Shaping the Hull

If you have a blueprint, printed to scale you can now proceed to making the hull of your ship. Quite naturally this is the first step in the process and also the step that most defines the look of your finished ship. This is where you’ll want to spend a little extra effort while shaping and sanding so that it gets the right look and feel.

The first thing you need to do is find the proper thickness of styrene sheet to make up your hull. Your hull’s height is easilly found by measuring the height from the waterline to the deck on your scaled blueprints. If this height is greater than the sheets you have available you’ll need to sandwich several bits to get the right height.

With the correct sheets selected, proceed to cutting out the top view from your scaled down drawings with a scalpel. It’s not critical that it’s micrometer correct, but try to stay within the lines. The ship in the photo has a raised forecastle so I’m cutting out an extra template for that to be cut from a separate sheet of styren to be sandwiched on later. Another thing that I was lucky enough to find for this ship was a plan view of the hull at the waterline. This is very helpful in shaping the hull so that it curves right. You will most likely not find it for your ship and you’ll just have to improvise this bit. Generally the waterline profile is more pointed at the ends and slimmer.

Next step is to cut out pieces of styrene that are slightly larger than the cutouts of your blueprints. You can do this with a good pair of scissors if the sheets are thin enough. Make sure to leave a bit of margin all around because this will leave rough edges. Thicker pieces of styrene needs to be broken off. This you do by first scoring a line where you need a cut and then carefully scoring it repeated times with your scalpel. Don’t use too much pressure, it’s easier to control the blade this way. After you’ve scored the piece, it should break cleanly along the line.

Now you proceed to gluing the cutouts onto your pieces of styrene. If you’re going to sandwich the hull you should start by gluing those layers together with plastic glue. Make sure that you line the peices up along the edges. When the glue has set you can add the cutouts. You glue the cutouts on with a regular gluestick like the ones you had in first grade. Regular paper glue is good enough for this. We’ll be removing the paper later so it’s better with a glue that’s less strong. If you have the waterline profile you glue that on to the reverse side of the hull, taking care to align it with the deck profile. Also make double sure that you have the bow pointing the same direction on both sides

Now you can start sanding down the pieces to the shape of the profiles! I start with a very rough sandpaper to quickly get the basic shape down. After this I proceed with finer and finer sandpaper. Details I shape with jeweller’s files, f ex the semicircular indentations on the piece of superstructure above.

After the rough sanding is done, you move on to finer grades to get the last bit closest to the cutout. I will now add the raised forecastle to the hull piece.

First I removed the bit of cutout where the piece is going to sit, taking care to polish off any glue residue. You can scrape it off carefully with your scalpel or a very fine sandpaper. Then I glued the bits together and let the glue set over night. You need to be a bit patient with this or you’ll risk having the bits slide around while sanding and glue can seep out of the joins.

When the glue has set you can start blending the bits together by sanding them down until the join is invisible. Now you should try and get the curvature of the hull done. 

Here you can see that I’m sanding down carefully towards the narrower profile of the waterline cutout. Take your time with this and stop to check that you have the same shape on both your right and left sides of your hull. It’s more important that it looks symmetrical than that it is perfectly to plan.

A lot of hulls curve inwards at the bow, you can achieve this by using a file with a rounded or leaf profile. Just be careful and take it slow and you should get a nice racy-looking prow on your ship.

That’s it for this part. You should be able to knock out a decent hull with these tips. Don’t forget to polish the hull thoroughly after you’re done shaping it in order to remove toolmarks. If you don’t they’ll show through after you’ve painted her.

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Tools & Materials

Blueprints

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Details, details, details!

Good luck!
//The Dude