Does anyone have a pic and info of how to make the deck look like boards. Would like to try on my Maryland. Thanks Ron
To create a "plank" looking deck you can draw lines on plywood with a ball point pen. If you use a pencil to draw the lines, it will smear. You need some fresh black pens, paper towels, a straight edge/ruler, and time. The "planks" need to be 1/8" wide and 3" long. Each should "end" of the planks should be off set from the other by 1" The pen needs to be wiped clean after every few lines, else you will get blots of ink and wood dust. Don't try to do more than about an hour at a time. If you rush you will make mistakes. Epoxy will desolve some ink in pens, so test if you plan to seal with epoxy, otherwise you can use polyurathne. Satin spar polyurathne works well, and can be found at most home centers. What you get should sort of look like this: |-| | |_| | |-| | | | | |-| | |-| | |-| | |-| | | | | |-| | |-| | |-| | |-| | | | | |-| | A photo link: http://www.scrapcombatships.com/commodore/images/strngun1.jpg
Thanks for the info and the pic. Is it worth the effort? Is that your ship? They didn't stagger the planks. I thought pencil would stay on better than pen with epoxy on top. I guess not.
Not my ship. And you are correct, they used 2" planks. Both pencel and pen will last the same once you have epxoy covering them. But the pencel tends to smear around when you paint epoxy over it. Note also that epoxy tend to get attacked by UV in sunlight, and breaks down if left unprotected. The marine polyurathane coatings have a UV protector in them. Planking decks is worth doing. Just is mind numbing slow going. I plan on doing it to all my new boats.
http://www.rcnavalcombat.com/FileManager/Storage/633163964496827577.png that is what can be done by indevidually planking...
Take care if you use real teak to plank the decks. If you have a teak allergy, it could be pretty nasty.
archer183 That must have taken a long time. Did you cut the boards. Is it better than doing the pen line thing?
it took a bloody long time and teak is really hard to cut. If I had it to do again, I would have done the pen thing. much easier.
Try this as an alternative: Get some narrow tape. Paint your deck one shade of wood (brown,whatever). Then randomly lay down the tape in wood lengths. Spray the next color. Then lay down more tape. Spray another color. The idea is to slightly vary the colors (add a little white or black to the wood color). Once you are done (say 6 coats), pull up all the tape. Then lightly spray the whole deck to "blend" it in. This really works, I'll be posting a "how-to" in the Cleveland build.