Creating an actual wood deck

Thanks for all the responses. Creekdude, you hit the nail on the head with the web link you supplied. Much props to you ... and your services. That's exactly what I was looking for. She looks awesome doesn't she? Hope mine resembles her in some way. Thanks again all!

Greets again!
I was just surfing around and ran into this:

http://www.steelnavy.com/TamitaBismarckDM.htm

1500 individual planks!!! I think I would be ready for the "rubber room" after that!
Still all in all, it looks superb
later and keep us posted
kevin

Several months ago on the IPMS website a guy was going to manufacture wood decks for tamiya's 1/350 Yamato and then US Iowa class BB's. You might try looking around in the ships section of their website. I don't know if he ever got it started or not.
G.L.

There are a number of vendors of HO Scale (1:87) lumber. 1x3 and 1x4 are a bit overscale but work.

My favorite wood for decks is holly veneer. As it comes from the tree it's almost pure white, with barely perceptible grain. But it stains nicely; I recommend "driftwood" color stain, from Olympic Paints. My usual approach is to cut the "planks" to the necessary width on a miniature table saw and run a medium-hard pencil around the edge to represent the caulking.

I've never tried laying individual planks on as small a scale as 1/350. It's been done, but the process is pretty tricky. The usual way to do it seems to start with a finely-tuned plane and a block of wood with a series of grooves cut in it, using a series of thin blades (X-acto blades might be made to work) held a jig of some sort to keep them a consistent distance apart and force them to cut in straight lines. The shavings from the plane become the planks.

On a plastic 20th-century warship kit I'd be more inclined to use one sheet of veneer, with the planking lines scribed in it and picked out with stain. That probably could be done pretty nicely, but it would be tricky. On that scale the thickness of the wood becomes a factor, especially where the deck bumps into superstructure, barbettes, etc. It might well turn out to be easier to remove all those protuberances and build a wood sub-deck than to fasten the veneer to the plastic deck. Frankly I question whether the results would be any more realistic than a really good paint job on the original plastic. On such small scales the ability of wood to look like miniature wood is dubious.

Good luck.

I was cruising the Dollhouse section at HobbyLobby and came across flooring vaneer. This stuff is paper thin, comes in mahogony, pine, oak, cherry, apple, and is about $15 for three 8x11 sheets. It is real wood in a expoxy composite, and although the planks are way too large, can be cut down to size or rescribed to fit your scale. I am experimenting with them now and really like the results. I also lightly sanded off the stain and am able to restain to change the color.

Before that, I have used teak, maple, apple, and oak vaneer, or as Jeff mentioned, Boxwood. Boxwood is by far my first suggestion for a beginer and this too can be bought in vaneer sheets. However, the thinner it gets, the brittler. That is why I have been experimenting with the composite vaneers.

Sounds like an ambitious undertaking!!!!!! Just got my Bismarck the other day and was kinda thinking the same thing. Don't know if you've seen these sites but here's a few builds of her:

http://www.bismarck-class.dk/shipmodels/shipmodels_menu.html

and an excellent reference site:

http://www.kbismarck.com/

good luck and keep me posted!
kevin

I used boxwood on my IJN Yamato a few years back..grain is tight, and its easy to work with.

I would imagine that the sailing ship guys Bruce, Big Jake, and a couple of others would know the best type of wood to use.

Jeff