The clinker effect

A question for the experienced builders. At the bow I keep suffering from a clinker effect. I’ve tapered early and use drop planks where necessary, but I also don’t want the strips pointing up to the heavens. On other forums I read that spiling solves it, but then I’d have to buy walnut sheet 1 mm thick and a few centimetres wide. That can’t be the idea. Now and then I still have to push quite hard to keep the strips in place.

Pingu57 called spiling planking for the advanced; he had solved it himself with an extra drop plank. Piet answered at length. It’s a matter of tapering in time and at the right point, down to half a plank width or at least 2.5 mm at the end. Most builders start too late. His method: hold each next strip, before bending, below and against the previous one and at the bow carefully bend it to the hull shape. Where the strip threatens to ride over the previous one, that’s where the taper begins. You repeat that for every strip. Then twisting is no longer an issue and drop planks, which are a good deal more complicated, aren’t needed. According to Piet it’s tapering or drop planks, not both. Spiling is tapering on both edges, without stealers and without drop planks: beautiful but very laborious, and something you have to start from the very beginning with pencil marks on all the bulkheads.

In Piet’s own log I thought I could see precisely drop planks together with tapered strips. According to Piet that was a miscalculation, a classic example of how not to do it: first planked from the top down and then halfway up from the keel, without first working it out with battens.

Where I may have gone wrong: I didn’t first divide the hull into belts with battens. I tapered on the basis of the distance between wale and garboard, arrived at 3.19 mm at the foremost bulkhead and later switched to 2.5 mm. Possibly that’s exactly where I threw away the millimetres I need now. I’m mainly going by the how-to from modelships-beagle.eu, which on page 20 also applies both methods. Without that combination I don’t come out at all.

What also surprises me is the difference in colour: my planking is much darker than Piet’s. According to him walnut does vary, and the strips become lighter after sanding.