Bounty by Constructo Part 7 Tapering Planks

g'day and welcome back to my channel now one of the things that a lot of people who are new to making wood chips planking is difficult okay and especially when it comes to tapering they start off at the plank is supplied in the middle but as they go to the stern they get a lot thinner and you know the same thing happens at the bow the planks thin out now there's not as much space how do you work that out now there are many complicated ways to do it but i think i've hit on a very simple and organic way to do it that anyone even if you're not very good at maths this is so easy and you'll be able to work out your plank tapering and get all your planks to fit together and it'll look just as nice as this wanna know about that all right hang in there roll the music now one of the questions i get asked a lot is about tapering like how do you work out how thin are your planks going to need to be how do you get them to all fit perfectly and thin all the way down and it looks like it's something that's really complicated and i've tried to explain it using tables and spreadsheets things like that which you know a lot of you are not mathematically oriented i know that and i see your eyes roll you know virtually across the screen and i've seen this all my life i mean i understand mathematics very analytical mathematical mind but not everyone's like that so i have tried hard to work out an organic technique to do this and this is the best that i can come up with and actually it kind of makes it easier so not only have i sort of not dumbed it down but tried to make it less complicated now if you haven't watched the previous videos then i'll explain now i have already planked the first layer here this side though i've done both layers now i've done that for the video you normally don't do it this way you you would do basically a plank or two this side a plank or two that side slowly build up your first layer slowly build up your first layer and then do your second layer but because of my needs to create videos i have i have done it that unusual way so if that confuses you for start i'm just doing it this strange way to illustrate things but assuming we are doing things evenly let's let's do that now my first layer i have done and to do that i needed to divide the hull into three sections because the three sections get operated on and get tapered differently they are consistent that all the tapers are pretty all the same in section one in section two and in section three so once you know that it's not really that big a deal you've just got you know a one two three a b c if you like now i start with the top section here okay so i'll turn the hole this way so i'm not working upside down all right the top part of the hull which is relatively straight up and down and these planks usually can go on with no tapering at all in the case of this kit the bounty yes that was possible there's no tapering at all that is the six millimeter plank from there all the way to the bow okay and then the only reason i haven't put planks here is i've used this method where we basically keep the tapering to an absolute minimum for the first layer to make our first layer easier and we fill the ends with bolsa as i've explained in previous videos now section one section two and section three just happen to be all the same number of planks for this bounty kit it's not always that way not always but generally speaking your hull is relatively flat the side of the hull right above the waterline and then at the water line it starts to turn right the turn of the hull and the turn of the hole goes all the way to the keel now the mid point of the turn of the hull is this line that i've drawn here so these define the zones the water line so to speak or the whale line the middle of the turn and the kill one two three okay and your deck defines this one usually that's your deck before you put any forecastle or um you know stern superstructure on this is always worked out from the level of the deck so from deck to water line from waterline to middle of the turn from middle of the turn to keel those are three areas some ships depending on the shape they are they might have more of a flat bottom or they may be more sharper there they may have not much basically free board here this might be very short on them you know or they might be very tall that all changes it just so happens in the bounty for the kind of ship that it is there's eight planks there eight planks there and eight planks there when they're six millimeters right which is what was supplied in the kit so basically it becomes a very easy way to illustrate these sections so my first eight planks go on and they are not tapered so those first two millimeter thick eight plank wide strips on they go and they become basically my strikes okay an entire run like that as a strike a plank is just like from there to there that's a blank planks together it's called a strike so there you go so when you have a lot of them they're all straight together okay or run i'll often call it a run it runs nice work anyhow so these runs or strikes are actually single planks and we do that modelling because it's easier it's easier to do one big long you know strike and then you can divide it up and mark it as single blanks later now my first layer too for those who haven't seen the other videos yeah i've got um toothpicks in there which is spiked in this big long plank to hold in place but that doesn't matter because it's all going to get covered up okay when the second layer goes on all of that disappears because the second layer usually doesn't need pinning the planks of the second layer are very thin so they can just be basically wet and bent and twisted so it's not a problem in my case i have brown ones and i have white ones that's only because i wanted that kind of coloration for my model okay because the ships of this period before they were copper plated had white lower hulls and then the upper part was darker colors usually blues and you know greens and whatever whatever color they wanted to paint things i wanted to really keep the wood texture so i've gone with this kind of using natural colors of wood the very light white yellow color and then the darker red brown color to give my ship a uh a natural demarcation there at the waterline there will be a plank that goes across here on the outside which is my whale i don't think it's about two planks and so that tends to um if you make a little bit of gaff when you join if it's too thin in one spot too thick and the other don't worry because your whale is going to go across there pretty well cover most of the sins of the join if your join wasn't perfect but anyhow okay so our first eight planks easy we'll just put those on basically they will not require tapering glue them on we will have a bit of trouble bending them into shape here so they need to be nice and wet and in my case i use the electric planking tool which is a big fat soldering iron with a knob on it and with that i will convince these planks to bend and twist into shape and i showed all that in previous videos and i will show you more as we go ahead working out