Progress is fairly slow but steady.

I glued some pieces of thin ply as a gluing guide for the forward hoodway.

I have now got to the point where decisions about the center or king plank need to be made.

In Ted’s book on page 77, he says the center plank was tapered although there is no indication of this in his sketch's.

If I made a single tapered plank it would end up looking absurd in my opinion, I made up a card template to visualize it at it’s widest point the plank would be the equivalent of 2.5 feet wide.

After a bit of a search on the internet I found some deck planking photos that indicate a method of letting planks into the king plank and I think I will go for this approach although not as stylishly.

Here is a photo of my proposed method, letting 2 planks into each side of the tapered king plank to thin it down to an acceptable amount.

Lastly a few progress photos.

Constructive criticism is welcomed...

More to come…

Thanks for looking in and reading my ramblings or just looking at the photo’s and stay safe.

Cheers,
Stephen. 

Some more Rudder pics as requested.

Cheers,
Stephen.

As the deck proceeds I am getting more settled in my opinion of it, that’s not to say I think it is brilliant but things have gone from “what the heck have I done to myself” with this hair brained approach and questionable results, to maybe it isn’t too bad.

It should be noted that the deck is intended to look a bit old as will the rest of the boat, this is due to it being a working boat not a pleasure yacht and even though some owners probably kept their boats in a well looked after condition I think there would be “weathered” areas and the deck would show weathering first I think and possibly within a couple of years could look a bit like I am presenting, at least that’s my guess.

I quite quickly worked out that using a small spatula to spread the glue mix wasn’t the way to go and started looking for an alternative. I ended up with a BBQ marinade injector that has 2 different diameter nozzles that I thought would be large enough for my thick mix to pass through and it was.

As I have progressed I have made the mix thinner, but still thick enough that it doesn’t flow readily, in the hope of reducing air bubbles which show up after trimming.

The first 4 rows of planks Port and Starboard, I prepared in one hit partly to get an idea of how they were going to look with regard to how much of a curve there would be fore and aft.

I now prepare two complete rows of planks, one Port and one Starboard at any one time this is to try and keep things even and when laying them I start at one end and work my way to the other end all in one sitting.

I have found there is a sweet spot for trimming the excess glue mix anywhere between 1 and 3 hours after laying, when the glue is not completely dry but not too wet.

Laying the deck is something I was looking forward to doing, I can say that I never expected the amount of concern it caused early on, I am happy to say that things have settled down and I am enjoying it more and more, except for the repetition that has crept in, well you know there is no pleasing some people.

One other problem on the horizon is how the forecastle center plank is going to look, the concern is how much of a taper is acceptable.

Ted says on page 77 in his book Tree to Sea, that there is a tapered plank forward and aft, though there is no mention as too how big it is and his sketch of a planked deck doesn’t show a tapered plank.

I made up a rough approximation of the amount of taper, in realty there will not be straight sides and think it is too wide at the aft end, I am going to wait and see how the planking looks when I get a bit nearer to needing a tapered plank.

I am also starting to have a go at modifying some 1/24th scale people, something I haven’t done before. Starting with the guy lying on his back, I want him to be standing though I am not sure of what sort of pose yet. This one is more for a learning experience, see how it goes when I get back to it.

Constructive criticism is welcomed...

More to come…

Thanks for looking in and reading my ramblings or just looking at the photo’s and stay safe.

Cheers,
Stephen. 

I have always been going to RC the Mizzen sail.
Controlling both Raise & Lower and Port & Starboard using 2 servos or winches.

The original idea was to mount both servos in the Galley (aft part of deck house) later on it became apparent that the Port & Starboard servo would be best placed somewhere aft of the deck house.

This is something I had forgotten about, although while looking at my decking attempts, I started thinking whether there was anything else I needed to do under the deck level before laying all of the deck.

Then I remembered I needed to fit a servo, or should I say “shoe horn” one in as there is not a lot of space left once the steam plant is in.

The plans show 3 tackles attached to the aft end of the Mizzen boom, see photo. From my limited knowledge of Gaff rigs having these 3 tackles is not generally practiced on other types of vessels, in Ted’s book there is a brief description of why the other 2 tackles are present.

Thankfully I had a 4 turn Sail Winch in stock and could start playing around with how on earth I was going to squeeze it in. In the end it wasn’t too bad, after a bit of a fiddle I made up a cardboard template and adjusted it a couple of times, then cut the shape into a piece of plywood later adding some strengthening pieces out of Spruce.

