With most of the parts made I started trying to figure out how to assemble the Forecastle hoodway, remembering that I need to be able to open up the Forecastle hoodway as much as possible to allow a reasonable air flow through into the hull, when the steam plant is installed.

I marked out then carefully cut out the notch in the roof.

Using a spacer I was able to temporally clamp things together, checking that there is sufficient clearance for the sliding hood to operate.

After some adjusting of the sides to reduce vertical clearance I made the leap and glued a couple of bits together.

Then glued the other side and roof on, leaving out the sliding hood so there would be no risk of gluing it and also give me the opportunity to clean up any excess glue where it runs.

After the main gluing was done I sanded the roof flush with the sides and general cleaned things up.

Next I glued the side guide rails one at a time, using a piece of ply with sticky tape wrapped around to prevent being glued in, each of these gluing operations were done while leaving them overnight to dry, meaning it took a few days to assemble.

I wanted to simulate planking on the roof and sliding hatch and after carefully marking out I scribe the lines.

With the hasp and staple glued on the hoodway it is nearing completion only needs little bits glued in to stop the sliding hood coming out, that will be after painting the colour.

That will do it for this one, next time some painting, thanks for looking in and reading my ramblings or just looking at the photo’s and stay safe.

Happy new year.

Cheers,
Stephen.

At long last some painting.

There are quite a few bits that need to be painted blue, I used Automotive Primer Filler on the Aft Skylight to fill the grain and give a smooth surface, lightly sanding between coats, with a bit of rinse and repeat going on.

After I had a smooth surface I assembled the portholes removing the glazed outer rings.

Next came a bit of masking the Forecastle Hoodway needing a bit of time to achieve what I was looking for, along with the Main fish hatch and Aft Skylight these were all painted on the inside with an off white first.

Everything was given a light coat of Automotive Etch Primer before the specially mixed Tamiya Acrylic was applied.

Then the Hasp and Staple was masked and painted Black.

Next up was to slide the hood in underneath the roof and glue the small pieces that stop the hood coming out and carefully sand it back until flush.

Then everything was painted with an Automotive Clear Coat all of this painting was done using my Badger Renegade Krome gravity fed airbrush.

If you are wondering why the clear over the colour it is to provide protection and enable weathering.

The main fish hatch covers are Blue on one side with clear on the underside to highlight the Huon Pine grain. I had made 2 spare main hatch covers that are clear coated all round.

I would have to say I am happy with the overall result with the grain showing through in areas where I wanted that sort of finish. As normal it took more time than expected, I thought I could knock it over in an afternoon, more like 4-5 afternoons.

That is not quite it for parts painted blue, the other bits haven’t been made yet they need the deck to be planked first.

If you are wondering why the deck is not planked yet there are a few reasons the main one being my original method looked like it wasn’t going to work that is to plank the deck then build the bulwarks, then make and fit the structures I have just finished.

The latest plan is to finish the covering boards build the bulwarks then plank the deck, all of this is subject to change.
That will do it for this one, at the moment I am thinking of taking a break from this build, a minor workshop re-organization and maybe throw some stuff out.

Next time I will probably get back to the Bulwarks starting with the capping rail, thanks for looking in and reading my ramblings or just looking at the photo’s and stay safe.

Cheers,
Stephen.

Hi Guys,
I am not sure why the photos didn't appear on the initial post, tried again today and it worked, much better with photos.

Cheers,
Stephen.

Back to working on the Drifter after a bit of a clean up and finishing off making a Rope Making and Serving Machine.

One of the reasons I stopped working on this project is because I had reached a point where I couldn’t work out a way forward, the problem being fixing the position of Stanchions in relation to cut outs in the covering boards, my initial idea was to make the capping rail and temporarily pin it in place this presented problems, mainly with how long it would take, so I came to a halt.

Fast forward a couple of months and after reading Tree to Sea for a while a way forward presented itself, that didn’t involve making the capping rail first. One thing that helped me was a drawing on page’s 97 & 107 that clearly showed the “filling”.

The idea was to make filling boards that are much longer than in real practice. The real ones “filling” a space between stanchions under the capping rail, my ones being long lengths that help to fix a position for the stanchions.

The first job to be done was to run a fairing batten to the correct heights and marking the stanchions then cut them to height.
A rebate needed to be cut on each stanchion to allow the long filling strips to sit in the wright spot then be pinned in position.

