....because every Maine boy needs a Lobster boat!!!

Last year for Christmas I "gave" my son this:

Yes, it was 2 pieces of paper with plans for a lobster boat on it.  To be fair, he was 4 months old, and probably does not remember me giving this to him.  In the last year, when I have had some free time and not been working on house projects or chasing the rascal around, I have been working on this project.  The goal was to have it built by Christmas 2015, and (SPOILER ALERT) I have done just that!  Mine deviates from the plans a bit, but I went simple since it is going to a toddler, not someone who will take care of a model boat.  And, if I am honest, I want him to play with the boat and enjoy it, not just have it sit on a shelf and collect dust.

If you were wondering why it took me almost a year to build this 20 inch long boat, other than I have a toddler to look after, this is why:  This is not a kit, this is not a simple slap together 6 pieces and done kinda thing.  I had to cut every individual piece and glue it together.  Luckily I had a bunch of spruce kicking around, so the boat was made mostly from spruce, with the exception of the frames, which were modeler's plywood, and the deck house, which was left over 1/4 inch  plywood scraps.  

This was also a plank on frame construction, which is labor intensive, but accurate to how actual boats are/were built.  To the left are the first two planks in the first layer of planking.  Since I didn't do much research into how to actually do this, I struggled a lot with it.  Part of my problem was using planks that were much too wide to match the sharp radius of the frames.  I was initially thinking that the wider the planks, the faster it would go, but I was wrong.  I ended up wasting a lot of time trying to trim down the extra wide planks to make the radius.  The other issue I ran into once I had the first layer of planking on was how to clamp the second row of planking.  I had a bunch of standard clamps, and as I got to the bottom of the boat, the clamps no longer reached because of the first layer of planking.  I had to get creative with weights and hoping that 2 clamps would cut it.  Finally, though, I finished the hull planking, and could move on to putting the deck on, followed by the deck house and cockpit floor.  Once those were on, it was a matter of paint to seal everything up, and cover up the wood filler that was used for a lot of the gaps and cracks left by my hope and pray method of planking.  That brings us to the mostly finished project.

 As you can see, there is a fair amount of detail missing from this model that is on the plans.  I would have added them, and I might in the future, but more importantly I don't want those little pieces coming off and my son choking on them, so they have been left off of the model.  You might also notice that there are windows missing on the port (left) side of the deck house.  Again, this is because I was going for strength, not for accuracy or style points.

 In this photo, the frames are still showing in the cockpit area, which could be fake, but let me assure you, they are not.  This is most certainly a plank on frame model.  While the planks do not show up very well in the photos, they are there.  Also, I think it looks really cool to have the frames showing somewhere on the model.

One of the other issues I ran into with building this model was that I was building it on a smaller scale than was originally intended.  That meant that some of the planking had to make extreme bends to conform to the frames.  Those would have been less extreme if I had taken time to really sand, fair, and shape the frames to accept the planks.  I learned a lot here, and I am looking forward to my next project, which is to be revealed later.  In the mean time, there is still the fiberglass hull to be finished, as well as epoxy coating the lobster boat so that it will stand up to plenty of play time in the lake/ocean/tub!