Frigate Chapter Five: 2nd Planking
After a brief section of marking and cutting out the gunports. This in itself was just messy. I used the template and drew in the gunports making certain that both sides were level and then drilled inside my line many,many little holes esentially using my drill as a mini saw. After that the ports were filed down before putting the sides in for thsoe gunports which will not be lidded. One problem hit here is that the gunports arrival makes some of the intervening planks have very little support between them and thus have a risk of coming apart under the required heavy filing. Some sort of support to hld the planks in would be useful.
Lower planking was then started. Below the marked line the planks would be 5mm walnut strips. I followed a rigorous path of only doing 1 plank a day. The ends were trimmed buy eye and the upside of every pair of planks was sanded before planking (outside to avoid the dreaded dust). This worked remarkably well and the resultant fit was a lot tighter than my previous model. When the planks were glued holes were drilled immediately below the plank and push pins pushed in to firstly hold the plank as close as possible to the one above and also to hold the plank against the under plank.
There were a few gaps wich were filled with stealers if at the end or fller if
they were large enough. The other problem was that due to excessive keeness I
happily planked around the bulge of the ship stopping as it hit the stern and bow,
but after re-reading the instructions noticed that this said plankng should stop
5mm from the stern so had to add extra planks to fill this area. As this will all
be under the coppering this thankfully was not to big a disaster.
The Upper planking went in fairly easily though the wood was of slightly worse quality though
that might have been caused by the smaller side to be sawn. Extensive use of pegs as clamps along
with the ever useful push pins helped. Care had to be taken when using the push pins as
it was important not to push the pin through the innter gundeck bulwarks.
