Vol. 71, No.1 Spring 2026


4 Building a plank-on-frame model is an ambition many of us share, and the sawn sections of


this pear wood


resembled miniature timber closely enough to be an incentive. Fortunately, there was also a good subject ready for the experiment, Harold Hahn’s Hannah.


Models of this vessel will be quite familiar to readers of this journal. Perhaps the most remarkable example is the series by the late William Wiseman in which he dedicated over two thousand hours to recreating this model in a thoroughly well-craſt ed and spirited way. T ere have been others in various issues of the Journal as well.


It is a good starting point for a beginner of plank-on-frame work because of the well-drawn plans and the technique carefully described and illustrated in Hahn’s Colonial Schooners. Hahn’s text and photographs provide clear guidance so a beginner will face few ambiguities. Only when getting into the rigging do many questions arise.


T e Hahn plans are at the familiar 1:48 scale, but I reduced them to 1:96, a scale more familiar to me and in better reach of many of my tools. Any reduction in quality of detail would be more due to inexperience than the smaller scale.


It is well known this reconstruction is based on Howard I. Chapelle’s reconstruction of a late eighteenth-century fi shing schooner. (T ere is a long massively-researched article by Randle Biddle on the likely appearance of Hannah in the members’ section of the Nautical Research Guild’s website.) Erik Ronnberg created a very diff erent possible representation of the early American naval schooner, based on research by the late William A. Baker. T at version shows a vessel with fuller lines, a square topsail on the main as well as the fore, stuns’l booms, and bulwarks pierced for sweeps. Because of this, my model has always been an Armed Colonial Schooner, though I did continue to refer to it as Hannah in my notes.


Hahn’s method seems so well known that it would need little further explanation here. It has been criticized for imitating the real construction of ship frames rather than faithfully recreating fl oor timbers, futtocks, top timbers and so on, and because the simplifi ed sections making up the frame blanks wind up wasting much of the wood. For a beginner in plank-on-frame construction, the method still


Figure 3. Sawing jig.


has many valuable lessons. T e distinctions in the results are subtle and may have little impact for most viewers. As for the wasted wood, this may be a concern for some dealing with greatly valued wood. Mine was just rescued from the wood stove. However, all the accumulated wasted wood from my frames prompted a photograph or two.


Many projects begin with ideas that prove impractical when applied. T ere were a few here. I had imagined using a jig to routinely saw the sections of stock for the frame blanks. T e fi rst time trying this resulted in about a third of the sections sawn too short. Although the sawing jig continued to be useful, it required checking measurements before each cut. (Figure 3) I had also imagined sawing the keel slot for all the frame blanks on my Preac saw at once. T at never happened. I had also imagined gluing and clamping all of the pieces of a frame blank all together in my small desk vise. T e pieces had too much of a tendency to driſt so the safest practice was to carefully glue each section together individually, a slower but surer practice. I had also imagined I would be able to make good use of the contrasting colors of my old tree’s wood, and although there was some success, the contrasts were not as striking as I’d hoped.


Because of determination to use only wood from our tree, some opportunities for better contrasts were lost. T ere were eventually only two exceptions; the tree’s wood would not bend well enough to form the mast hoops, so I used pear wood from a piece generously given to me by


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