Wooden model ship kit guide

A wooden ship kit is not a kit in the plastic sense. It is a bag of raw material, a set of plans, and an assumption that you will make the parts fit. That is why the same subject appears at wildly different prices, and why the price tells you very little.

Three ways a wooden hull is built

The overwhelming majority of kits on sale are plank on bulkhead. If a kit does not say which it is, it is plank on bulkhead.

Single or double planking, and why it matters more than the wood

A double-planked hull gets two layers. The first is soft, cheap wood, usually lime, glued and pinned over the bulkheads, then sanded fair and filled where needed. Nobody sees it. The second layer is thin strips of a decorative hardwood laid over the top, and that layer is the finished surface.

This matters because it means a double-planked kit gives you a practice run. Your first attempt at bending, tapering and edge-fitting planks is hidden. On a single-planked kit, the first attempt is the finished hull. For a first wooden ship, double planking is worth paying for.

The word that governs the whole job is fair: a hull is fair when a plank laid along it touches at every point, with no flats and no hollows. Bulkheads are bevelled before planking so that the plank lands flat on each one. Skipping the bevelling is the most common reason a first hull ends up lumpy.

The woods, and what they tell you about the kit

Grain scale is the thing people miss. At 1:75 a plank is a few millimetres wide, and a wood with visible open grain looks, at that size, like a ship built of driftwood. Boxwood and pear look right at small scale precisely because they have almost nothing to see.

Fittings: cast, turned or printed

Kits supply fittings in three forms, and the mix tells you where the maker put the budget. Cast white metal, sometimes called britannia metal, arrives with flash and mould lines that have to be cleaned off, and usually looks better blackened or painted than bare. Turned brass, for cannon and eyebolts, is crisper and needs blackening to stop it reading as jewellery. Printed resin fittings, increasingly common, are the sharpest of the three and the most fragile.

Whatever the kit supplies, budget an evening for cleaning fittings before anything is fitted. It is dull, and it is the difference between a model that looks made and a model that looks assembled.

The plans and instructions are the real product

Two kits of the same ship, with the same wood, can differ by a hundred hours of frustration purely on documentation. Before buying, find out:

• How many full-size plan sheets there are, and whether the frames and planking bands are drawn at full size.
• Whether the written instructions have been translated properly, or whether they are a caption sheet.
• Whether the rigging is given as a numbered plan with thread diameters, or as one general arrangement drawing.
• Whether anybody has published a build log of that kit. A well-documented kit is easier than a better kit nobody has written about.

Standing and running rigging

Rigging divides in two, and every rigging plan assumes you know which is which. Standing rigging is fixed: shrouds, stays and backstays that hold the masts up. It was tarred, so it is dark brown or black. Running rigging moves: halyards, braces and sheets that work the yards and sails. It is left natural, so it is pale.

Thread is specified by diameter in millimetres, and using one size for everything is the fastest way to make a model look wrong. A rigging plan that lists diameters for each line is a sign of a serious kit. Deadeyes and lanyards, the tensioning arrangement at the foot of each shroud, are the slowest hour of the whole build and the part visitors always look at.

Scale, and the size of the finished thing

Wooden kits follow no common ladder. The same subject may be offered at 1:100, 1:75, 1:64 and 1:50, and the difference is a metre of shelf. The arithmetic is the ship’s length divided by the scale: a 45 m frigate hull at 1:50 finishes at 90 cm before the bowsprit, which typically adds another fifth. At 1:100 the same ship is 45 cm and lives on a bookshelf.

Fair

A hull surface with no flats or hollows, so a plank touches it along its whole length. Faired before planking, not after.

Bulkhead

A transverse former slotted onto the keel spine. Not a real ship part in this sense, but the shape the planking is bent around.

Garboard strake

The first plank next to the keel. The hardest one to fit, and the one that sets the run of everything above it.

Treenail

A wooden peg fastening planks to frames. On models, simulated with fine dowel or a pencil dot, and best understated.

Deadeye

A round wooden block with three holes, used in pairs to tension standing rigging with a lanyard.