I'm building Answer's
Akitsushima and I've tried out some ideas about building the hull -- mostly gathered from this forum.
I used balsa for the formers. I'm not sure I would do that again. On small parts, it splits too easily. I laminated computer paper (24#) to the back side of some of the formers and that seemed to help. One or two of the "rib" formers split while I was gluing the deck to the hull, but they were not laminated on both sides. 1/16" Balsa is a lot easier to cut than 2mm card, but I'm not sure that outweighs its fragility.
To skin the hull, I first added extra formers between the ribs by photocopying parts P4 and P5 (the horizontal formers), laminating the copies to 1mm card, and cutting pieces to fit between the ribs. (See photo 1).
Then I cut a half-inch-wide strip of TyvekŪ -- the plasticized paper that FEDEX envelopes are made of -- and stretched and glued it along the length of the hull, centering it on the edges of P4 and P5. Tyvek doesn't stretch, doesn't soak up moisture, is impossible to tear, and glues like paper--handy stuff. (It makes great hinges.) And it was free from the FEDEX store. (One large shipping envelope will go a long way--no pun intended.)
I set the hull aside and assembled the hull skin in two halves, fore and aft, using joiner strips made of computer paper. Where the two halves would meet I used a joiner strip of cardstock (scrap from the kit pages). I ran a line of rust-colored marker pen along each strip where the skin sections would meet, so no white paper would show through any gaps. I let the skin halves set up overnight.
The next evening, I carefully glued the forward half of the skin to the hull. I first glued the skin at the keel, gave that an hour to set up, and then carefully smoothed and glued the skin, section by section to the Tyvek strip, working from the center forward. I set the end of my 6" steel ruler behind the Tyvek strip to keep each section flat as the glue first set up.
I let that dry for an hour or so, then glued the aft half of the skin to the hull in same way: keel first, let it dry, then section by section from the center aft.
The result, as you can see, is a pretty smooth hull, with few gaps and very little distortion, except along the keel --where no one will see it.
This is only my third ship model -- Maly's
Orp Piorun and and unfinished Uhu's U-boat came before. I like ship models, even with all the little fiddly bits, and I'm running out of ceiling room to hang airplanes.
I had originally planned to scale the Akitsushima up to 1/125 or so, but I came to my senses. At around 2 feet long, 1/200 is big enough. I still want to scale up Halinski's Jeremiah O'Brien to 1/100 -- for about $75 in duplicating costs
.
--David