I drilled a hole in the aft sub deck for a brass tube to be inserted into and thread it’s way to the servo position avoiding the rudder actuator, later on after much thought I decided to add a second tube to enable me to control 2 lines or I can drop back to a single.
I then added a couple of clamps to keep the brass tubes in place.

The reason for this is I am concerned about the angle that the center tackle will tip over to will be very flat when the Mizzen boom is let out a fair bit, which I think will cause the boom to lift quite a bit, this is due to the mounting point being very high, that’s where the ability to try adding another tackle this time Port & Starboard should prevent the boom lifting all that much, we will see how that plays out later on.

Then some more adjustments, drill mounting holes make a brass nut and glue in place, the entire servo and mount are removable if needed, to finish off I varnished the mount and areas that I had ground down in fitting the brass tubes.

I have included some pics of the steam plant in the boat with the removable upper section in place, before the deck is fully on, I am really glad I installed all the gear before doing the deck as it would have been a nightmare to do after the deck is fitted.


More to come…

Thanks for looking in and reading my ramblings or just looking at the photo’s and stay safe.

Cheers,
Stephen. 

I wasn’t really happy with the thinned down planks, I mean it worked on the model but when I thought about it, they weren't right. When faced with this sort of problem I like to think about how I or the shipwrights would have done it, and in my opinion they would do things in a way that is time and material efficient and removing half of a few planks didn’t add up.

On my initial planks I had a 2.5mm step in them, this caused too much of a severe bend when laying (it doesn’t seem to show up in the photos but the bend is more than wanted) to the point that one snapped. What to do, read Teds description of how the planks were cut again to find the step was only 1 ¾” on the real thing which at 1/24th scale is roughly 1.8mm, so the planks that have a very shallow taper I tried making them with a step closer to 1mm and success. My idea is to increase the step size up to 1.8 for the planks that have a steeper angle. In reality there is no surprise when you look at after it is done, but it took me a dozen planks to work it out, all part of that learning curve.

I did some experiments a couple of years ago with caulking and found that a mix of Titebond 3 + West Systems 406 filler + Black Artists Acrylic worked quite well in those experiments, this is what I decided to try.

In the excitement to lay the first plank I forgot to do an experiment with a wider caulking gap of .8mm to see how it looked, (my earlier experiments had a gap of around .4mm) and for some reason I thought it would be alright to go with .8mm, so when I laid the first plank and looked at it I thought that is too wide, and promptly pulled it up before the glue mix set.

After shaping the planks, I glue a piece of .44mm brass wire (something I have plenty of, see photo) along one edge of the plank to get the spacing (I tried just sitting a piece on the deck beams but it didn’t work), then pre-drill and pinning the planks in position before removing and weathering, then the final assembly.

Remember I am looking for an irregular finish due to Teds comment that after the tar was poured into the nail holes and seams it would be left as was in a rough state.

Some days when I see the messey caulking I am not happy other days I think it is working. At the moment I am going to press on with this method as I think I need more planks laid before the effect is more apparent, at least I can remove excess glue mix to get more even results and if I really don’t like it I can sand it back.

Next time, a slight deviation.

Thanks for looking in and reading my ramblings or just looking at the photo’s and stay safe.

Cheers,
Stephen. 

I have found out over the last week or so that there are numerous ways to plank a deck.

I have seen all manor of variations in photos of the real thing and on models. I have come to the conclusion that like many things in life there are different ways of doing things and the way Ted describes in his book is different from anything I can find in photos.

After a lot of headaches and trying a couple of different deck plank arraignments, I have decided to go with deck planks that run parallel to the Deck house coaming coming into a gentle curve Forward and Aft.

I will attempt to do something similar to the method that Ted describes in his book photos of the sketches included, page 76-77 for those with the book Tree to Sea.

I still don’t know how I am going to do the forecastle so I thought I would make a start around midships and focus on getting planks parallel to the wheelhouse coaming.

Nothing is pinned or glued yet, just getting some experience in cutting and an idea of how things might look.

More to come…

Thanks for looking in and reading my ramblings or just looking at the photo’s and stay safe.

Cheers,
Stephen. 

Whilst racking my head as to how best to proceed with the deck planking, I started thinking about the Bilge and Circulating Pump outflow, something I have been thinking about on and off for a while.

