Model Boat Building IV: Painting the Waterline

One of the most anxiety fraught parts of making any model boat is painting the waterline. Because of its prominence, mistakes are obvious to anyone even casually looking at the boat. If done well, a good paint job can cover a multitude of mistakes made while creating the hull.

The first step is to draw the waterline correctly. Measure the points at the bow and stern where the waterline will be. The Yankee Hero kit comes with laser cut guides to help you find these points. More advanced kits often require you to figure out this point from the plans. The boat then needs to be carefully placed upside down so that the bow and stern points you drew are the same distance from the ground. Use blocks of wood to help adjust the boat (see first photo). You can tape down the boat if you need to, but it makes it harder to draw the line.

To draw the line, glue a pencil to a piece of wood that is attached perpendicularly to another piece of wood. Carefully trace around the boat. It helps to do it several times. If you have a large lazy Susan, it really helps to have the boat rest on this as it makes it easier to spin the boat around without moving it!

The best way to paint the waterline is to use thin masking tape to cover the water line and paint. The Yankee Hero has a boottop (the white stripe) and you can use decal tape that is the same size as the boottop and then retape after you paint. Paint above the waterline first. I like to paint several coats over several days. This allows time for the paint to dry and assures and attractive finish and clean line. Patience really pays off!

In the case of the Yankee Hero, I used the tape to make the boottop. You can also get special tape at an auto-parts dealer or hobby shop to make lines. While its possible to get two pieces of masking tape parallel to each other over some distance to make a line, I don't recommend it.

Model Boat Building III: Deck and Cabin

One of the nice things about taking time off is the ability to spend a lot of time on things that you like to do but often don't have enough time to pursue. In my case, this means tennis (not worth blogging about, but funny to watch) and model boat building. I am just finishing off the cabin of the Yankee Hero as I write this. Although at times I feel like I am building a doll house, building the deck and the deck structures really gives a boat its character and imparts realness to a model.

I always think building the deck furniture is going to be easy. It certainly seems it after you finish either carving or planking the hull. Many kits, including the Yankee Hero, have laser cut, tabbed pieces which just fit together. Having said that, the human eye forgives some errors in curvature. It doesn't make those same mistakes with right angles. And , in my opinion, non-modelers look more carefully at the deck and masts than they do at the hull. So it helps to be careful.

Several tricks help. The most important is to use a block to help hold the pieces of wood as you glue them together. This keeps the corners straight. The second is to sand off any spare bits of wood on the pieces of wood. This also allows you to have a clean corner.

I am a great believer in using several coats of paint, particularly for light colors such as white, and sanding with fine sandpaper between coats. Its a pain to do, but it has a much better appearance when completed. A good paint job can also be used to cover up some pretty ugly errors!

Setting the cabin into the hull is always very exciting. Just make sure that the piece sits in the deck correctly before gluing it in. Sometimes you have to sand or cut part of the deck or bulkhead to make sure the cabin sits true.

The Yankee Hero kit has a well designed cabin that is reasonably easy to make. My only criticism is that they could have supplied a few more strips of 3/32" x 3/32" basswood. It needs to be rounded to make molding (see photo). Its easy to screw this up, and they don't give you much extra. They should.

Model Boat Building II: Shaping the Hull

I have spent the past few days of my vacation shaping the hull of the "Yankee Hero," the quoddy fishing boat that I am building. Although in more complicated kits you often build an actual keel, frame it, and shape wood strips around it to form the boat, in simpler kits you get a very roughly shaped piece of basswood which you then have to finish. I have to admit, that in this age of computer guided 3D printers, it seems a bit odd to be trying to even out the two sides of a chunk of wood using sandpaper and a hobby knife. But its very therapeutic and incredibly satisfying when you look at it after you've been working several hours and see how much better it looks than when you started. Its also not as hard as you would think.

There are several tips that I can pass on for hull-shaping. The first is to constantly check to make sure that the keel is straight, and that the keel lines up with the tops of bow and sternpost. I really like using curved hobby knives to carve: they stick to the curve of the boat much better than a straight edge. Little errors on the curves of the bow can be corrected as you go, but it is much easier to do if there is a real centerline that you can follow.

The second tip is don't be afraid to sand the whole hull down, see how it looks, and restart the carving process. While I'm sure that you would need to do this less if were to care hulls repeatedly, but if you, like me, are truly an amateur, it helps to "finish" and then start again!

Because the hull is three dimensional and the plans you receive are two dimensional, it can be difficult to ascertain how close to "scale" you truly are. Don't worry about it to much. If it looks close and even to you, it will look great when its finished!!


NEW: Flickr Photos of the Yankee Hero's Progress!

Model Boat Building I

Although I have spent the majority of time filling this blog with information on the manly pursuits of hockey and cooking, I feel it is time to expand my horizons a bit. One of the pursuits I have enjoyed doing in the past is building wooden model ships. I have been feeling a hankering to get back into this recently, and decided to buy a somewhat simple model to get the feel for it again. I also wanted something I could bring out to Fire Island and get back after my vacation.

Blue Jacket Ship Crafters is a 102 year old company in Maine that designs professional model boats and also makes a variety of kits in a wide range of skill levels. Compared to some of the other companies that do this, many European, their instructions, plans and supplied equipment are of top quality. Because this is my vacation, I was particularly pleased to see that they made "all-inclusive" kits, which include tools, paint and pretty much everything else you need to make a boat. Bluejacket has an excellent web page, and my model was delivered quickly.

I have decided to build the "Yankee Hero." This is a model of a "quoddy" fishing boat originally built in Maine in 1889. The original boat is in the Smithsonian. This type of ship was commonly used to fish well through the beginning of the Twentieth Century. I have to admit that visiting boy 1 in Maine and visiting the Maritime Museum there rekindled my interest in model boat building and in building this boat in particular.

Compared to my cooking or eating reviews, I feel that these will more personal than technical, describing my experience making the boat. Since I am truly a rank amateur, I am not anticipating adding much to the World's knowledge of model ship building. But I am hoping to solidify my model building knowledge by documenting my progress as I build the ship.