Next I made up a former to steam the strips into something resembling the right shape, this former will be handy when I come to plank the bulwarks.

Once this was done I could sight along the rail for irregularity's a few stanchions needed some attention though in general I was quite pleased.

More to come...

Thanks for looking in and reading my ramblings or just looking at the photo’s and stay safe.

Cheers,
Stephen.

I was happy with the progress until I re-discovered a problem I had forgotten about. The problem being some Stanchions don’t line up with the Thwartship Boards something that at the time I thought would be alright, well several months later looking at it again I didn’t think it was alright.

What to do, 3 choices came to mind, redo all of the stanchions, leave it the way it is or move the appropriate stanchions. The perfectionist in me thought the only way forward was to redo all of the stanchions which in turn would mean redoing all of the covering boards, not so happy about that idea....

After a couple of days to contemplate, I decided I would do a mock up, moving the appropriate stanchions without pinning and just see how it looked. To my surprise it didn’t look as bad as expected and after a couple of days in their new position I thought it was acceptable, I decided to try modifying the affected covering boards and see how they looked. I think that once a little bit of weathering is done it should be very hard to tell where changes were made.

Once I was reasonably happy I proceeded to start work on the Pin Rail and Knightheads steam bending some material roughly to shape. I ended up making a couple of these because there are quite large differences in the plans for the Pin Rails, one plan shows one length while another shows a different length, while one plan was basically the same as Ted Frosts book I decided to go with that.

The Pin Rails needed brackets or Irons to be made these I made from Brass cutting strips then using my Hold “N” Fold to fold the Brass.
Then marking and drilling the holes then trimming to length.

Fitting onto the model required holding in place and drilling holes for the Brass pins to go into.

Once again after a bit of time has passed, I have decided to re-make the forward pair of the covering boards, the main reason being where the added part lies is right where a freeing port grate is and would be quite visible.

More to come...

That’s enough waffle for now, thanks for looking in and reading my ramblings or just looking at the photo’s and stay safe.

Cheers,
Stephen. 

You would think I would be getting faster at making covering boards, well no such luck. After remaking the 2 covering boards it was time to remove all the stanchions again then start gluing down all the covering boards. I have also glued in place the main fish hatch and aft skylight.

Next up is to start planking the deck, I would have thought this would be a fairly straight forward thing however that doesn’t seem to be the case. My initial thoughts were to start from the center and work my way out, straight forward I think then reading Ted’s book he says that the deck was laid out with leaders or long planks as pictured in Ted’s sketch and described in the green highlighted text.

I have setup a couple of long planks to get an idea of how things are going to look.

The Starboard side I have pushed out so they fairly closely follow the covering board inner curve, on the Port side I have bought the ends in slightly although they appear to be straight they aren't.

I am not sure which way to go at present, I like the way the Starboard side looks but then, is it too pronounced a curve, is something closer to the Port side more like it?

Any constructive criticism would be welcomed.

More to come…

Thanks for looking in and reading my ramblings or just looking at the photo’s and stay safe.

Cheers,
Stephen. 

Whilst racking my head as to how best to proceed with the deck planking, I started thinking about the Bilge and Circulating Pump outflow, something I have been thinking about on and off for a while.

In Ted's book he describes approximately where these are located on page 125, and highlighted in the photo.

With sketches on the preceding page.

I think I have worked out where the location is roughly, see photo of model and photo of sketch.

Although I am reluctant to cut the Binn iron just yet, if anyone has any thoughts on weather this is probably the right spot I would like to hear them.

Cheers,
Stephen.

I have found out over the last week or so that there are numerous ways to plank a deck.

I have seen all manor of variations in photos of the real thing and on models. I have come to the conclusion that like many things in life there are different ways of doing things and the way Ted describes in his book is different from anything I can find in photos.

After a lot of headaches and trying a couple of different deck plank arraignments, I have decided to go with deck planks that run parallel to the Deck house coaming coming into a gentle curve Forward and Aft.

I will attempt to do something similar to the method that Ted describes in his book photos of the sketches included, page 76-77 for those with the book Tree to Sea.

I still don’t know how I am going to do the forecastle so I thought I would make a start around midships and focus on getting planks parallel to the wheelhouse coaming.

Nothing is pinned or glued yet, just getting some experience in cutting and an idea of how things might look.

More to come…

Thanks for looking in and reading my ramblings or just looking at the photo’s and stay safe.

