So - a small update:
Sheathed the transom, experimenting with a convex surface and imitation of caulking with ink mixed with glue: I don't really like the caulking result yet - I'll look at the overall impression later.
And then suddenly the strongest sharaf happened - with a sharp drop in humidity: half an hour after I took the model out under the shed, something happened that scared me a lot - one of the glue seams between the sections burst and the gap grew to almost one and a half millimeters!
I was so shocked that I didn't even take a picture of this horror.
Fortunately, it was enough to bring the model into the house and wait a couple of hours for the wood to acquire volume and the seam to tighten. In the photo you can see the temporary longitudinal reinforcement of the gluing between the sections at that location.
It became clear to me that it was urgent to sheathe the sides of the ship, until the deformations of a thin layer of pine led to something even worse.
But I had to start with the drawings: when calculating the cladding, I discovered some of the features of St. Albans that I missed earlier, namely the 2 upper ports in the main mast channel board area (exactly those whose decorative wreaths are located above the line of the rest of the wreaths).
The one closer to the stern (2) did not raise any questions - it was just necessary to glue the lower part of the port flush with the channel board upper line. With the next port (1), everything turned out to be more interesting: its lower part is also beveled parallel to the channel board, but is slightly higher than it. Such a strange shape of the port is apparently explained by the desire not to hurt when opening yufers, installed opposite.
The situation was worse with the port next to them: on the main drawing and on both models, it looks displaced downward relative to the entire line of ports on the main deck (At the same time, in the interior layout drawing, all ports are drawn at an equal distance from the decks.).
No matter how much I looked for a rational explanation for such a strange solution in every sense, nothing came to my mind except for an unintentional mistake of the author of the original model.
I've decided to keep this port in line with the others for now, but I'll be glad if someone can shed some light on this oddity.
I also had to spend a lot of time adjusting the height of all ports: I initially wanted the doorposts of the ports to protrude half a millimeter (in real scale about an inch), but with a skin thickness of 1.5-2 millimeters, this size is difficult to maintain and does not look very good. I had to accumulate jambs on all ports.
A couple of templates for ports fitting.
At the same time, I picked up an ocher paint from my stocks. Although it is designed for plastic, to my surprise, it fits on the wood perfectly.