your tapers section a don't have to worry about that done sections b and c okay first you need to know where is this midpoint and it's pretty easy to work out because you've only got to measure from where you finished up here with section a down to your keel and in my case that is basically 96 97 millimeters that is terrific because it's 16 six millimeter wide blanks okay two lots of eight so that's great so we then can measure half that distance so 48 all right we've only got it's only simple math 48 halfway and halfway 48 48 we can get a midpoint now just so happens this frame here this bulkhead that all these planks are on and this bulkhead and this bulkhead they're the widest ones in the kit and that's kind of you you get that around the middle of your ship you'll have two or maybe three bulkheads and they form the widest thickest part of the ship and they should be consistent so these ones here all measure and give me that 40 47 48 48 48 basically allows me to have eight planks eight planks and they no taper required at all so for that section there there's no tapering but as we go this way they're going to get thinner now how much thinner they get well this is how you work it out once you know where the bulkheads are that for not tapering and hopefully you've got at least two right so we'll just say you've got those two you can then draw a line as i've done measure draw your line at this point we put a plank you can use the two millimeter ones it's probably better because then they won't twist and warp as much but for what i'm trying to illustrate i'll just use this very thin half millimeter plank so holding it there in place you could pin it if you like you can put holes in this layer because you're going to cover it up but let's let's just say that um i've got it there i can even sticky tape it in place whatever just make sure i hold it and it doesn't move now i let this plank run to its natural course and if you have a look that's the line that i drew okay and the same on this side making sure that it's lined up there and then i let it run its natural course and then there's that line and you just pencil that in so with your your bent plank in place well it's not actually it's it's it's not bent up or down it's just allowed to flow okay so just rests on the hole you just basically run on there and mark it okay now you've got your demarcation point that is the natural curve of the hull between b and c regions that means that when you lay a plank here it will not need to distort and twist too much see up here you do have distortion that is not level okay okay that is up swept so that poor old plank there needed to be bent and wet and twisted and to get its shape it's fairly level here but then it kind of sweeps up at the stern so that plank did require a bit of twisting even though i didn't require tapering it had to be twisted up to get the shape but our middle plank here is going to require nothing other than to wet it and put it on and it will just sit there perfectly it'll be so easy we just glue it that we did wouldn't even need to really wet it much probably just give it a bit of a bit of dampness at the top and the the bottom you know the bow and stern it'll sit perfectly so that is an unstrained plank that's what we want so that line it's very important and it's good to draw it on at this stage and that's handy doing two layers of planking because we can do this calculation so we really haven't done much math at the moment other than to measure and then just divide in half which is fairly simple now when i measure here my lower hull measures to 45 millimeters and my upper hull measures to 48 millimeters so here i might want to go to five and a half millimeter planks or you know still close to six but still i might decide five and a half millimeters it's an easy calculation you've got 45 divided by 8. when i measure here though i've got 40 and 43. so at this point these planks here i've got eight planks to fit into 40. so 5 8 40. so i know i'll need 5 millimeter planks and over here i've got 43 i think i'm 42 so then i know oh they'll have to probably be again five and a bit so i can probably average that because really unless you're absolutely brilliant at cutting planks that's a five and a five all right just the same as that was six or six it's close enough and then i get down to here and i've done the measurements there to work out what i need and i've got four and a four so straight away these planks are going to be four millimeters wide there five millimeters wide there and six millimeters wide there that's all looking pretty good pretty easy actually and then six and six and six okay and then i get to here and i've measured this and here i've got 44 and 46 they're going to be five and a half okay so five and a half eighths is 44. just got to know your eight times table because we're working in eights all the time we've got eight planks running through here so we've just always got to divide by eight so 40 divided by eight is five it's pretty easy 44 divided by 8 well you'll get your 40 which is 5 which then you've only got 4 left which is half an 8. 5 and a half use a calculator if if you really can't do it when i get to here i've got 43 and 41 so i measured that as five for this section but five and a half for that section and then when i get to here i'm still at five and a half of my lower section but my upper section has got down basically to one 36 so that point that's four and a half i can't do the five anymore and then when i get down to here it's 30 so i can only do four four eight thirty two okay so there'll be four millimeter planks from then on now don't worry too much because the difference of a millimeter you can shave off one plank when you go to put the final plank in okay so as long as your measurement allows for a little bit extra you should be fine and there's always a little bit of drift a little bit of movement and you will get the odd tiny little gap but we're trying to get as close as we can and anyhow being wood you can kind of push it together and you can you can do some tricks with the wood it's it's not like plastic or metal where it's a fixed size it's very malleable it will stretch out you can iron on with that electric plank bender and fatten the planks out by crushing the cellulose in the in the timber so that actually spreads out and fills a tiny gap or you can basically push two against each other you'll end up a little raised area but that can easily be sanded off so it's a natural product you can do tricks with them doing it this way i've i've written on my model i didn't have to make up a big spreadsheet or do anything complicated i'm actually doing it as i'm working way through so i'm measuring i'm dividing by eight and away i go and i have this line to work towards so when i'm planking down i'm looking at this line so for some reason i start to get a massive drift and i end up now my planks are starting to look like this i'll go well something's wrong i would need to double check my measurements maybe pull a few planks up because i've made a big mistake but hopefully as i go down my planks will all be level and they'll end up there and there's this