Nailing it. Slowly.

Soaking test bed. The cookie sheet is the only
container, short of the tub, that these planks fit in.

I started planking the hull.

Finally.

Part of the delay comes from doing research on how to arrange these planks. As you can see at right, the planks are long, straight pieces of wood. If I were building a model shoebox, this phase would be completed by now; however, the hull is plenty curved. Although these pieces of wood will eventually be covered by an outer lining, this plank arrangement is important practice for figuring out how to do that outer lining well.

I couldn't find any close-up pictures of someone else's Albatros build at this phase. However, I found enough pictures of other ships, plus some tips from a few books, to get started.

The first nail. You can see on the stern board my
off-center marks from my initial stab at lining it.

It all went pretty well. The wood needed only a few hours to soak to get pliant. I'd used a casserole dish for the bulwarks, but that doesn't cut it for the hull planks; I turned to a cookie sheet instead. I did two planks, mirrors for each other on either side of the hull. This is very soft wood, and at this point I can't imagine it distorting the overall ship while drying out -- but, still, I'm keeping both sides of the ship in sync.

One essential absent tool: a proportional divider to ensure that a plank's relative position on one side of the keel matches its partner's. I improvised with hash marks on Post-It notes, but I'm hoping to borrow, for this week at least, a divider from a colleague at work.

The nails -- really just beefed up pins -- drove through the planks pretty easily, i.e. with just finger power. I bought a tiny hammer a few weeks ago to drive them through the frames and support chocks at the bow and stern. A bit of glue as backup, with special attention with adhesive and pins at the bow.

The planks are just a little longer than the longest stretch along the hull. In the third picture, you can see some of that overbite on one of the planks; before driving in the last few pins, I trimmed the other plank . . . about 2mm too short. Not a tremendous flaw, considering that the bow will be covered both by the outer lining and then the false keel.

Two down, more than two to go

For the next plank-on-frame model, I should probably sand down the frames to better match the curvature of the hull planks sitting on top of them. You can see the big gap between planks and frame, especially toward the bow and stern, in the picture at right. I don't think this hurts the model per se, but this kind of spacing discrepancy affects how sound it is. I've noticed -- and created, through combinations of inexperience and inattentiveness -- a few tiny gaps and alignment discrepancies that I may be the only person to notice. But, I notice. I think the ship will still turn out looking good, but it'll be nice for the next one to look and be even better.

Addendum: a proportional divider is in the mail, and in the meantime I've borrowed one from a colleague. Let the planking continue!