USS Constitution -3

by John

The Hull -3 Gluing the bulkheads to the keel.

Today I glued the bulkheads to the keel with the top deck rubber banded in position, but not yet glued in place.

The deck sheets sitting in place, but then I realised that it is curved fore and aft AND sideways.
So I applied rubber bands to pull the deck piece down into position to produce the curves and to pull up some of the looser bulkheads against the deck pieces. Then I checked visually from all directions to ensure that the curves in the deck and the bulkheads looked correct, and measured where possible.
Then inverted the assembly to make sure that the bulkheads were square to the keel, and corrected some accordingly.
Applying the PVA. Not an ideal method, because I am relying on capillary action to get the PVA into the joints. It took so long to get the assembly set up that I did not think that there would be enough time to apply glue to the mating surfaces in the normal way and then to redo the setup. Using a medical syringe and drawing up needle (purchased on Ebay) to apply the glue. Later with the model inverted the other way I applied CyanoAcrylate to the top section of the join, just in case.
Surely some of that PVA will get into the joint…it is all hidden in the finished model. And the photo clearly shows the deck curvature. Those bulkhead slots were very handy. I think that they are to locate the gun-ports later.

When the Keel-bulkheads glue was dry, I removed the deck, so I could install longitudinal strengthening beams inside the hull.

The beams were walnut, and nominally 10x10x500mm, but when I checked the dimensions, they were actually 10.0mm x 10.3mm in section, and would not fit into their slots. I needed to remove 0.3mm from the oversized pieces. I have a wood thicknesser, but that might have grabbed and shattered the long thin pieces. A hand plane could have been used, but I wanted more accuracy than my little used hand plane skills would manage. What I really wanted was a sanding thicknesser. See next post for my solution.