The hull is quite simple without hull keels and plating (it certainly had a plating but this wasn�t made overlapping so the individual bands were invisible on the hull). There were only short docking keels between frame 31 and 44.
I wanted to make a fibreglass hull with the master made from 2 mm balsa-wood on frames from 4 mm and a keel of 8 mm plywood. The frames from the plan were first reduced by 2 mm and than cut from the plywood as was the keel. The openings for the outer propeller shafts were included in the frames so they would align perfectly.
Also included in the frames were the castell with the casemates for the turrets.
After a lot of filling, sanding and a coat of resin (and of corse sanding again) the hull was finally ready to take a negative form.
This proofed to be a desaster. Due to the complex form of the hull and the casemates and although I used masses of release agent the negative form was almost impossible to release from the master. It all ended up in an unusable negative form and lots of damage at the master. Such frustrated I stopped the project waiting for the experiences of some comrades who wanted to give the master of another ship to a form-builder in Poland.
As times went by the polish project didn�t really get along and the (albeit damaged) hull of the Mass�na was smiling at me. The article about the french ironclad Redoutable in Model Shipwright No. 123 finally gave me the kick to start again on my Mass�na. In this article the author described his ship being build split horizontally in the middle short above the waterline to get to the RC-interior. This I thought would be also a good idea for my Mass�na. The only problem was, that the frames were left full (because the hull should only be a master) so the separation of upper and lower hull would mean that I would have to split them too. But no risk, no fun. I took a panel saw and sawed. Thus the hull was divided just along the top of the armour-belt. The operation wasn�t exactly what you would call a clean cut but finally the hull was split (and due to the damages in the formmaking-process I will have to fill and sand again anyhow).
The next problem was that I had to cut the inner part of the frames out, to leave space for the RC components, but the distance between the frames was only about 3 cm. The solution was a right angle attachment for my Dremel mini-drill and a shaper. With them I was able to cut the frames out perfectly.
As I hadn�t laminated a layer of fibreglass on the outside of the hull but feared that a simple wooden hull would be in danger of cracking, the next step was to laminate the fibreglass-layer on the inside.
To be continued ....
