It's kind of repetitive to say how busy I've been lately, but it does impact the modeling time. I continue with the tedious task of laying the 1mm X 3.2mm X 102mm planks. Each plank is cut to size, all four edges of the top surface scraped with a scalpel to knock off the sharp edges and give definition between the planks, and then glued down. I'm laying them in a staggered pattern of 4 rows before I repeat the pattern. I futzed around with the contrast and such on this photo so that hopefully you can see what I'm talking about.



That's it for now, but I believe I might have worked out how to begin laying out the casemate, something I've been pondering for a couple of months now. Hopefully I can proceed soon, or at the very least finish planking the bottom of the hull and move to the hull sides, which will be done in the same manner as the bottom.

Your planking looks good, It will give a good base for painting and weathering.

Cheers/Jan

It doesn't look like much progress, but it's a major milestone as far as I'm concerned: I have finished planking the bottom of the hull! I'm happy with it, so I'll be using this process for the rest of the ship. A couple of quick photos of the bow and stern sections here.



These are before-and-after shots of a sort: on one side of the hull the planking is still sticking out before being trimmed. On the other side I've trimmed them and sanded flush with a very firm sanding block and metal files; you can't have any flex in the sanding medium in this area.



I've finally decided on the method for building the casemate. I'm starting with a sheet of .040" styrene, cut to the shape of the deck and as long as the base of the casemate. I'll cut this out, and then cut out the majority of the interior of this sheet as well. The idea is to have a thin sheet all of the way around, sort of like a footer for the wall in a house, to build the side timbers upon. This might be a little backwards and odd way to go about this, but right now it makes sense to me.

Wonderful work Devin

An embarrassing long time since an update, but work, vacation, writing, blah blah blah...

This is a single shot of the beginning of the gun deck and casemate construction. I've decided that I want the casemate to be a separate assembly for ease of interior detailing. This is the start of it: the "floor" of the gun deck is taped to the hull, the forward and aft ends of it are where the casemate will meet the deck. (note, this is a different piece than I had in the previous post, I had to cut it again, got a little overzealous the first time!) I have it taped in place for final shaping, and I drilled four holes and have inserted wire to help hold it in place, and also to key the assembly so that I can line it up exactly as construction progresses. The other sheet in the foreground is the top of the casemate, or the hurricane deck. The next step is to take the casemate bottom and the hurricane deck, both of 1mm styrene, and sandwich a sheet of pink insulation foam between them, then start sanding to shape. We'll see how this goes...

Picking up from the gun deck decking photo above. Here it is being glued to a sheet of ordinary pink insulation sheet foam. I got lucky (again) and the sheet foam's thickness of 1" turned out to be the exact height I needed between the casemate floor and roof. I used white glue for this step as the foam will be coming out and I want that process to be as easy as possible.



Once that was done I flipped the assembly over, centered and aligned the sheet styrene for the top of the casemate, and glued that to the foam using white glue as well.



When the whole sandwich dried, then I shaped it. I started with a coarse rasp file, switched to a fine one, then did the final sanding with 150 grit sandpaper in a sanding block. The rasp made quick work of the foam, almost too quick at times. The foam sands and shapes very well, though.



All of the rough sanding done, most of the fine work as well. There are some gaps that I will fill with spackle before I sheet over the foam with more styrene for the casemate sides. Here's an overall shot; besides the pink color it's starting to look like a gunboat.



Here's a view of the stern, showing how well the foam blends to the curves. There's a little more work to be done to get it all lined up and right, but it's darn close.



I've also started thinking about what I'm going to put in the interior of this thing. Here's the five styrene tubes that will make up the boiler assembly.

Looking good!