Michael,
Yes, the dissimilar material and the different behaviors with heat, humidity, etc., and the gluing of those materials together are my main reasons for avoiding them. I have no problems with using different materials for detail work (such as PE for railings and details, or wooden ship's boats, etc.), but for something like this I feel that wood would be less stable than plastic. As Dean said, my initial idea for the 1/200 scale build is to put together the frames as he's shown them, and then fill between them with Aves Apoxie Sculpt just a little proud of the frame edges, and then sand it down smooth. I'm afraid that without a lot of extra work to seal the wood, the Aves would put moisture into a wood structure and cause issues.
It may be a moot point; I'm going to email the company that Dean linked to and ask what they suggest. From dealing with laser etching and cutting companies in the past, I have a suspicion that they might not be able to work well with styrene of .060 thick without it burning or making soft cuts. In that case, wood it will be and we'll go from there.
The stacks and pilot house will be easy enough: either there is telescoping brass tubing that is the correct diameter (hopefully!) or I'll turn them on a lathe as I did with the stack on my
Weehawken. I'm thinking with the turret that I want to cut the bottom/floor and the top/roof (hopefully with the grate detail) circles from styrene, and then figure out some way to wrap them in heated sheet styrene to build up a hollow turret.
Yes, there will be a build blog/log of this beastie, whenever it gets off the ground (or is it off the ways?). I'm working now to get some other projects off the bench and a writing deadline behind me so that I can start playing with this as I return to my
Carondeletbuild.
-Devin