Wave pool

There is relatively little to be found on the internet about coppering, so I am glad of all the help. Piet confirmed that plates may also be cut to size on the short side. I had tried scissors, which is easy but bends them, so it will be a knife. I am going for five rows below the waterline, which I see more often than a single row. In another forum I read, incidentally, that this custom only arose in the 19th century and that in the 18th century the plates on English ships were simply cut off at an angle at the waterline. For the model I prefer a crisp waterline.

Henk pointed to the knowledge base on his site (henkvanluinen.com), where a former forum member describes coppering his hull. I am sticking with the row along the waterline, not the wooden strip, although that looks very good too. Stick to the plan.

The funny thing is that I had set aside a few months for the coppering. Once I got going I thought it was moving quickly. No idea what possessed me to go so energetically wrong.

Rudder

First I planked the rudder and sanded it to a taper, the same thickness as the sternpost. That can still be done for both at once now; once the plates are on it cannot. The manual says nothing about planking the rudder, which cannot be right, because the rudder would then remain 2 mm thinner than the sternpost. The difference is small and hard to photograph: the top line runs straight, towards the bottom it tapers. Measured along the sternpost they now match.

Waterline, second attempt

After that I placed a few plates along the waterline. That seemed to go reasonably well, until I looked more closely and the waterline looked more like a wave pool. So everything off again and the line done all over. The problem was finding a flat, level surface: table and floor were out, and in the end the induction hob turned out to be smooth, large and level. My waterline rig was not stable enough, so afterwards I tightened up the line with a mechanical pencil, at exactly the same distance from the keel and from the wale on both sides. An evening’s work. By now there is still not a single decent plate on and I am four days further on. Fortunately it is the holidays.

I then marked the line with yellow masking tape. The bottom edge of the tape is the line, and the grid shows that it now runs reasonably straight.