A whole day laying deck

After a whole day of laying deck, a photo of the progress. Honestly, I like the thread caulking seams very much. Yet I don’t see it much on the forum. Stephan confirmed that: here you almost never see it, in the model-building books you do. Herby63 has done it once, on his Jantje, with planks 5 mm wide. With 3 mm planks he prefers to rub the edges with a soft 6B pencil.

Scraping or sanding

Stephan pointed out that the books also say you don’t sand a deck with sandpaper but scrape it with a blade. True, I have a special scraper for that. Some care is needed, though, because before you know it you scrape the threads out from between the butt ends. Jaques always uses old-fashioned razor blades for it, which according to him work a treat.

Hans Groenenberg wondered whether scraping really gives a nicer result and what the advantage is. In my view scraping is mainly meant to remove glue residue and not so much to get the deck silky smooth. Perhaps it also has to do with the grain of the wood: with scraping it stays intact better than with sanding, I would think. But I am only guessing. Stephan had a better argument, with a page from a book attached: it is the oldest method of getting wood smooth, the wood keeps its sheen, whereas with sanding it goes dull and you get little scratches across the grain. With a blade you have more control, and used properly you don’t pull the thread out either. Hans had still worked with a cabinet scraper at school in the eighties.

Stephan also asked whether I had glued the thread. If not, you can fix the thread from above with matt varnish before scraping. In my case that isn’t necessary: I glued the sides of the planks each time, so the thread stays put nicely. The plan is to give the deck Danish oil afterwards; if I remember rightly, I did that on the gun deck too.

All a fine story. I will make a few test pieces at some point, but the scraper I use works fine as it is and I am not going to fuss over it too much. I am already happy with the current result.