somewhere near the turn of the bilge, where the curvature of the hull in cross section is sharpest. I use a small set of Fiskars scissors to cut and shape the planks along with a small hand sanding block to straighten the cut edges and do subtle trimming
How to get them both symmetrical? Do one or two planks on one side, the do the other side with mirror copies. Don't do one whole side of the ship, then try to duplicate the pattern on the other. You pay attention to where the tip of the drop plank is, and try to make the tapers on each plank about the same. Where planks end at the stem or stern, step back every so often and use some dividers to see if one side's planks are resulting in faster growth and coverage measured from the edge of the planking to the keel, or from the edge of the planking to the bottom wale. After a long series of planks, one side may cover 1mm more that the other, so you make the next two planks on that side a hair less wide and rebalance the plank coverage.
Where to insert drop planks was a free-form decision process, where I can imagine the effect of a particular drop plan on the shape of the line of advancing planks as the gap closes. On this model, the area to be planked on one side formed a triangle near the bow, then straightened out as you moved aft, changing for a very subtle taper as you approach the stern, below the expanding are of the deadwood, as seen below. Filling the triangular area was the hardest, judging where to place drop planks and how to position their points to crate the right amount of planking expansion as you move aft.
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Yes. Assuming that a frame would be at the same of each bulkhead on the model, that's where the planks usually end. I penciled the bulkhead locations onto the first planking layer earlier in the build. Of course, the locations of the bulkheads may not line up with a frame on the real ship, but since there are so many frames, chances are that they do. The location of any plank end which does not terminate on a bulkhead is completely arbitrary, but if two plank ends terminate close to each other horizontally, I make sure they line up with each other vertically, so that they appear to be on the same frame. There are many frames located close to one another, so choosing a place to terminate a plank is not going to be way off the mark no matter what. If they do not land on a bulkhead, the ends at least are not totally random in location. If this were a POF model, you'd know where all the frames were, and thus where to terminate the planks.Kurt, did you concern yourself with where bulkheads were? I tried to get my drop planks and butt planks to end where the treenails would go. I’m not sure that’s where they were supposed to end, but I’ve seen it that way on other models.