Well, time to get back to the monster, sorry, the Nuestra Señora. The spanish and the portuguese had this habit of naming the ships after Nuestra Señora (Our Lady, for those of you that don't understand castilian or spanish).
More the spanish than us they always were more catholic.
Putting together the two halves of the keel revealed how huge the model is, as I said it is 70cm of false keel. The wood is good, the laser cut is well done and the parts have a nice fit.
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At first I thought that there was some warp on the ply but it disappeared as the two halves were glued together.
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The halves were glued with the help of a steel ruler to make sure that the bottom of the keel was straight, no signs of the warp, so a very happy modeller.
I used nails while the glue was setting to avoid any deviation. It worked well and this step was completed.
Now for the first deck . (should be the last, if you are going down in the ship, but everybody refers to it as the first deck, so, follow the navy). Four parts, a very small gluing surface, I used PVA at first, it didn't support the weight, so I used CA and it kept untill the deck was planked. The planks, of course gave more strenght to the whole, but even so it broke again. Did not separate due to the planks, but the glue gave way. Some thick cyano solved the problem
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I must say that I didn't like the wood OcCre supplied for the deck planking. Too much grain and not good quality wood and also the strips were somewhat twisted. I had bought some wood from Hobbies Guinea, a nice dealer from Spain and I had some strips from mukali and manzonia (I don't know the english names, sorry). As the mukali strips were .6x4mm and the manzonia were .6x5mm, due to the large scale of the ship I decide to use using this one.
I used a metal ruler to make sure that the two halves were absolutely straight while gluing,
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You can see here the bulkheads and the false keel, ready to start doing something interesting like an hull
.
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The fit was excellent, just a touch of sanding paper on the grooves that were a little tight and the bulkeads were absolutely perpendicular to the keeel, no worries here
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Being so, I dry mounted all the bulkheads, make sure everything was square and straight and a bath of thin CA joined everything together.
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four lenghts of square section were supplied the idea is to help get the hull straight. They also give more strenght to the hull because it is heavy.
The fit was a very little loose, I used some spare square wood to glue those sections to some bulkheads (not all, it was not needed) and I ended up with an absolutely straight keel what I only managed to get in my prince with the help of some wood glued to the sides of the keel.
Even without the square lenghts glued to the bulkheads, the keel was almost straight, just a litthe warp
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After gluing the squares, the hull was absolutely straight.
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And it is all for now, time to plank the deck and glue it in place.
See you!
Regards
JL
