False Gun Deck

Well, there's been another nice long break between posts thanks to a lovely holiday in Spain and Morrocco. We flew back into Bristol at around midnight on Wednesday night, just hours before all planes were grounded throughout the UK due to the volcano dustcloud from Iceland!

Anyway, back to the Surprise, and some slight progress has been made. I've glued and pinned all the parts of the false gun deck. This didn't prove too difficult with my trusty "pin pusher." Anyone starting out in model ship building who isn't aware of these should definately get one. When I started the small Victory model I had problems hammering pins into the deck as I couldn't get them 'started', as it were. The pin pusher means you can accurately place the pin where you want it, push it some of the way in, and then use a small tap hammer to finish the job.

The only other thing to say about the deck was that I marked two lines where the edges of the bulkheads are so that I was hammering pins through both the deck and the bulkhead. I did this by simply holding a ruler against the edge of the bulkhead and drew a line athwartship on either side (look at me using the nautical terminology already! Athwartship is the direction running across the width of the ship, from port to starboard)
Some pictures, because I am waffling:

Next step is to plank the false gun deck. The instructions tell me to just lay full planks along the deck and then mark the "butts" (where the ends of two planks meet each other) with a pencil. I don't really like this idea as I think it will look a bit fake and weird, especially since one of the planks provided in the kit won't cover the whole length of the ship so there will be some real butts and some false ones. For these reasons, and because I want some practice at doing 'proper' planks I have decided to cut and lay individual planks even for this false gun deck which will mostly be covered.

I asked some questions about this on Model Ship world and the general consensus was to go for it if I wanted to. Having done some research into ways of doing it I have decided to try a "3 butt shift." I have no idea if this is even close to being historically or practically accurate, but I like the sound of it...which is good enough for me! It also involves som calculating and measuring, which appeals to the mathematician in me.

3 Butt Shift

So here's what I'm going to do next. Thanks to a post on MSW I am told that planks would usually have been around 24' long (or somewhere between 20 and 25 feet.) At the scale I am working at (1:48) this will mean planks of around 150mm. For the maths fans out there this is best understood and calculated by saying that the scale basically tells us that 1 foot on the model is the same as 48 feet on the real thing. 1 foot is equal to around 308mm. So to find the size of one foot on the model we devide 308 by 48 (around 6.4). So to find the scaled length of 24 feet we simply multiply 6.4 by 24. This gives a number somewhere around 150mm.

To do a 3 butt shift I take one plank and lay it on the deck. For the next athwartship (there I go again!) plank I offset the start of the plank so that it won't line up with the first. I do this again with the third plank. The start of the fourth plank will then line up with the end of the first plank. Since a plank is 150mm long, then "shifts" must be 50mm for this to work. So the first plank is at 0. The second plank is offset by 50mm, the third by 100mm and then the fourth plank will be offset 150mm, the full length of one plank.

Something tells me that pictures are going to be able to explain all that a lot clearer than I ever could!

Anyway, onward and upward. Decks to plank.

Jonny.