Cheers,
Stephen. 

I wasn’t really happy with the thinned down planks, I mean it worked on the model but when I thought about it, they weren't right. When faced with this sort of problem I like to think about how I or the shipwrights would have done it, and in my opinion they would do things in a way that is time and material efficient and removing half of a few planks didn’t add up.

On my initial planks I had a 2.5mm step in them, this caused too much of a severe bend when laying (it doesn’t seem to show up in the photos but the bend is more than wanted) to the point that one snapped. What to do, read Teds description of how the planks were cut again to find the step was only 1 ¾” on the real thing which at 1/24th scale is roughly 1.8mm, so the planks that have a very shallow taper I tried making them with a step closer to 1mm and success. My idea is to increase the step size up to 1.8 for the planks that have a steeper angle. In reality there is no surprise when you look at after it is done, but it took me a dozen planks to work it out, all part of that learning curve.

I did some experiments a couple of years ago with caulking and found that a mix of Titebond 3 West Systems 406 filler Black Artists Acrylic worked quite well in those experiments, this is what I decided to try.

In the excitement to lay the first plank I forgot to do an experiment with a wider caulking gap of .8mm to see how it looked, (my earlier experiments had a gap of around .4mm) and for some reason I thought it would be alright to go with .8mm, so when I laid the first plank and looked at it I thought that is too wide, and promptly pulled it up before the glue mix set.

After shaping the planks, I glue a piece of .44mm brass wire (something I have plenty of, see photo) along one edge of the plank to get the spacing (I tried just sitting a piece on the deck beams but it didn’t work), then pre-drill and pinning the planks in position before removing and weathering, then the final assembly.

Remember I am looking for an irregular finish due to Teds comment that after the tar was poured into the nail holes and seams it would be left as was in a rough state.

Some days when I see the messey caulking I am not happy other days I think it is working. At the moment I am going to press on with this method as I think I need more planks laid before the effect is more apparent, at least I can remove excess glue mix to get more even results and if I really don’t like it I can sand it back.

Next time, a slight deviation.

Thanks for looking in and reading my ramblings or just looking at the photo’s and stay safe.

Cheers,
Stephen. 

I have always been going to RC the Mizzen sail.
Controlling both Raise & Lower and Port & Starboard using 2 servos or winches.

The original idea was to mount both servos in the Galley (aft part of deck house) later on it became apparent that the Port & Starboard servo would be best placed somewhere aft of the deck house.

This is something I had forgotten about, although while looking at my decking attempts, I started thinking whether there was anything else I needed to do under the deck level before laying all of the deck.

Then I remembered I needed to fit a servo, or should I say “shoe horn” one in as there is not a lot of space left once the steam plant is in.

The plans show 3 tackles attached to the aft end of the Mizzen boom, see photo. From my limited knowledge of Gaff rigs having these 3 tackles is not generally practiced on other types of vessels, in Ted’s book there is a brief description of why the other 2 tackles are present.

Thankfully I had a 4 turn Sail Winch in stock and could start playing around with how on earth I was going to squeeze it in. In the end it wasn’t too bad, after a bit of a fiddle I made up a cardboard template and adjusted it a couple of times, then cut the shape into a piece of plywood later adding some strengthening pieces out of Spruce.

I drilled a hole in the aft sub deck for a brass tube to be inserted into and thread it’s way to the servo position avoiding the rudder actuator, later on after much thought I decided to add a second tube to enable me to control 2 lines or I can drop back to a single.
I then added a couple of clamps to keep the brass tubes in place.

The reason for this is I am concerned about the angle that the center tackle will tip over to will be very flat when the Mizzen boom is let out a fair bit, which I think will cause the boom to lift quite a bit, this is due to the mounting point being very high, that’s where the ability to try adding another tackle this time Port & Starboard should prevent the boom lifting all that much, we will see how that plays out later on.

Then some more adjustments, drill mounting holes make a brass nut and glue in place, the entire servo and mount are removable if needed, to finish off I varnished the mount and areas that I had ground down in fitting the brass tubes.

I have included some pics of the steam plant in the boat with the removable upper section in place, before the deck is fully on, I am really glad I installed all the gear before doing the deck as it would have been a nightmare to do after the deck is fitted.

More to come…

Thanks for looking in and reading my ramblings or just looking at the photo’s and stay safe.

Cheers,
Stephen.