Hello Ballastanksian,
My recent boat, number 30, I photographed its progress from day 1 every week or two until I finished it. I haven't managed to post any pictures, as I can't get the system to work and I'm not very good on computers. Somebody else has posted my other pictures, and if he was willing, I could send them to him. The first lesson I learned is when producing drawings is not to draw them on wallpaper joined edge to edge to get the size needed. I drew them on a large sheet of ply from Wickes, which is rigid and much more useful. Drawings on paper stretch and shrink with humidity and also tear very easily. Also needed is another ply board with battens down both sides and acrossways here and there to build the model on. This is marked with a centre line and lines across every 1/2 inch and the 'stations' numbered in inches. There must be holes cut out in the middle to put your hand inside. All the bulkheads and frames are cut out and attached to this board with nuts and bolts before skinning commences. Frames are needed at intervals no more than 4 inches, and 2 or 3 inch intervals where the hull shape is complicated. It's very similar to building a balsa model aircraft except you are using thin sheet metal. One thing with metal is that there are no shortcuts. The skin has to be right, you can't file or sand down the contours afterwards like you can with wood, it's only 25 to 45 thou thick. Metal is not easily bent in complicated curves without professional bending and shaping presses; you are generally limited to curves in one plane. The hull is assembled with 3/32 inch blind (pop) rivets, countersunk below the waterline and your personal choice above. Good quality rivets retain the snap head and are watertight, and even the slightest tendency to leak is cured once the model is painted. More troublesome are the seams, but are easily fixed with paint. Don't use filler to start with, it just sits on the outside. Use up any old gloss solvent-based paint on the inside of all the seams. It will penetrate the seams and may drip underneath the boat to start with, but after 8 coats, will fully seal all the joins. Colour is immaterial, I have loads from old house decoration jobs. Any holes and cut-outs in the frames and bulkheads need to be made before they are fitted. Drilling holes afterwards is very tricky. It can be done with a right-angle drill drive, or with a long drill, made by silver soldering a drill onto a long shaft, but it is not easy. When the hull is all rivetted up it can be removed from the assembly board; it will be very rigid and strong. All my stringers and longerons are either cut from sections of greenhouse frame or bent from sheet. For this you will need a couple of lengths of 3/4 x 1.1/2 mild steel bar about 2 or 3 feet long. You will need lots of G cramps and a piece of RSJ from a big building. Domestic RSJ's are a bit light in section. This is clamped to the work bench and the work all clamped up. It then remains to hammer up your sheet metal working along the edge gradually until you have it all bent up at right angles. It's easier to hammer upwards because you can see the line you are bending the metal to. You can't if it poitning downwards. I have a big collection of iron blocks of all shapes and sizes for shaping metal around. 'U' channel can be made by hammering the metal with it clamped to the edge of angle iron and hammering it around. Different gauges of angle iron will give different sections of channel. I'll stop here in case of gone on too long, but I can carry on if anybody wishes, and can certainly try to answer questions, and if all the construction stages are wanted I will submit more photos for inclusion. Peter