Wow, it's been a little while. Time to catch up!
So I was ultimately unsatisfied with the way the first exterior door looked. It was a little too plain in its appearance, so I brainstormed ways to spice it up a bit. I remember on my last visit to Korea some years ago the traditional exterior doors had fairly prominant nails/rivets in them.
Although this is for a building, I recall the doors on the turtle ship I visited looked relatively similar.
So I decided to revise my approach to make my doors stand out more and to give myself another reason to rip my hair out (because I'm 35, and it's about timee to start going bald anyway). I experiments with simply using a fine ball point pen and making impressions, but the ink overbled into the wood a bit and the the overall effect didn't look good from a distance. Then I tried using very finely cut brass wire to glue on, but by god that looked aweful. So this was the plan I eventually landed on.
I started with drawing two perpendicular guided lines in pencil across the doors. I then used a handdrill with a 0.6 mm bit to drill in holes (more or less) along those lines.
The effect of the holes alone was nearly convincing. But it was from this point my sanity slowly started to crumble. I took the 0.8 mm brass wire I had, but a lot of small strips and fitted them into the wholes. I would then trip down the length a bit and then grind the ends down with the diamond disk of my dremel. The heat of the friction actually helped peen the ends a bit, making them look more like nail heads. After this, I chemically blackened the ends and then CA glue on the backsides to make sure they stained in place. I then made more door rings, and got those into place as well.
Of course, this created some problems. Out of laziness, I never covered the doors in masking tape before grinding down the brass, causing a lot of the fine bits of metalic dusk to get lodged into the wood grains, darkening them. Second, while I couldn't blacken the brass until I had already ground things down, I had to be careful with applying the blacken solution to not touch the wood, but mistakes were made. This meant a lot of resanding and restaining the doors. But all this lead to a slight smudgelike appearance on the doors. Furthermore, with the "nails" all in place, it became very apparent how misaligned my drill holes were. Despite learning all these lessons, further attempts at the doors did not yield much better results.
So, I sunk into a mini depression, covered the ship with a blanket so I didn't have to think about it, avoided this website like the plague, and took a brake a bit to help reset my mental state. A buddy of mine, who does tailoring as a hobby shared with me a bit of wisdom a more seasoned hand had told him: Imperfections can make a product better is it reflects the human effort involved instead of making it look machine made. I repeated that to myself mentally for about another week before I decided to buy it and go ahead and get everyting fixed into place.
So here they are.
I decided to leave the bow and stern doors open to leave the interior construction partially visable and because the anchor should be hanged out the bow doors. For this reason, I added a fairlead right in front of the bow doors that I've seen pictured on some turtle ships.
