Bob,

That's a very clever little machine which has given me some food for thought. My wife restores vintage model yachts and she has a couple which need the decks relining. One of them is a beautifully built 10 rater but the deck lining is awful with unevenly spaced scoring of the ply and areas where the top layer of ply has been sanded through. She plans to sand down the varnish and fill as necessary, then paint the deck and reline it in ink. She has an A class hull built by two of the the great British model yacht craftsmen, Arthur Levison and John Gale, which has the deck finished in that way and looks fantastic. The plank lines need to be curved to match the shape of the hull with a straight but joggled king-plank down the centre. Somewhere on the forum is a thread which has a picture of a home made tool for doing such a job, if only I could find it.

However your idea of using a screw thread to advance the cutter/pen across the deck provides the facility to adjust the line spacing to suit the size of the model. I shall now start thinking about how to adapt it to a model yacht deck lining application. The tool illustrated in the earlier thread had an evenly spaced set of holes along its length which was not quite so versatile. When I get round to making my version of the lining tool I will add some pictures on the forum. Maybe I could even make a U tube video of Elizabeth using it – then again maybe not.

Thanks for a very useful bit of information.

Gareth

My device is great for straight lines, but I can't think of any simple method of making curved planking so beloved of yacht designers. I got the depth guage from a car boot sale for a very low price, so the whole thing did not cost much.

Bob