Return to modeling with the 1/96 Constitution

I find nearly any excuse to give me a reason to purchase a new tool appropriate.

No, I won't eat my words on it being a lousy kit.  This my first ship, but this is not my first laser-cut wooden kit rodeo.  You want a good kit, buy a clock from Jeff and Marcie Schierenbeck. The holes will be round, and in the right places.  If you buy a plywood kit (though I think all his kits are MDF now), it will be high-quality, multi-ply plywood with a minimum of voids.  If you buy his plans, you can use them to make parts identical to the ones in the kits he sells.  The whole thing will not only assemble correctly and accurately, it will run, and even tell time!

If Model Shipways made the parts for Jeff's clocks, they wouldn't stand a chance.  Bulkhead B is totally different from the plans.  If you try to trace the plans to make a new one, do you use the profile on the starboard side or the port side, because they're different.  Every single one of the bulkheads is cut such that those ribs that protrude upwards from each bulkhead are significantly thinner on one side than the other.  The thin ribs are cut so thin the laser burns all the way through the core from both sides, so you have a fragile matrix of charred mush that breaks if you look at it too hard.  To get the bulkheads to fit into the false keel, I had to chisel out 1/16" or more of material from every single slot, because the plywood they used was obviously a lot thicker than the plywood they designed for.  The little holes that are supposed to align all the double thickness pieces are wallowed out on one side, so the alignment dowels are useless.

It just goes on an on with this kit.  I guarantee you if Jeff put his mind to making a laser-cut ship kit, it wouldn't take you a month to work through the many problems with the basic pre-cut framework!

Maybe Jeff caused me to have unrealistic expectations in model ship world, but if some guy in Wisconsin can do this in his basement.....

Exactly!  This build has reacquainted me with my long-lost friend, Lee Valley!  I've also dragged out a lot of dusty old friends, and I used a plane that was more than 100 years old to take shavings so thin you could read through them.  That's satisfying.

Very well and good, you have it in front of you and I do not. Looking at photos of the kit however, you may have gotten a bad run of laser cutting. In which case you could probably get replacements.

GMorrison

Very well and good, you have it in front of you and I do not. Looking at photos of the kit however, you may have gotten a bad run of laser cutting. In which case you could probably get replacements.

That was my first thought too.  I entered the build very cautiously, documenting these problems to the nearest 64th in detail.  The guys who have gotten some quite beautiful models out of this thing unanimously told me to just get over it and deal with it, because that's Model Shipways.  If I order new parts, I'll get them, and they will be just like these parts.  The problems with bulkhead B were documented all over the archives, and have existed since at least 2009, for example.

It's my fault for not doing my due diligence.  It's an eye opener.

I would love for the laser-cut parts to have been of better quality, but either way that's only maybe 25% of the parts you end up using.  Most of this is scratch built, and I have another eight pounds or so of raw lumber to turn into everything that's left on the build.

It's fantastically good advice to try to talk anyone out of attempting this build.  If you aren't certifiable, and an experienced woodworker, there is little chance of success.

Fortunately, I have 20 years of woodworking under my belt, and I'm a few bricks shy of a full load.

Could be you're experiencing just the sense of the challenge.   Beautiful houses are built with a pile of material, not perfectly matched parts that can be assembled. I built them all my life. Real ships too were built from raw timbers, carefully fitted by the craftsmen builders, not a factory that produced parts. Kits are boxes of material.

Have fun with your build, that's what this hobby is all about.  

EJ

I did a web search and ended up running across my old plastic Constitution thread here, so I thought I'd pop by, even though I'm no longer working on the Revell kit now.  (I'm still using it as a reference, and it's a handy thing to have around.)

In some ways, I regret the decision, and almost wish I had opted to mast the plastic hull in wood and leave it at that.  In other ways, I'm glad I went all in.  I'm a woodworker, and as frustrating and time-consuming as it is, I'm loving this.  It isn't going tremendously well, in part due to problems with the bulkheads in the kit, and in part due to my inexperience, but even though it has problems, it's still really looking like something now that I've framed out and opened a few gun ports.

I'm modeling the ship in 2005, before the current level of restoration, because the MS kit is designed with high bulwarks and a high waist, and she had those features in 2005, but doesn't have them today.  I could lower the bulwarks and open the waist, but then I'd be responsible for too much research, and I have enough to do as it is.  She looked like that for much of her life, and there are early photos going back to about 1910 showing all the same features.  That's historical enough for me.

I was spending too much time preparing photos for web forums, and decided to streamline things.  I do daily photo dumps of my progress on a blog at Wordpress, if anyone is curious to see how it's going:

https://modelshipwright.wordpress.com/