Welcome Paul. I’m ex-navy, so fond of anything that floats, I look forward to seeing your builds. Incidentaly, I live in a fishing village, so if you want some photos of working boats, give me a hoy. They may not be the same sort of boats, but they all share the same weathering.
Paul, there are many wood ship builders here including yours truly as you can see by my avatar. Check out the “ships” section of the forums. Many of us build a little bit of everything and post our builds in the section for the build.
I’ve built many plank on frame and plank on bulkhead ships. Here’s a link to a couple of them.
There’s another new member, someone who joined within the last month, who mentioned that he’s working right now on a wooden model. I know I complimented him on his courage in tackling the project. I can’t remember who it was, though.
If you have a look through the Ships forum, I think you’ll find some other threads for builds. Probably not a lot of guys consider it-kind of like the idea of building a vacuform kit.
There’s also a club devoted to building wooden ship models, the Connecticut Marine Model Society. I see their newsletters via the IPMS Region’s distribution network. Their website is at http://ctshipmodels.org/index.html I think you’ll enjoy having a look there!