SEA > SAIL
French 36 Pounder
Rokket:
GOOD for you! Nice when they "get it," even a little bit.
Pat:
Very nice work on the gun Ernest. Even moreso considering it was your first wooden kit, not a subject that you're familiar with and especially that you did it in such a fantastically short time. I built one very similar a decade ago and it must have taken me a couple of months.
It'll make a great display on their mantel or some such, or maybe on a desk (he can turn the barrel in different directions like a court martial sword, depending on what's on his mind)
Greif:
Thank you Pat! I take it from some of your comments in other threads that you have built a few, or prehaps more than a few, wooden ships. I really admire the craftsmanship and beauty of those builds. Maybe someday I will "crossover" a bit and try my hand at one. Seems like there are alot of specialized skills to master however. I was just reading about hull planking techniques and it seems quite complex and skill intensive.
Ernest
--- Quote from: Pat on 26 Feb , 2010, 17:10 ---Very nice work on the gun Ernest. Even moreso considering it was your first wooden kit, not a subject that you're familiar with and especially that you did it in such a fantastically short time. I built one very similar a decade ago and it must have taken me a couple of months.
It'll make a great display on their mantel or some such, or maybe on a desk (he can turn the barrel in different directions like a court martial sword, depending on what's on his mind)
--- End quote ---
Pat:
Yes, I've been building models for about 53 years now, and over half the ones I've build have been tall ships, with at least half of those wooden ones, some kits, some scratch.
There's several different ways of doing the decks, eah one more difficult, but also more impressive in the end, than the preceding.
The first way of doing a wooden deck is like the plastic kits. Just cut it out of a printed sheet on thin plywood. the planks are outlined in ink. Easy and fast, but not that real.
There's also the veneer method, which I described elsewhere for doing the U-boat deck, where you take a thin veneer of real wood cut into strips, and glue it onto a plain deck. Doesn't matter whether the deck is one piece or several, whether it's good looking or crappy. All that matters is that it's smooth.
Then of course there's the idea of using separate planks supported by a framework of actual beams underneath, just like the real thing. That's the method that I'm using on my U-boat. I started it that way because I wanted the effect of having all the slots in the decking, which couldn't be done with the plastic kit deck, and the PE decks have to paintedbut it's just so hard to make brass look like wood. If it had been a U-boat with the steel deck, ok.
The other reason that I decided to do my U-boat deck that way was guess because I'veplanked so many sailing ship hulls over beams, that it just seemed natural to me to do it that way for the sub.
Pat:
That was just a brief description of the main methods of putting the planks on a deck. The patterns and making them look more realistic occupies almost an entire shelf of books in my library.
Planks on a ship are almost always caulked in between. The caulking on modern yachts is sometimes white, but traditionally it was done with tar. Modern warships I think have a rubberized caulking that's more to preserve the wood than to keep water from leaking below since the deck UNDER the wood on them is usually metal.
There are several ways to simulate the caulking.
The easiest way, as I said in the last post, is to just have the deck planks inked onto a sheet of plywood. It looks acceptable, but the grain and any blemishes in the wood cross over from plank to plank so it's noticeable that they aren't really individual planks.
You can also buy scribed plywood. (little grooves cut into the wood to make it look more like individual planks.). this method has the same problem as above with blemishes and grain, but usually they use clear basswood or poplar, maple or birch and so that's not a big problem.
If using the scribed wood, you can leave it like it is, or try to fill the grooves with something to simulate caulking. The biggest problem here is making sure that whatever you use, it doesn't get soaked into the plank itself and ruin the contrast. This can be done by first coating the wood with a sealer, applying the stain, graphite or other dark material, and then sanding the application off to leave the colour just in the grooves.
If making individual planks, you can actually use something to caulk between each plank. I did this on two models that I built by using black paper. the first time, I cut the paper into thin strips and glued it along the edge of each plank and at the butt ends. When the deck was finished, I cut the excess paper off with a scalpel and then sanded the deck smooth. It came out beautiful but was a LOT of work.
The second time, I put all the planks together, and then glued a sheet of black paper along the edge and then cut each plank away individually. this was difficult to get the cuts even and straight and still left the butt ends to be 'caulked'. In the long run, it wasn't much easier and the effect was identical.
Another way of applying caulking to the edges is not as dark as the paper, but a LOT easier and comes out just as good or better (depending on scale) is to rub the edge of each plank with a soft pencil. I've seen some people who used paint, but it tends to saok into the grain too much.
You can also bevel the edges of each plank, and then after assembly, lay a thin black thread into the groove between each plank. This is just about how they were done in real life. I lot of work, but quite effective. A very thin knife with the edge flattened helps.
Finally, you can just lay the planks and forget about caulking. This works best if the planks are very, very tiny so that caulking would be almost unseen anyway.
There are other methods of course, but these are some of the most common.
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