*Groan*
OK, that was poor, but it's Friday and I'm tired. High time for a blog post I thought to myself, so here it is.
As I mentioned in my last post, I have experimented with a technique of "treenailing" the deck. On real ship, the planks would have been fixed down to the deck beams by using wooden nails, the aforementioned treenails. There are various methods used by modelers to simulate these treenails. The way that the AL instructions suggest is simply to use a pencil point to mark them in. I thought that this would look a bit rubbish to be honest (not least because I would get bored of sharpening my pencil, and the treenails would be different sizes!)
The method that I decided to use was 100% stolen from a member of the model ship world forum. His excellent build log of the HMS Supply is well worth a read. It's very long but worth it! It can be found here: http://modelshipworld.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=6295
Anyone, this is how I do it:
First, I mark two lines alongside the butts of the planks. This showed up the fact that I hadn't been anywhere near perfect with lining up the planks, despite my best efforts! Still, it wasn't too bad a job, so the treenails will be nicely lined up, and the correct side of the butts (only just in some cases!)
Then I take my little pointy thing (I think it's called an awl) to mark the places that the treenails will go. I think this pattern is fairly standard, but I may well be wrong. The main thing for me is that it looks OK!
I then have to drill the holes with a drill bit that is 0.5mm in diameter! This is a seriously small drill bit. I bought a few of them as break very easily and bought what they call a "pin vice" to hold the bit. Not much force is needed to drill the hole, just rotation I have found.
The treenail is then made using 0.5m copper wire. This will be available from most hobby shops I imagine, as apparently it is used a lot of model railway enthusiasts. I push the end of the wire into the drilled hole, and then snip off the end. To make things easier it is best to snip the wire as close to the deck as possible. I have found that if they stick out too much some of them tend to fall out when sanding. I think this problem is mainly due to the quality of my snippers. I have had some success, however, with using the tips of the snippers to push the treenail further into the hole to make it flush with the deck. This is a bit time consuming so I may invest in some better quality snippers!
The final step is to take some medium-fine sandpaper and sand down all the treenails. I tend to do a whole row at once to save time. Sanding them not only flattens them against the deck, but also shapes them nicely! This picture shows some completed treenails:
The whole process is quicker than it sounds, but it is still quite laborious and is going to take a long time to finish. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who doesn't like repetitive tasks. So far I've done 449 treenails, and probably have another 1000 or so to do! I'll most likely do some fairing of the hull (more on that later) to break it up a bit in preparation for planking the hull!
To finish, here are a couple of pictures of the model in it's current form. It's really hard to photograph the treenails, so they're barely visible in these photos, but they're there (all 449 of them) I promise!
Onwards and upwards!Jonny.
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