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Wooden hull is basically done and I am so proud of it! I have never expected before I could really do it. It was tough but it was not as bad as I had expected. Important thing here is that during planking, I did not have to care about how planks were laid next to each other as all will be covered anyway. Well, I mean I did care but not as much as I would have if were about to do hull of historic ship and would want to leave realistic timber visible.

Rivets and plates of the hull

Here comes a big one. Originally I planned to plank bulkheads, sand it, shape it, fill wherever would be required and then nicely paint it. However, somewhere deep in my mind I had this idea of plating the hull as it would have looked in real live. I was so lucky to get picture from KID showing hull with totally cool lines of steel plates and rivets! Having such details I had to do decent steel plates. From the pictures you can figure out the distance between real frames and how plates were laid over them. I only had to simulate that.

  My Method of Plating

Rivets making tools

1. Mark on the hull with pencil locations of frames- in my case they were 1.5 cm apart.
2. Out of transparent paper cut out long rectangle; place it on the hull and draw on paper locations of marked frames. It sounds easy but as you go along and you want to have nice looking and smooth steel plates where hull becomes oval, you will have fun.
3. Place this slip of paper on metal plate making sure that the side you have just drew on will touch the metal. In other words, imagine you put paper between metal plate and hull; I have to get “negative position” of lines as I will be pushing out rivets. With something sharp mark the shape “inside shape” on the metal and then mark lines where you will be putting rivets. Not all lines will be parallel! At least not everywhere.
4. Now get from somewhere wheel with teeth (has it got some name, no idea) e.g. old watch as I did, and with ruler roll it over the lines you have drew. You will need to practice a bit to get desired result in terms of rivets’ size.

You can see first results. I used aluminium from coke and beer cans. I thought it would work. It did only at the beginning; I would not be able to finish the job with that. Aluminium from cans is not plastic enough! Also I was thinking that rivets are a bit too big. Finally made up my mind and removed everything and started from the beginning… this time using proper 0.1 mm copper!

On one of the pictures you can see nice brass keel. Before I started to put copper plates I decided to attach keel first. The keel I made of U brass profile (5x3mm). I glued it with 2 components epoxy resin (UHU). Actually all copper plates I glued also with UHU but only simple all-purpose elastic one.