After the glue for the chine and butterfly keel had dried I cut off the excess and then began planking the bottom of the hull. Contrary to most Dumas Christ Craft models that use wood for the first planking layer this time Dumas have experimented using Styrene plastic which brings down the planking time. The styrene came of the sheets pretty easy and needed some sanding and fairing to fit into place.

It is possible to still make some mistakes with the styrene planking, like I did at the very bottom of the hull towards the bow end, as you can see form the picture the sheets did not meet correctly. The reason this happened is because I was using Super Glue which does not give you much time to re-adjusts anything, when you start to plank this section you start from the rear (recommended in the manual) and go forward and despite several dry test fits which all look correct (it always does) I still got it wrong, anyway was not too bad it can be fixed, as you will see in the next pages