Keel glued and practising on the false deck

A week later and a little further along. The keel and the bulkheads have been glued together, with borrowed Lego bricks to keep everything square. I also bought some clamps straight away. It’s now drying nicely.

Meanwhile I wanted to plank the false deck. Since you won’t see much of it later, I’m using it as a trial for the real decks. I chose planks of 10 cm: a tree trunk yields about 6 to 7 metres of straight plank, and at 1:64 that comes to roughly 10 cm. Hans Groenenberg thought that realistic. For the pattern I drew the pattern from my cutter onto the deck, repeating every four strips, which puts 25 mm between the plank ends. For the caulking seam I bought a Pitt oil base pencil. Hans explained that English ships had a fairly fixed deck planking pattern, unlike Dutch ones, and copied the how-to by Klaas (Germt van Rijswijk), whose photos can no longer be found.

I’m glad I decided to practise, because I ran into quite a few snags. The wood in the kit is 1x4 mm tanganyika. Some strips are rougher than others, the wood splinters when the caulking line is applied so that corners go missing, and some strips are narrower, which leaves wide gaps. I smoothed the deck with a rasp instead of sandpaper, for fear that otherwise nothing of the caulking line would survive, but that sometimes left scratches.

Peter recommended using the best strips and keeping the offcuts for short pieces; the splintering probably comes from scraping against the grain. Hans pointed out that what Klaas means by ‘breaking’ the edges is chamfering them slightly, and that an edge you blacken with pencil is black through its full thickness. You can then simply sand, and the caulking seam stays visible as a line. I had read that somewhere, but the instruction video with my first boat insisted on scraping. Must have been that builder’s preference.

After some repair work, sanded this time, I’m leaving it at that. It’s only the false deck. Close up it remains a bit messy, from a distance it’s not bad at all. I also see that I laid the deck completely askew on the bulkheads, another thing to watch out for. How the gun deck was planked after this gets its own series.