The margin plank is finished

Piet had been away for a bit and came back with a load of advice. The Dutch word for margin plank is waterwegplank. The width is generally taken as one and a half to two times the width of the deck planks, and around the bow and stern it is a little wider still. According to him the construction is anything but simple, especially at the bow: the butt end of the deck plank that is let into the margin plank must be exactly one third of the plank width, and the angled part must be at least one plank width long. Longer is fine, shorter is not. He has only done it once himself because of the degree of difficulty. And top and butt belongs only on wales, not on deck planking. So that chapter can be closed.

Precisely because it is so tricky, I’m practising on the gun deck first. The imperfections will be less visible there later on, and I’ll decide afterwards whether I think it looks good enough. The idea is: the more visible the deck, the better it gets.

Making the planks is quite a job in itself, but the first halves look reasonably symmetrical. Towards the bow I let them get a bit wider. Right at the end they unfortunately taper off a little again, but honestly nobody is ever going to see that. Luckily I remembered not to follow the notches in the false deck, because those are too big. Nothing is fixed yet, because I still have to work out how to get the deck planks the way Piet describes them. He says one third for the butt end, but I also regularly read half the width. I’ll see which is easiest.

On 30 March the margin plank was finished. I learned a lot from it. One piece tapers off a little, 0.6 mm to be precise, and I’m not entirely happy with that. With the other one I am.

Piet asked whether I’m going to do the upper deck the same way, since not much of this deck will be visible later. That is exactly the point of the exercise. I asked him for a photo of his own deck with margin plank: how symmetrical do the two sides need to be, and how far do you joggle before you simply lay the deck plank straight against the margin plank? I can find plenty of examples on the internet, but I never know which one is correct and which is just a good attempt by the builder. Hopefully a start on the deck planking on Saturday. Now to hope the joggling works out reasonably well.