The Ship Model Forum

I think you are worrying to much! The keel section that is wider than the yellow portion is not a problem, just cut the frame to slot onto the keel, don't worry about the lost bit just sand the keel to a sharp edge and you will get that 'lost' part of that frame back. I have that same set of plans downloaded too.....

I have done the same type of build with the bow frames on my USS Long Beach CGN9 and USS California CGN36. (both builds are lurking about in the scratch building projects section)

Cheers Bruce :thumbs_up_1: :thumbs_up_1:

Hi everyone,

I'm new to scratch-building and I'm throwing around terms and ideas that I'm not really sure about. In the attached picture, I have started tracing over the lines of a Colorado class BB (plans source from http://www.hnsa.org/doc/plans/). I'm using the free program "Inkscape" available from [url]http://inkscape.org[/url]. I've scaled the plans down to 1/200. I have a 1/4" thick full keel piece (represented in orange) but the bottom of the FP frame is such that I'll loose part of it (note the red arrow). How do you typically overcome this? If I just glued it to the keel then that part of the hull would bulge out to far. However, if exclude the bottom portion, I'll loose some of the hull shape. I don't think it would be wise to make that forward portion of the keel piece thinner. I guess I could follow the advice in "Scale Model Warships" by Bowen and make the whole bow forward of say, frame 1, a solid piece but I'm not sure my shaping skills are up to par but maybe it would be time to practice... Anyhow, I was wondering how you pros tackle this sort of situation. Like I said, I'm new to scratch building and I may be going about this all wrong. It's hard to articulate what I'm trying to say so I hope the image provides a decent-enough reference.

Thank you very much for your time and advice.

Sincerely,

Chris