Build log · Phase 9, Planking the upper deck

Deck beams glued and a plan for the deck

19 December 2020 · Problem and fix

The deck beams are being glued now. After that the deck could go on, but once it is fixed I can hardly get at the gun deck any more, if at all. So first a final check: have I forgotten anything obvious?

The guns are rigged, the anchor cable and the messenger are in place. Whether they are entirely right I don’t know. A photo in Piet’s build log makes me suspect I have run the cable around the riding bitts differently from him: on Piet’s model the anchor cable passes under the bitts on the inboard side, on mine it goes over the top on the inboard side. I am (I think) following Zu Mondfeld’s instructions there. Otherwise I see nothing odd. The messenger I have hung from the deck beams on one side. I saw that in Anatomy of the Ship and thought it a nice detail.

Gun deck with anchor cable and messenger, while the upper deck beams are being glued

Dust on the gun deck

Stephan came up with a tip I would never have thought of myself: cover the gun deck with plastic sheet (overhead transparency film, which is stiffer), so that no debris and dust ends up below when the upper deck is planked. He even suggested letting the stiff film run half a millimetre to a millimetre beyond the deck, fixing everything with PVA glue and then pulling the film out from underneath, because PVA doesn’t grip on film. It took me two questions before I understood it.

On reflection I am going to do it differently: plank the deck first and only then fit it. It needs only a minimal bend to fit between the bulwarks, and this way I can make sure the margin plank fits properly everywhere. After all, that is what the bulwark planking will sit on later.

Margin plank

The start of the margin plank is there. This time I am making it in sections. On the gun deck I had still used full lengths, but of course that isn’t right: trees that long didn’t exist. The margin plank will be 9 mm wide. On top of that comes another 1 mm of bulwark planking, so 8 mm remains on the deck. That is exactly twice the width of the other deck planks, which seemed rather neat to me.

Christmas holidays now, so hopefully I can make a decent dent in it.