| Building a Mk XIV |
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| by Michael Scharmer | |||||||||||||
Page 3 of 11  23.10.2005 The idea here is not to show you how a quick IOM looks, but to show you how you can build an IOM inexpensive and quickly. As you have noticed from the picture above, nothing more was added to the model yesterday. I began planking today. The first row of planking is from a type of pine wood, then the rest is 2,5mm balsa strips. After one hour, four rows was brought in place on each side of the hull. -For glueing I use plain Ponal, since I have still the old bottle with Ponal express. -Usually I use a “Balsaplank plainer” to make strips cut to 10 mm width. -But, this time I use tapered strips, in order to provide a better result (hopefully). The reason for this is: with my boats being built one approximately each year, building with a positive moulded model, it was not necessary to have a perfect hull surface. After the hull was finished planked up, the hull was planed and polished. Then the hull received a layer of epoxy on the inside and outside. Again it got sanded and polished on the outside, and again epoxy, then wax. Thereafter I put the glass/epoxy laminate, usually 2x 160g and one 80g mat. About one hour after the laminating prosess, I imedeatly primed with microballon (the red ones) thickened epoxy. On the next day I sanded and polished, released the finished hull from mould (template). With the last boats I made a positive mould, and only one hull was produced from it. After sailing this boat It was clear that there might be possibilities to improve the hull - There were about 5 different positive moulded boats built. This time I will try the direct way - to build a planked core, that becomes sanded both inside and outside, glassed with 80g glass mats. This saves me from the building a positive mould. For that reason the more complex, but (hopefully) better looking balsa strips - without the end grain, I get with untapered strips. Let us return again to the more important part, the building.  To get the bow area finished off beautifully, many pins is nessecary since the planks curves a lot in this area.  A small piece of advice; in the keel area I put in a narrow strip on each side of the centerline. These strips have a black colour on the inside/outside (painted). This way it then becomes easier to determine the centerline at a later stage, both on the inside and outside. I selected a frame space of 5cm here. The reason for this is that when you are sanding down the hull, while it is still on the the template frames, you don't get flat spots with the cross sections 5cm apart. That's because the distance between the cross sections is short and therebye the frame is stronger. If the spacing where 10 cm, the planking would flex much more.The linedrawing itself is not published here, you must either make your own, or use what's already available. The only linedrawings I have published, is to the Mk VIII. On the Mk VIII the skin is made with plywood, therefore you do not need to sand the surface. So with that kind of construction, 10 cm between the cross sections should work fine. |
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