The Mighty Panokseon (Plank Board Ship)

[Na Daeyong's Apprentice]

The flipside of your conundrum regarding the lack of documentation on those oars is that it's extremely unlikely that someone will come along and be able to prove that you did it wrong. Take your most educated guess, dive in, and have fun with it. Good chance you are SoS' foremost authority on Korean warships.

From what I can tell, I might just be! (Cue “One” by Three Dog Night).

I realize that your interest is Korea not Japan and that they have totally different cultures and a sad history with each other, but maybe Douglas knows something useful. Look him up on the web.

Not necessarily! While certainly I am primarily interested in Korea from a historical perspective, Japan interests me as well, both in its interactions and connections to Korea and in itself. If this build goes well, I'm considering of having future projects revolve around the ships that fought in the Imjin War (1592-1598), which would include the Japanese ships of the era. But that's getting way ahead of myself.

But thank you for the recommendation. I found his website and have bookmarked it for further investation in the future.

 

[Na Daeyong's Apprentice]

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.

 

[Namabiiru]

Looks like, having installed the fairlead, you’ll need an anchor and gear to weigh it.

 

[Na Daeyong's Apprentice]

Looks like, having installed the fairlead, you’ll need an anchor and gear to weigh it.

Ah, you got me! Guess I shouldn’t have brought up the fairlead if I wanted the rest to be a surprise. But it’s not quite next on my list.

 

[Na Daeyong's Apprentice]

So it's time to get to work on the oars. My plan was to use the popcicle sticks I still had left over from the original plan of the build, but then I found something else.

I bought the dowels months ago for just a few dollars but tucked them away in a drawer as I realized I didn't have much need for them. Now their time has come! This means the oars will be slightly more labor intensive (reduce the radius of the ends by woodturning, splitting the dowels evenly, etc.), but I think it will come out better than with popcicle sticks.

Already got the easy part out of the way, reducing down their size to about 10 cm (the oars had an estimated length of 10 meters) and did a quick rough test of the shape.


The hard part is to not let my mind get distracted to the next big step: the ship stand. As the oars and rudder will require me to keep the ship elevated from now on (as they both drop below the hull), I've started thinking about what the ship will need to rest on. I already picked up some decent materials (a nice birch plank and dowel). I got some some good (but needlessly complicated) plans for the stand, but let me know: should I include the ship stand in this build log?

 

[Namabiiru]

Yes! It’s part of the build.

 

[Na Daeyong's Apprentice]

I LIVE! Alright, I've definately been gone for a bit, to the point where coming back here feels like coming back to a cold, apartments after not being used for a few months. But time to dust the place off and settle back in.

While I have certainly been sidetracked by a combination of work and unfortunate family circumstances, I've been working on the oars at a snails pace and they are finally done! I actuallly had to start over as I found my original process wasn't working so well. As I had to reduce the thickness of the handle ends to fit through the opens into the ship structure. To do so in a uniform way, I decided to try my hand at turning. Also, figuring out how to split these dowels clearning without shearing my finger off was another thing I had to be mindful of.

Teachable Moment of the Day: When using a drill for turning sofer woods like basswood, best to wrap the end the drill will be gripping in a lot of masking tape to reduce the denting from the chuck.

With everything shaped, split, sanded, and stained, I had 18 oar ends done. I actually invested in some Miniwax prestain and, while it didn't help the splottyiness so much, it did help the dowels absorb the stain a bit better than it had on the test dowels.

For the next step, I had to work on the handles, which comes in a few pieces.



The overall shape of this main handle board was very difficult to determine from the images. Oringally, I tried something close ot a mandoline shape.

I made 18 of these before I decided I didn't like the shape! For a size reference, each one is about the length of a finger nail. Although the shape isn't perfect, it's a stronger, and more subtle shape that is at least a bit closer I think to the actual shape. For the actuall handles, I had hoped that my toothpicks would be thin enoufg, but I had to end up turning those too to get them down to a better scale.

18 of those boards, and 32 handles later, I was ready for final assembly. After fixing all the parts together with the strongest woodglue I have, I braided some sewing thread I had to making it look closer to hemp rope that was used (not that one could tell), and wrapped up the parts and soaked it in CA glue. The results were fairly convincing, to my eyes anyway.


Unfortunately, I can't mount these up yet until I finish up a few other steps, including rudder, anchor and winch, and other interior details. I've also run through a few different design ideas for the base, but I'm now probably overthinking it.

Just a quick dryfitting with the oars. The ship is definately going to need be elevated above the base a bit.