No More (tree) Nails

False Gun Deck Complete

So, it's been a while since my last post, but that's because I've been knuckling down and getting all these pesky treenails done!

I haven't been able to get work done on it as much as I would have liked, so it seems like it has taken quite a while to do all the treenails, but in terms of actual modelling time it's been a relatively quick process. Much quicker than I thought it would be!

There were 1280 treenails in the end to do the whole of the false gun deck. The process went pretty smoothly. The only tip I would pass on is that I was having problems with treenails falling out when I tried to sand them down. Some people on model ship world suggested to glue them in place (either by dipping the wire in glue first, or just applying a coat of thinned paint before sanding. However, I ended up getting a better pair of nippers and find that because I could then cut the wire closer to the deck I didn't have any more problems!

Some pictures (Poor ones I know, I've been doing some reading about taking better pictures, so will hopefully start practicing soon!)




My next job was to give the whole a deck a good sanding. I started off with some medium sandpaper around a cork block and tried to get rid of any major unevenness and dirt. I had to abandon the cork block when sanding up close to and in between the bulkheads. I then repeated the whole process with 240 grit sandpaper and finally some 280 grit (for anyone like me who has/had no idea about sandpaper, the larger the number for the "grit" the finer the sandpaper)

I'm pretty happy with how the deck has turned out now that it has been sanded. There are some areas that are a bit lumpy, but that is mainly down to me planking badly. In particular, it is best to make sure that the pins which hold the deck to the keel are tapped completely flush, as I was a bit lazy with this some of the planks bulge slightly which is difficult to fix just by sanding. I'll might have another go with the sandpaper at some point, but seeing as most of it will be covered I'm satisfied.

I haven't taken a decent photo of the deck yet, but here is a quick one I took of the whole thing with the deck sanded:

This officially finishes the third installment of instructions and I have to face the scary reality that I'm going to have to start planking the hull soon! Very scary indeed.

Speaking of which I've been reading an excellent beginners tutorial on hull planking which I would heartily recommend. It can be downloaded from here: http://www.modelshipwrightsdatabase.com/Page/03fp.htm
I will be following this technique as closely as I can, with reference to the AL instructions of course, and also to James Choi's build log to keep me in check.

Part 4!

The next big job will be to prepare the bulkheads for planking. This is described in detail in the tutorial above, and I will post next time to show how I'm doing it, but first a quick note about the instructions. As James Choi points out the instructions say to file and sand the bow section before fitting the bow strengtheners. This makes no sense since you would then have to sand the strengtheners again. So I have fitted them first as in the following photos:




A couple of things to note about this. The instructions aren't 100% clear about where exactly to glue the strengtheners, but they should be glued flush up against each side of the false keel and then against the winding frame.

I have been having a slight issue with the fact that I somehow didn't glue the winding frame quite square with the false keel. When I fitted the false deck this looked really obvious since it wasn't parallel to the winding frame. However, when adding these strengtheners I was able to fix it by first gluing the strengtheners to the keel and then adjusting the winding frame so that it came into contact with them. I then clamped it in this position and when the glue dried the winding frame was magically straight! Good news..I had been worrying about it for quite a while.

The final photo shows a pretty weird clamp position. When clamping the top of the strengtheners the bottoms moved out so I realised I needed to clamp them against the winding frame at the bottom as well as the top. However, since the surface is curved this seemed impossible. I tried a couple of clamps and they just sprung off. I would love to be able to tell you that I came up with an ingenious method to fix this, but what actually happened was show in the photo above. On one side the clamp just stayed in place on about the third attempt! I have no idea how it was gripping so well but I just backed away slowly and prayed that it stayed where it was! The other side actually ended up holding in position because I was holding it for so long while trying to clamp it..so it luckily didn't need a clamp.

Next Steps

The next thing that I will be doing is adding some balsa wood filler blocks in the bow section to make the planking easier. I will then need to do a LOT of filing and sanding of the bulkheads at the bow and stern so that I can start planking. This will involve quite a bit of patience and work but I will post a detailed description of what I am doing as I do it!

Fun times lie ahead!

Jonny.

Do trees have fingers?