section of planks when i run from there all the way to the waterline they should be level okay now it's best to make up a former plank for any section so i've already made up a former here which will work for this middle section and all i did was i'll turn it upside down to show you what i've done i've i've basically got a plank imagine it hasn't been cut and i've just pinned it on here okay so i think i've got some holes so i've pinned this plank on here so that's where it starts and then it's going to run all the way to the end here and not all blank's going to be the same length so that's a another consideration like this plank here is going to be shorter than those planks down there which are going to be longer okay all right so that's where it is and then all i would do is i've already done my measurements so i can just copy them under there so that's five that's six that's six that's six six five and a half okay and i'm doing it whether i've made all my measurements on the frame so it's an easy thing to find to get a reference five okay what i say they're four and a half and then this one's four this last one's four there are my measurements and then i'd simply go to my cutting board measure them off and trim them now a word of warning here you're always going to trim the top part of the plank now in this case we're working upside down so let's turn this around so this plank and i've already cut it okay so it is flat along the bottom not that you can tell because everything's twisted here but if we put it on something level is flat on the bottom but when i turn it over it sits up for the top so it's a good thing to know which way is up and which ways down so it's often good to mark that so now i know that's up okay because you want to put your planks upside down now the reason is if you put a plank on a ship and you just let it follow its natural curve it always goes up so if you're cutting stuff off the bottom you've increased that twist up and it's going to be a bugger if you want to push it down and try and flatten it if you take your waist off from the top of the plank it's going to be a lot easier you've got much less wood to push down if you're trying to force planks to a certain shape so when you're tapering you always taper the top so we've only had to cut one two three frames there and then on this side one two three four so really you've only got to cut the little strip off there and cut a little strip off there you could do them all individually just using your rule and your hobby knife or you can use the other method that i i like to which is mount up a whole lot of planks together and usually or with these very thin ones you can do all eight you can do eight in one hit basically put them all together put them in a vise and then you use the former one that you've already done as a template and you plane down to them and then you'll have eight planks all identical but there are various ways to do it you only have eight to two you can easily do them by hand and just cut each one using your rule and the um the lines are fairly straight they're not too bad you could sand them to smooth out that curve because a little bit oh it's not going to be perfect curve the thing is though wood again compresses and expands so you can put them in there and push hard against the next plank this is only half a millimeter thick so pushing up to the next plant and pushing down and you know basically forcing them together you will only raise a little bit of wood which you're going to sand off or you'll flatten out the plank a bit and it'll squeeze across and they'll compress so don't worry too much about that as long as it's a nice clean cut you should be fine so once you've got all those planks you should be fine you should be fine to just basically work from that line all the way up now the other thing which i have discussed in the other videos is yeah i'll do this section first call that a if you like but i won't do b section next i'll jump to c and work from the keel you always do that you work from the deck down to basically the whale line or waterline you start out the keel and you work up to the turn of the hull there and then that leaves your middle section now what you do then is once you've done those two and you're back to middle you re-measure because there could have been drift there could have been problems what happened here when i was doing this i was having such a devil a job in the first layer doing my wedges earrings i didn't like this water was splintering and it wasn't bending the way i wanted to and it was um this was birchwood and i really wouldn't recommend it it's it's a bugger for doing planking and when i got to my middle point i was way off from my line the thing is i could see my line i'd marked it on the frames so i knew i was really going to do a rethink doing my planking here so my planking in the middle here is not as neat for that first layer but it taught me i don't want to use this kind of wood again and also taught me to double check my measurements and that's why i started working out this technique if you mark it all up on the model it's there in front of you and your only measurements are right there you're measuring on the model you can write down that number straight away lost my pencil write down that number as you do it so you're not getting lost and you know that number refers to there and then you've only got to divide by the number of planks in the section in the bounty each section is eight planks how easy is that i hope that has made it less stressful and less scary in trying to work out planks as i have tried to explain this a number of times in videos and some people get it some people don't but if you can draw it on the model and see it there in front of you maybe that's easier and the only math you've got to do is divide by your blank number so if you're building a bounty kit you've only got to remember to divide by eight easy as that well you'll divide by two to get those halves but now everything's in eights so eight eight eight very simple fairly easy to work out your tapering okay well that's it next time we'll actually physically do all this and you can see it all in operation and we'll see if all my numbers add up they should they should i mentioned on this side i had a nice job planking there and my skills got better and better the more i've got back into this after um being away from wood ships for quite a lot of you know quite a lot of years all right that's enough for today yeah if you like this video please yeah comment subscribe like hit that bell notification if you'd like to support me so i can do more of these videos have a look at my patreon channel where from a dollar a month you can get these videos early and advert free how good is that all right that's it goodbye from australia and it's hero from harry [Music] identity [Music] you

Channel: Harry Houdini Models

Views: 13,443

Keywords: Tapering Planks, wooden ship model, building a ship, wood model, ship model, how to taper, aussie humor, HMAV Bounty, HMS Bounty, Constructo Bounty

Id: BApyIV8kw5U

Length: 23min 58sec (1438 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 03 2021