Beautiful shop! I love how you did the bow and stern blocks. I think the idea of using the shelving and pins to hold the various wood strips and dowels is great. If I may ask what did you use to clamp the planking to the ship when gluing? It looks like you just played the planks on.
Rob
Good morning Rob! Sunny day today, finally.
A couple of things. Used the templates provided to shape the filler pieces. Produced several duds before figuring out how to get it right. A problem is securing the piece firmly, so it can be shaped with a wood rasp. The rasp removes a good amount of wood, with control. Then final sanding. During the process keep remarking the lines on the piece after rasping and checking with the template.
Getting these pieces right was a big learning experience from this kit.
For the planks, use a dab of CA on the bulkhead, Titebond on the edges. In a perfect world the plank will fit without gaps. Always have some. Found if they are forced closed between the bulkheads with a clamp, the board is edge bent, and the gap doesn’t go away it’s there to be dealt with when installing the next row.
If there are alot of gaps and alot of clamps the planks could get wavey. This happened to me - after about 5 strakes wondered why planks needed to be fat in the middle and skinny at the ends.
Usually my shaping, steam bending, and tapering goes fairly well so I just let the plank fit naturally across the bulkheads and let the glue on the edges fill any gaps, and if needed apply extra glue from inside the hull, with say a dab of Titebond on a finger.
At the end of the job I apply Titebond/filler to planks from inside the hull to fill any gaps. Avoid filler on the outside plank faces because it fills the grain, and appears as smooth spots after staining/painting.
Thanks Rob
