School for Shipmodel Building School for model ship building

[Dave Stevens (Lumberyard)]

There is a lot that goes into building a model ship. After looking at your new page, I quickly went and had a look at the Decking on the Bounty in John McKay's book, and he shows 4mm wide boards for 1:48 scale. I noticed you have silver maple 1/8 x .080, and are those for the deck?

yes that is the decking

i took a look at John McKay's book and counted 37 deck planks and the Bounty is overall 24 feet 4 inches breadth deck is around 20ish feet wide so each plank is about 6 1/2 to 7 inches wide on the drawing. The 1/8 wide planking is a bit wider making the deck planks 6 1/2 wide well within acceptable scale.

 

[JacquesCousteau]

Very interesting discussion. This entire series is quite informative and useful on scratch-building.

On this model the width of the deck planking is about 18 inches wide

I'm curious where you get that the deck planking on that model (which I think is of the cutter HMS Sherbourne) is 18 inches wide. I count 22 planks across the deck. The real Sherbourne had a beam of 19 feet, per wikipedia. Subtracting a foot to roughly take into account the thickness of the gunwales etc, and dividing by 22 planks, that corresponds to planks scaling to roughly 9.8 inches wide on the model.

It's interesting that the contract you show states that the deck planks were to be 5 inches wide. How typical was this? I was under the impression that deck planking was usually wider on earlier vessels, and narrower later. Chapelle says that fishing schooners usually had 5-7 inch wide decking pre-1845, and narrower in later years. For warships, my impression is that they were generally wider, although also became relatively narrower with time.