Almost forgot it's Wednesday.

Scharnhorst issue 32



As announced we finally begin planking the middle of the hull with the 32 first planking strips. At 3mm width these are the slimmest planking strips I've ever used, making them both the easiest and most tedious to work with. Easy because it's really simple to have them follow the lines of the ship without watering or prebending. Also chamfering becomes unneccessary. On the other hand, you have to put down a lot more strips than usual.

Tall ship builders might be wondering why the strips are not layed down in a pattern. With the strength of the MDF hull skeleton theres no need to pattern for more stability and as the hull is made of steel plates in the original anyway we actually don't want a pattern of planks to show.

Very tidy work on the planks.

Regards
delboy271155
(Derek)

Thanks, guys.

Scharnhorst Issue 33



When it comes to planking there are two very different groups present in the ship model building community. There's the ones like me, that find an almost meditative quality in the work involved and then there's the second larger group of ship builders that absolutely DESPISE planking getting increasingly annoyed at doing the same task over and over again with hardly any progress seen, oh God, why won't it END?

To accomodate the second group, this kit has sporadic intermissions where we do something different to break up the planking work a bit. Here's the first one already.

With this issue we clad the area around the drive shafts with preformed ABS parts. Like the stern and bow, this area would be very very hard to build out of wood. We also extend the keel a bit with a wood strip we received a few issues ago.

Love it or loath it that planking looks very neat.



Regards
delboy271155
(Derek)

Scharnhorst issue 35



Finishing up planking of the middle section of the hull, we learn how to cut strips to size so they will fit in gaps. Afterwards all the nails are pulled and the planked section is given a once over with sandpaper to smooth it.

We've reached the 25% landmark in the build, so it's time to have another look at the whole thing put together so far.

Great work

Are the bow, stern and propeller sections permanently attached at this point? If they are won't that complicate the planking around those areas?

Your last photo really gives the idea of the scale, she’s a biggy
Looking good. So keep up the good work.
Regards Gray

Yeah, it's the same group of designers who did the Bismarck partwork


Scharnhorst issue 36



We start planking the second section of the hull. Now that we know HOW planking is done, the instructions speed up things a bit and so we lay down about double the amount of strips then we did in the sessions before.

Nice tidy work, coming on very nicely.

Mark