A bonus today! - Two parts together!
It's happened because I've realised I don't have any photos of the next stage (Part 12), which would make the post rather short.
I'm really sorry about the photo showing the making of the gunwhales in part 13 - it was the only one I had! (and yes, it is yours truly)
‘Natterer’ – A shipbuilding Odyssey? – Part 12
By this stage, I’d temporarlily had enough of the mechanicals, and decided it was time to work on the decks and topworks. But since varnishing the hull, I’d been talking to a friend about the problems I was having with a vintage electric launch, constructed with similar sized planks to Natterer. Every winter, after a season on the river, she would dry out and the planks would shrink. The next season she would leak like a sieve until she took up again. My friend is very much in to model yachting and suggested I should try one of their techniques by glassing the hull on the outside. Apparently the model aircraft boys use this as well to cover the wings. Very wary about this, but decided to experiment on an old hull. I used a very fine glassfibre cloth, almost like a thin sheet of satin, draped over the hull and stippled through with resin. It becomes instantly see-through, and can be moved around to cover the contours of the hull. When dried, it can be further resined to cover any “starved” areas, and then polished to a high gloss. The finish is superb, with no seam lines, and in fact it is impossible to tell it is there other than on a sharp edge, which will end slightly rounded!
Anyway, I next tried it on the vintage launch and it was fantastic! No more shrinkage/leakage problems. So after a couple of seasons with the launch, and no ill effects, I took the bull by the horns and turned Natterer upside down before slavering paint stripper on all my nice varnish. (Yes – it took a lot of nerve!) When every last trace of varnish was off, I draped the cloth over her and started with the resin, working from the keel outwards. It was quite amazing the way the cloth could be moulded to the hull, and I found that one piece of cloth covered the whole hull in one go, with the only ‘seam’ being on the stem (which of course is covered by the brass stem piece. I seemed to be polishing for a week, but what a finish! Obviously, you couldn’t use this technique on a lot of scale boats, as the finish would be too high, but the steam launches were ‘big boy’s toys’ and generally finished to a very high standard, so quite acceptable.
I’m afraid no pictures for this stage (I was as nervous as h***, and forgot to take any!
So lets go straight on to the next part
‘Natterer’ – A shipbuilding Odyssey? – Part 13
Anyway, on to the topworks. Natterer is flush-decked fore and aft, and also in the mid-section, over the power-plant, with fore and aft cockpits for crew and passengers.
Nothing particularly of note about the basic deck framework and planking, as it was all straightforward framing, albeit of quite large size. The planking on the mid-section was parallel, but that on the fore and aft decks was gently curved to follow the line of the gunwhales, before being joggled into a kingplank on the centreline, and so had to be cut out of extra-wide stock. Black card was used on the planking edges to represent the caulking.
The gunwhales themselves were a challenge, as they were 20 x 3mm in section and I wanted them in one piece from bow to stern. This entailed persuading them to follow the line of the gunwhale, meaning they had to be curved in the plane of the minor axis (i.e. flat) This meant steaming, and a steam chest was rigged up using a length of copper pipe, well lagged, and a domestic wallpaper steam stripper to produce the necessary steam. The shape of the gunwhale was transferred to the building board, and a series of blocks screwed down each side, which would enable the timber to be clamped in position after steaming. The gunwhale was to be bent on a rather tighter radius to allow for the inevitable relaxation that would occur when the clamps were loosened.
The gunwhales were steamed for about fifteen minutes, and then quickly transferred to the board, where myself and a friend clamped them up. Absolute poetry in motion, as the pair of us danced and wove around each other wielding wedges and hammers – actually a lot of tripping up, hitting of thumbs and even a few naughty words. When dry, they were released, and relaxed as anticipated to take up the required shape, before they were firmly screwed to infill blocks between the gunwhale strake and the internal stringer. Job done!
The remaining timber works on the deck included making access hatches in four locations, each with an inset brass lie-flat handle. No commercial items available at this sort of scale (if indeed at any scale) so they were hacked and milled out of brass sheet, and yes, they do work! There is a very pretty looking skylight over the engine so you can look at the whirly bits while they’re working (shades of looking at the engines on the Isle of Wight ferries when I was younger (much younger)
While making the handles for the hatches, I realised it was really quite difficult to envisage the size of fittings required, as with the odd scale of 1:4.5 the crew was going to be rather large – in fact the captain is 16” (400mm). The solution was to produce “George”, an articulated two-dimensional figure, which could be sat in the boat as necessary and enabled me to sort out seat heights, wheel sizes, reversing levers, Windermere Kettles and so on. Very useful, and I’ll use similar mock-ups while building any future boats.
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Topic: Natterer - A shipbuilding Odyssey? (Read 23105 times)