Deck planks and wood suppliers

On my Dad's workbench, there is a very old Deans Marine kit for a Thames steam cruiser. A sort of posh steam powered yacht to ferry people sipping Pimms around Henley Regatta.

Anyway, the main feature of this boat is a decoratively planked deck. The kit supplies a plywood thing covered with printed paper as a guide. There's also some planking wood but only enough if you are accurate with your cuts to fractions of a millimetre.

Nuts to this, time to get hold of some replacement stripwood.

Except that the local dolls house supplier only keeps basswood. Hobbycraft is the same, even if you can find anything of use. He needed as much mahogany as basswood.

With no model boat shows on the horizon, it was off  to mail order. A few minutes spent on the Westbourne Model Boats website saw the order placed and in just under a week, the long, thin package arrived.

Not really worthy of comment you might say, except that ordering yard long lengths of wood is a bit odd. Hardly a normal shape package. Despite this, all arrived in one piece, unbroken or bent. Worth remembering for the future.