What ho, shipmates!
First - thank you for looking in, contributing, educating and sending emojis of approbation!
So, having decided to go with natural wood for the bulwarks inboard, I needed to finish the front of the poop deck and plank the poop deck so that I can get to the waterways. Here are a few shots of recent work.
My slightly oversized office on deck at dawn. Before I finished the from of the poop deck I decided that I needed to sand the deck thoroughly so that the lowest facing planks sat flush (or as close as possible

). I wound up sanding the whole ship down to 400 grit.
View attachment 531841
Overview of the poop deck planking - nice that you can see how bad several of the joints are. A confession - I have two major character flaws (yes only two major ones

) impatience and bad at math. Really just impatient so everything that takes too much effort is compromised further by my impatience. Since the forward end of the poop deck is 1 1/16" wider than the aft, I had a choice to make - either go with same width planks and have the sharp pointed ends aft, or taper them aft so that there was an even distribution and no sharp ends. I chose the latter. Reduce them by how much? My math told me that I needed 32 strakes at 1/8" forward. So, I reduced aft about, seriously, about 1mm or so, and began planking.
View attachment 531842
Here you can see that the aft ends aren't quite uniform, but then I got impatient. It looked like I could stop reducing the aft ends and use full width (red arrow second from left). WRONG



The remaining width aft is still much smaller than the remaining width forward. We'll see how I manage to "fix" this. Unlike some of you, I'm not going to tear out those full with planks!!! And as I wrote that, I thought: When I get home this afternoon, I'll tear out the full width planks!
View attachment 531843
The doors and windows came with the kit - "hundreds" of them for the hotel that the kit designer would have one build from forward aft. So, with "wood" as the primary color inboard, based on the models of other French ships from this era, the other color inboard is black. I plan to frame the windows and doors in black using thin strips of black artists paper that I find give me the right color with no risk to the wood and the right thickness to indicate depth. I used the line drawing function in the computer to outline. It will look much better when the wood is tung oiled and that lovely honey color replaces the reflective white of the untreated wood. I can hardly wait!!!! But I will - after fixing and finishing the poop deck planking, installing the waterways and scuppers, then the tung oil, then the window and door trim.
View attachment 531845
Finally, a shot of her money-maker sanded to 400 grit.
View attachment 531844
Blessings. Peace. Gratitude.
Chuck