Sectioned
Redesigning the hull
I wasn’t happy with the way that the hull-skin pieces fit together. There were always gaps or overlaps. I came up with an approach to alleviate this: I completely redesigned the hull so that:
· The hull could be built as separate sections
· On each section, the hull-skin was to be cut extra-large, glued on (sticking out past the ends of the section), then trimmed to exactly fit the section.
· Then the sections were to be butt-joined together.
To make the sections strong, I designed the frame pieces to be 1 mm thick (three card-stock thicknesses laminated together). To keep each section square, I added extra framing. I added notches in these extra frames to allow the final butt-joins to be squeezed together using tweezers. Here are the Part-Sheet Drawings for this new hull design:
(The images are shown in reduced scale;
Click on the images to see actual sheets at 4-times resolution.)
Notice that I placed a lot of the pieces adjacent. This way, one cut could work on more than one piece. The disadvantage is that it is ambiguous as to whether the common cut-line is really a cut-line or a fold-line. You can tell that they are separate if they carry different part-numbers.
Assembling the Hull:
t Here is a picture of one of the sections, Section 8, before the skin is glued to the frame.
o You can see the completed framing for this hull-section.
o Notice from the parts sheet, that the skin piece, 8X, has two “tuxedo-tails” which needed to be joined together. I used a ¼ inch wide strip of thin paper (with glue applied) to help hold the tails’ edges together. (This is part of “Tabless Construction”.)
t After all of the sections were completely dry, I trimmed the skin back to the edges of the frame. I found two things important here:
q Changing to a brand new Xacto knife blade helps for this. It is delicate work
q It is best to try to always cut against the self-healing mat, even around the curves of the hull sections.
t Here is a picture of eight of the nine hull sections, all assembled and trimmed. (I don’t know why the ninth section turned up AWOL for the photo.)
q Notice that Hull-Section 5 (the long one) has three holes for the paddlewheel axle (so that the paddlewheels can turn).
q Also notice that I have painted the hull skin edges on each section so that there would be no white showing if there were any defects in trimming. I recommend water-colors for all edge-painting.
t The next step was to butt-join the nine sections together.
q I used white, water-based, “Tacky” glue for this. The water in the glue softens the skin-edges slightly providing a closer fit. To help this, I applied glue to both sides of the joint.
q I inserted tweezer-tips into the notches provided on either side of each butt-joint and tightly squeezed each joint.
Here is a picture of the result:
t There is still a hull-side-panel piece to be added to each side, but that had to wait until after the First Deck was attached to the top of the hull assembly.