Progress with the ship

On this weekend I had some free time which I have spent on building by model. I have finished gluing the ribs to the keel. The next step was the main deck. It was already cut out but when I assembled the hull to see how the parts fit I found out that it was 1 mm above the place where it should have been.                                This could seem a tiny error but because of the small scale of the model and the fact that I was planning to imitate the planks I decided to correct it. Using a small saw I made long cuts on the bottom side of the deck just where the ribs will be. So that the ribs would go 1 mm inside the deck piece and the deck overall would be lower.

When I did that I started making holes for masts and other deck equipment and cutting out hatches.

Mission statement for our school

On the CAS session last week Mr Parker (our IB coordinator) asked us to think of a mission statement that would be more informative and better reflect the mission of our school than the current one. The best one will be placed on our school's web-site.

I did this task together with Han and Benny and that is what we came up with;
Our mission is to provide high quality internationally recognized qualification as well as extra curricular activities which sculpture our students to be balanced, reflective and caring individuals. Our international community creates an unique multicultural environment which guides our students to be a part of a modern global society.

The competition will certainly be high but I think that our statement is quite good because it mentions the qualities for the IB learner profile and activities that lie out of the curriculum such as CAS.

Chess

On this week and the previous week I went to the chess club where I learned some new things. Mr Cribb explained some strategies, for example he showed us the sicilian defence and a very simple but interesting combination called "the fool's mate". Since on previous wednesday I was the only one who came, we started a game and continued it on friday (yes, chess is not a fast game :D)


Being reflective and looking back I should say that I need to think more of the strategy of the game as a whole. I can analyse the opponent's moves and respond to them, but I need to think a couple of moves ahead and focus on the opening moving my pieces out.

News from the shipyard

I have spent some time on the holidays working on the ship. I have finished transferring the outline of the paper templates on plywood. Then I started to cut them out. That was a difficult and time-consuming process. Even a minor inaccuracy in cutting would lead to a distortion of the hull. So, if I had made a mistake, I would have to redo the whole part. Fortunately, I had to do that only once when I noticed a crack in one of the ribs (the parts perpendicular to the axis of the hull). Then I assembled the hull without gluing the parts together in order to see whether they fit in properly. Of course for the first time most of the parts did not fit well. So I had to slightly adjust their shape and assemble them together again to see whether my adjustments improved the situation. I repeated this procedure a couple of times until each part was finally in the right place.

Then I was ready to glue the ribs to the keel. I had to be very careful because I used super glue that is very strong. It would be very hard to remove a part that has already been glued.

I have not finished the gluing yet (on the photo only half of the ribs are already glued).