I?ve been learning lots of new things on this project; for instance, I?m told the ?sag? in the hulls of ships in the 1920?s and 30?s, is called Sheer, and the overhang on the stern is known as the ?Elliptical? or ?Counter Stern?.
If you?re planning to build a boat with one or more of these features, the first step is to gather lots of pictures as reference material, gain a good understanding of how these features interact with each other and the other parts of the ship.
The second step is to then go and lie down until the desire passes, and make something sensible like a landing craft.
If you still insist on this madness, you will need plenty of 1mm thick card, more superglue than is healthy to share a room with, shellac, and a square kilometre of sandpaper.
The counter stern in particular was a long process. The first step was making a template. This was held against the model, at which point it became obvious it was entirely the wrong shape, so I made another template, held this against the model, and repeated the process. Eventually I ended up with a piece of card that was the right shape. Sort of. At least close enough that I could fill in the gaps with scraps.
Now came the job of sticking it on. I applied glue to all the surfaces which would come in contact, and added drops of superglue to the corners, in the hope this would hold the card in place while the rest dried. The Superglue, of course, stuck to my fingers, modelling board and anything else until it came in contact with the rest of the model, at which point it became ineffective. When the card finally ended up in the right place I had to hold it awkwardly in position; letting go to change grip would have caused it to spring back.
After a fairly uncomfortable ten minutes holding the stern together, I decided to check if the glue was working.
It wasn?t.
Eventually, the card was subdued and after leaving it to solidify overnight, I added a second layer, which worked somewhat better because of the larger surface to glue, trimmed the result down in places and filled gaps in others, and left that to solidify.
This done, I gave the lot a rough sanding, painted shellac all over the model and left the whole sticky mess overnight. Next morning it got more shellac, before going to work. Then I got out the 80 grit sandpaper, and lots of it: card soaked in shellac is very solid, so the sandpaper tends to give up first. Eventually I was able to go down to finer sandpaper, and fill remaining small gaps with wood filler and sand that in turn.
And then finally, a smooth hull. I was about to celebrate, then realised that having made all these complex shapes, I now had to make a deck to fit them?
05 December 2008, 04:02:20 PM