By the way . . . .. .
A simple way to build a clinker planked ships boat, or any planked hull is to get your mits on some of that blue or pink foam board used in building insulation.
The flying boys are doing cart wheels over this stuff as it make lovely light flying models, is easy to carve and sands well and is very tough. On their forums there is tons of advice on shaping and gluing this stuff.
Google 'foamies' for details.
Keep the hoover handy though because you end up with a pink halo that follows you around the house and the missus will take a slice out of your butt for your trouble!
From a model boat builder standpoint it can be used to carve a half model set against the keel of the boat you intend to build.
Or the method can be used on complete hulls using the old and well tried bread and butter hull building method.
On our new foam half hull mould we can draw the run of planks and then lay cardboard plank shapes over this (always salvage the cereal boxes before your kids consign them to the bin, as this stuff is great for plank templates!)
The foam takes pins beautifully and of course the resulting plank shapes are patterns for both sides of the hull.
Take some 1mm aircraft ply and a sharp pair of scissors in hand and chop out two sets of each plank. Chop up the foam half mold where you want frames to land and you have perfect half mold patterns at each point for each frame.
Lob all cut out plywood plank shapes together with your original wooden keel (as in the normal procedure for plank on frame models) on a little building board and chuck it all together.
Lob in a few ribs, thwarts and other required internal paraphernalia and hey presto!
A brand new ships dinghy!
Of course things are a little bit more involved (these are, errr more guidelines than your actual rules) (now where have I heard that before? Something to do with pirates?) than indicated here but you get the basic idea I hope
But with practice you end up with things like this
and this
and this
and also
This model is 15 3/4 inches stem to stern but you scale things up or down as required, the principles are the same.
It takes a little blood sweat and tears and a good dollop of swearing to get models of this sort exactly how you want them, but anything worth doing is exchangeable for a little pain of one form or another!
But once learned this method is like falling of a bike (I think!) you never forget how to do it!
