I am a bit disappointed, I set you up for the perfect comeback with the rum joke, but not one person took the bait. You guy's really need to brush up on your pop culture jokes. There has to be one Pirates of the Caribbean fan in here.
Onward! I have made some progress! The next step call for planking the two lower decks, the aft end of gun deck 1 and the whole of gun deck 2. The designer didn't really mean for you to detail out the aft areas because the windows in the galleries are just for show, there isn't anything inside the aft cabins. I intend to change that, but I don't know to what level, yet. I do know I wanted more experience planking a deck before I started on the big main deck. The decks themselves are 2mm plywood that you are supposed to plank with pear strips that are provided. I decided to use Alaskan Cedar instead for the contrast. The decks come in 2 parts for the lower deck and 4 parts for the upper. I used masking tape to tape them together for planking.
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I bought some 5/32" and 1/4" billets from Dave. These came thicknessed to the proper deck plank width I wanted, but I needed to make my own planks from them. I cut them on the Byrnes saw, but I think I need more practice because my plank thickness repeatability is dreadful. At the very least I might need a Byrnes thickness sander to boot. I was able to use one of my Veritas mini tools, an end planer to clean up the rough sawn edges of the billets from Dave.
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The results were some nibbing strake width planks and some regular planks.
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He is where I need practice. I started the nibbing strake from the end, but I soon found out I should start them from midships and work aft. The geometry doesn't wrok the other way around.
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But with that figured out, I moved on to planking from the center out. Because this has to remain two parts until it is installed, it took some doing but I was able to glue the two strakes just outside the centerline like this:
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I went back and glued the center one to one side of the deck later on. Then I worked my way form the center out, planking as I went. Here you can start to see the board thickness problem really stand out.
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Next I started cutting in the nibbed planks. This was quite enjoyable for me.
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You might see a couple spots where I practiced with the mini cabinet scraper to even out the boards midway through. When I finished planking the first thing I did was to scrape the whole thing down to a uniform thickness.
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Here is the finished scraping. Because of the scale and the multiple directions of the wood grain, you might see a couple spots where I scraped against the grain, but unfortunately, I had little choice at this point.
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Only thing left is to sand it et, voila! I would give it a personal 7 out of 10 for a first time doing my own planks and doing nibbing. I am unsure if I want to do trennels at this point, but I might. I still have that whole main deck to do, so it might be something I distract myself from that with.
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