...they must do, where else would you find the treenails?

*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.

You can't get the wood you know...

Well, judgement day has arrived, and the planking gods decided they were going to monkey with my emotions, and leave me agonisingly short of wood to finish the deck planking!

I'd feared it would happen for a while, but because I went against the instructions and did individual planks, I ran out of wood before I had finished the planking! I have a large pile of offcuts that would do the job, but hey are all too short and I want it to be perfect so am considering my options about getting some more wood to finish the job!

Just to show how close I came, here is the area that is left to be planked:


Other than that, deck planking has gone pretty well since my disaster with the wonky planks. The port side of the ship is completely planked and trimmed flush. I have a few small planks to trim flush on the starboard side but apart from that, I just need to wait until I get more wood to finish the deck and then I can give the whole thing a good sanding.

One trick I discovered half way through doing the job was to flip the ship upside down when trimming the planks at the edge of the deck. This means that you can easily see how much of the plank needs to be trimmed and whittling the plank away with my craft knife was a lot easier. However, one word of caution, don't make the silly mistake that I did of trying to file/sand the plank flush while the ship is upside down. I temporarily forgot about gravity and when I started to file the first plank this way, it promptly fell off! Much better done with the ship the right way up me thinks!

Some quick pictures of the ship in it's current state:


And now I think it's about time for a terminology diversion.

A terminology diversion

For no other reasons than the fact my girlfriend and I were curious, and because I've used the terminology above I thought a quick definition and explanation of the words Starboard and Port were in order. Before ships had rudders they were steered by a special type of oar located at the back (stern) of the ship. Since most people are/were right handed, this oar was located on the right hand side of the ship (for someone looking towards the front/bow). Starboard comes from the old English word steorboard, which means literally the side of the ship which is steered. Since this steering oar was located on the right side, early ships would also dock into the port on the left side, to avoid crushing the steering oar. Hence, the left hand side of the ship is referred to as port. Incidentally, anyone who has read James Choi's wonderful build log of the surprise will notice he refers to the port as the "larboard" side. This is just another word for port which again came from an old English word meaning the "loading" side of the ship. It was changed to port because it sounded too much like starboard!

Well, enough of the lexicon lesson. It was largely stolen from wikipedia anyway, since that was where I looked it up. It could therefore be very wrong, so I welcome corrections!

Back to the build...

Cutting mast holes

Right, the only other thing that I have done on the model is to cut out the mast holes. Since the AL instructions just say "draw in the mast holes before covering them planks" and "cut out the mast holes" with no indication as to how this might be done, I once again to did what I could with what I had! So another "How I did it" guide to cutting mast holes out.

Firstly, while I was planking I marked the holes as I covered them. The best way I found to this was to mark two points of the circle at opposite edges onto the first plank I laid. Once the hole was planked over I then measured the distance between these two points to get the diameter of the hole, and then simply used a pair of compasses to draw of circle with this diameter. I end up with the hole marked like so:

To cut out the hole I started by using a hand drill to make a small hole in the centre:

I then used a small needle file to open this hole up a bit:


Now comes the messy, and probably inefficient bit where I attack the hole with my trusty craft knife! This step was simply to open up the hole enough to get the larger round file in. I imagine this could be better achieved by continuing to open the hole with the needle file, but I found my method quicker, and the mess will get tidied up in a minute!



Next I get a round file, and slowly open up the hole, filing the edges until it it completely open and finished! I usually gave them a quick once over some sandpaper to get rid of any scruffy edges, but there you have a vaguely neat looking mast hole.


One thing to note is that since the middle plank is being split into two, I found with all the holes that both sides of this plank invariably came unglued when cutting and filing (as below). This wasn't a problem however, as I was careful not to damage them, and could then simply glue then back down when I had finished.


Anyway, I think there is quite enough in this post already so I will leave with an "action shot" that my wonderful partner (Marie, who is incidentally a far superior photographer than me, and is responsible for all the "in progress" photos in this blog) took while I was struggling away with the needle file. I particularly like the obvious tension in my left hand...a common symptom of my sheer terror when taking any sharp edge anywhere near my model!

Happy building everyone!

Jonny.