In Ted's book he describes approximately where these are located on page 125, and highlighted in the photo.

With sketches on the preceding page.

I think I have worked out where the location is roughly, see photo of model and photo of sketch.

Although I am reluctant to cut the Binn iron just yet, if anyone has any thoughts on weather this is probably the right spot I would like to hear them.

Cheers,
Stephen.

You would think I would be getting faster at making covering boards, well no such luck. After remaking the 2 covering boards it was time to remove all the stanchions again then start gluing down all the covering boards. I have also glued in place the main fish hatch and aft skylight.

Next up is to start planking the deck, I would have thought this would be a fairly straight forward thing however that doesn’t seem to be the case. My initial thoughts were to start from the center and work my way out, straight forward I think then reading Ted’s book he says that the deck was laid out with leaders or long planks as pictured in Ted’s sketch and described in the green highlighted text.

I have setup a couple of long planks to get an idea of how things are going to look.

The Starboard side I have pushed out so they fairly closely follow the covering board inner curve, on the Port side I have bought the ends in slightly although they appear to be straight they aren't.

I am not sure which way to go at present, I like the way the Starboard side looks but then, is it too pronounced a curve, is something closer to the Port side more like it?

Any constructive criticism would be welcomed.

More to come…

Thanks for looking in and reading my ramblings or just looking at the photo’s and stay safe.

Cheers,
Stephen. 

I was happy with the progress until I re-discovered a problem I had forgotten about. The problem being some Stanchions don’t line up with the Thwartship Boards something that at the time I thought would be alright, well several months later looking at it again I didn’t think it was alright.

What to do, 3 choices came to mind, redo all of the stanchions, leave it the way it is or move the appropriate stanchions. The perfectionist in me thought the only way forward was to redo all of the stanchions which in turn would mean redoing all of the covering boards, not so happy about that idea....

After a couple of days to contemplate, I decided I would do a mock up, moving the appropriate stanchions without pinning and just see how it looked. To my surprise it didn’t look as bad as expected and after a couple of days in their new position I thought it was acceptable, I decided to try modifying the affected covering boards and see how they looked. I think that once a little bit of weathering is done it should be very hard to tell where changes were made.

Once I was reasonably happy I proceeded to start work on the Pin Rail and Knightheads steam bending some material roughly to shape. I ended up making a couple of these because there are quite large differences in the plans for the Pin Rails, one plan shows one length while another shows a different length, while one plan was basically the same as Ted Frosts book I decided to go with that.

The Pin Rails needed brackets or Irons to be made these I made from Brass cutting strips then using my Hold “N” Fold to fold the Brass.
Then marking and drilling the holes then trimming to length.

Fitting onto the model required holding in place and drilling holes for the Brass pins to go into.

Once again after a bit of time has passed, I have decided to re-make the forward pair of the covering boards, the main reason being where the added part lies is right where a freeing port grate is and would be quite visible.

More to come...

That’s enough waffle for now, thanks for looking in and reading my ramblings or just looking at the photo’s and stay safe.

Cheers,
Stephen. 

Back to working on the Drifter after a bit of a clean up and finishing off making a Rope Making and Serving Machine.

One of the reasons I stopped working on this project is because I had reached a point where I couldn’t work out a way forward, the problem being fixing the position of Stanchions in relation to cut outs in the covering boards, my initial idea was to make the capping rail and temporarily pin it in place this presented problems, mainly with how long it would take, so I came to a halt.

Fast forward a couple of months and after reading Tree to Sea for a while a way forward presented itself, that didn’t involve making the capping rail first. One thing that helped me was a drawing on page’s 97 & 107 that clearly showed the “filling”.

The idea was to make filling boards that are much longer than in real practice. The real ones “filling” a space between stanchions under the capping rail, my ones being long lengths that help to fix a position for the stanchions.

The first job to be done was to run a fairing batten to the correct heights and marking the stanchions then cut them to height.
A rebate needed to be cut on each stanchion to allow the long filling strips to sit in the wright spot then be pinned in position.

Next I made up a former to steam the strips into something resembling the right shape, this former will be handy when I come to plank the bulwarks.

Once this was done I could sight along the rail for irregularity's a few stanchions needed some attention though in general I was quite pleased.

More to come...

Thanks for looking in and reading my ramblings or just looking at the photo’s and stay safe.

Cheers,
Stephen.