As the work on constructing the hull for IJN Battleship FUSO is progressing rapidly, I'd like to spare a page to document what the progress is, and more, on how I construct the hull.

I used to create the hull from only the section drawings. However, the errors in the section drawing will induce considerable disform at some certain areas. The picture on the right hand side shows the clear disformation on the hull of Takao due to the error of one out-of-place section. Using hull plans solely will induce the same problem.

However, there are always noticeable discrepencies in the drawings of hull sections and hull plans. Putting those two kinds of drawings together may confuse the construction progress at those discrepency points. So what I did now is to use the plan drawings first, obtaining the general shape at different horizontal levels and then brace each frame by the curves as show below.

From then on, the frames are created. The contraint points serves now as the reference points for the general shape of each frame. But the frame does not need to conform with the contraint points exactly because of the possible errors there. The shape should agree generally to the frame drawing.

After all necessary frames are created, the old plans are removed and new plans are generated from the frames. So at this point, a compatible set of sections and plans are ready from plating. Errors are averaged by experience during the process. The following set of picture shows the finished hull supporting.

And some more pictures