Using wood on plastic ship model

Using wood with plastic is quite common.I make a lot of yards out of wood.They'll take the strain of the rigging better than plastic.You can attach the wood parts to plastic with some CA glue. If you don't have a lath to turn the parts you need,just use and electric drill and sandpaper.
Rod

I can echo millard's comments. We had a discussion of a related topic a few days ago in this forum. To summarize my two cents' worth - wood is almost by definition a better material than plastic for spars, because wood (if you pick the right species) doesn't bend as easily. Good woods for spars include degame, lancewood (pretty much the same thing), and cherry. Unfortunately they're a little hard to come by - though the better woodworkers' stores and mail order firms do carry cherry. If you go that route you'll need a means of turning the spars - though some veteran modelers insist that the best way to make a spar is to plane it down from a square cross section.

The standard dowels that are sold in hardware stores and hobby shops these days seem to be of two species, oak and birch. Oak is, with rare exceptions, not a good wood for model building. Its grain is so coarse that a scale person could trap his foot in it. Birch is pretty good provided you pick the dowels carefully, avoiding the ones in which the grain doesn't run parallel to the length. (If it doesn't, you'll have a serious problem with warpage sooner or later.) Birch is reasonably easy to work and takes wood stain pretty well - and birch dowels are available in a wide variety of sizes. The electric-drill-and-sandpaper technique is a good one. Just be sure to buy plenty of extra dowels. They're cheap, and you'll break some while you're climbing the learning curve.

Plenty of adhesives work on both wood and plastic. In fact standard, old-fashioned styrene cement in a tube (at which veteran plastic modelers turn up their noses) is excellent for the purpose. It dissolves the surface of the plastic and soaks into the pores of the wood before hardening.

Thanks guys. You have answered my biggest questions. I do have 2 more questions, though. Since the main part of the ship is going to be painted plastic, will the masts and yards look ok stained or should I paint them as well to keep the color scheme uniform? Second question has to do with glue. It was mentioned to use CA, which I use a lot and have had much experience and good results with. The other one mentioned was tube glue. I know what you mean but I use Model Master liquid cement, the little black bottle with the metal tube applicator. Will it work as well as the tube cement? Once again, thanks to all who respond with advice. You are true lifesavers.

Welcome to a better avenue of building plastic sailing ships. I very rarely use plastic masts and spars anymore, they are just too much of a hassle when it comes to rigging. One piece masts and spars look out of scale and the two piece masts end up splitting apart if too much stress is put on them. I like to use the plane method and use the small plane by Exacto to taper the ends ot the spar, then sand to the final shape. With regards to adding details, there are millions of ways to do bands, caps, and covers by using solder, wire, plastic strips, washers, or aftermarket fittings that is covered in any scratchbuilding book. As far as painting, depends on the scale. On the larger 1/96 scale models, I use wood laminates on the deck and tend to replace the gratings and other fittings with wood and brass, so there is a good balance between painted and natural wood. On smaller models, I tend to paint everything in order to keep a scale balance.
I use four types of adhesives. CA for moderate bonding, Testors liquid like what you have for tacking and temperary fits, 5 min expoxy for the masts or for bonds that will take a lot of stress, and Gorrilla glue, which I was just introduced to, which I may be using instead of the epoxy since it does a much cleaner job for bonds to wood and plastic and wood to wood.

Scott

Mixing media presents some interesting challenges. If you do it carefully and thoughtfully enough, there won't be any jarring contrast between the painted plastic parts and the wood ones. Start out with the attitude that you're trying to make each piece, whatever it happens to be, look realistic. Airplane and armor modelers constantly try to make plastic look like metal; period ship modelers make all sorts of materials look like wood, metal, and fabric.

I'd be mighty careful with the use of Gorilla Glue. It's one of the current generation of polyurathane adhesives, and it expands as it dries. The woodworking publications all emphasize that anything glued with this kind of adhesive needs to be forcefully clamped for several hours while it's drying. I used Gorilla Glue to build the workbenches and cabinets in my workshop. I used clamps, screws, and nails everywhere, and the glue stuck great. But if you get underneath the workbenches you can see where it's oozed out of the joints, in the form of a stiff, yellowish, sort of styrofoam-like glob. And if it gets on your hands, getting it off is a real mess. It's great stuff for some purposes, but I question its usefulness in model building.

jtilley has given you some really good advice. When I use different materials together I give them all a coat of the same paint like tan or wood for and under base. Then I can stain or paint over the top of it and control
the shades and contrast of colors.
Rod