Copper Plating the Hull - Part I

As I have mentioned, the posts up until now have been recapping steps that I had done on the ship a couple weeks ago.  This blog was an afterthought so the postings were just summaries; not much detail and ultimately a bit light on content.


This post marks the first "up to date" installment and from here on will reflect where I am currently with the build.  This should let me provide more detail for anyone interested.

Hours on Project: 31

This next part of the ship build is really the first time intensive bit of work encountered on the ship.  Until this venture I had put in about 11 hours, however, the coppering of the hull tacked on a good 20 hours.  Going forward this will be quicker, but being my first time out it was quite slow going in the beginning.

So what are the copper plates for?  In short, the hulls of wooden ships starting around the 1700's were protected with copper plates which were attached to from the keel to the waterline.  The plates created a surface which prevented ship-worm and weeds from attaching to the wood and thus extending the life and reducing maintenance of the ships hull.

To replicate this on a model ship all you need is a roll of copper tape, an X-Acto knife and a whole metric ton of patience!!!

The first thing to do is get the copper tape and figure out the size the plates need to be to match the scale of the ship; luckily with the Phantom it was kind enough to tell me: 1/4"  x 1/8".  With that I went ahead and cut up a bunch of plates to start with and then just continued to cut as I went.

To give you an idea of what the working plates look like...

Take this

And cut it up into this..

That is all there is too it, heh.

Well, it sounds pretty straightforward and easy - but in actuality until you get used to the cutting it can be a pain to get nice rectangular plates.   I tried lining it up on ruler and cutting it lengthwise; that didn't work out so well; very angular cuts and plates got all messy.  So, as with so many other projects - created a jig to help cut the pieces.

First - the Dimensions of the plates as said are 1/4" x 1/8" - the tape I a using is 1/4" wide so the thought was just cut 1/8 inch strips off the end.  This started working later as I got used to cutting the tape but, for the first few hundred plates it was not working out so well.  A few folks in the model ship forums preferred to cut the tape lengthwise then cut 1/4 inch strips off of those.  This gives you straight edges for the long sides and if anything gets screwed up cutting the plate it is the short side which is much easier to camouflage on the model.

I tried this, but cutting lengthwise proved to be even more of a pain (to me) and I just didn't like how any of them turned out.  Thus was born the copper plate jig.

First I took a few strips of 1/8" basswood and glued them to a sheet of wood to create a slot which would hold the tape

I then took a 1/8" basswood strip to set into the jig, dividing the copper tape in half

This allowed me to cut two nice straight strips of 1/8" copper, once that was done I added a 1/4" guide to the frame to size up the actual plate to be cut.

Worked like a charm!!!

But!
Then there is the placing it on the ship itself.

I have no problems saying my first attempts at placing the copper were horrible at best, the copper is extremely pliable and susceptible to dents and dings.  Also, when cut, it leaves little curls at the edges of the copper.  It took some time to get used to working with the tape.

To remove the curls, cut the copper and remove it from the backing. Then lay it face down (Sticky side up) and gently scrape the back of the X-Acto knife across the plate once or twice.  This will flatten the plate and not remove the adhesive

Once that is done placing them on the hull is just a matter of lining it up; trying to get as straight a line as possible and affixing the plate.

Or so I thought.

As the beginnings of this adventure show; the plates went down fine - but looked very ragged and jagged and not very protective to the hull.

Kind of rough, really didn't like the look of it.

I tried replacing some of the copper (this was a horrible experience and made more of a mess than I had before).   I tried repositioning some of the copper; however the adhesive is good enough it doesn't move much once in place and led to having to replace those pieces which again, made more of a mess.

I then decided to make sure the plates were aligned as well as they could be, and then taking the cap to my X-Acto knife and using it as a burnisher I went over the copper with a fair amount of pressure.

It worked like a champ!!!

With all that behind me, I went ahead and continued the rows on one side of the ship.  Placing the plates and burnishing every two rows to get a nice flat, smooth surface.

I still have some areas that need a little more burnishing, as well as a couple of places which need some copper  paint to fill extremely tiny gaps; but all in all - I don't think it came out too bad for a first encounter with hull plating.

I do have one extremely troublesome area however, and that would be the sternpost.  No amount of burnishing has worked thus far and it looks quite horrible.

My two options at this point are to strip it, hope it doesn't wreck too much, or burnish the edges and hope the center is hidden by the rudder once that gets attached.  I haven't quite made up my mind yet on how to proceed, but that will be figured out for the next one when I do the other half of the hull.

This half took 400+ plates and 20 hours to do; most of that is due to inexperience so hopefully the next half will go a bit quicker.

Next up - Plating the Phantom Hull Part II
Enjoy.