18th Century English Longboat by Model Shipways, Part 3

Planking this model was the hardest part of the build. The first couple are very straight forward and don’t require any special tapering, and bending them is very straight forward. After that, the planks require some edge bending and with thin basswood, that’s a bit tricky.

The next planks are the garboards, which are the planks next to the keel.

Following the instructions in the kit, I was able to manage tapering and edge bending. That took some soaking and heat, but it worked. These are then bent normally before gluing into place. It all worked pretty well, but the boat almost looked clinker-built since I couldn’t do enough edge bending. Sanding took care of it, but the planks required so much of it that you could see light through them when all was done.

I did have a little trouble with one of the planks at the bow, but it shouldn’t stand out too much once the hull is painted. Note that the planks are edged with a No.2 pencil before gluing into place.

The bulkheads are then cut loose, leaving the frames in place. With the planking done the hull is fairly strong. It still requires some care, but it’s sturdy enough to work with. Frames are sanded way down.

Floor boards and platforms are added and hull painting is started. Note that I followed the kit’s recommendation and stained the hull with a 50/50 mix of Minwax Golden Oak Stain and Natural Stain. For the paint, I used a mix of acrylics. The red interior is a mix using Tamiya acrylic paints – the first time I’d ever used them. I chose a dark red color, which might not be very accurate since contemporary models seemed to use a much brighter shade of red.

Risers are added along with other internal detail. The instructions explain a method for simulating edge molding by simple use of a scribing tool and straightedge. It took a little practice to get the scribed line nice and close to the edge, but I was really happy with the results and impressed with the simple technique.

The frieze design was provided in the kit as color printed paper. These turned out to be oversized for the model, but the models developer, Chuck Passaro, provided the artwork as a pdf file. I printed this onto decal paper and applied those to my model. To get them to fit properly, I still had to re-scale them down by about 3% or so.

More details of this build in a future post.