Model Ship Builder

What you've done a the stern looks fine, but it's not adding a stealer, just the oppodite in fact!

A stealer's used when the next plank is runniing away from the previous planking and leaving a gap.

Don't fit that plank yet, instead, mark the point where the planks start to diverge. Now take a new pice of planking long enough to reach from there to the end and taper the edge that goes against the previous plank from full wiidth* at the end to half width where it meets your marked point. Trim the corner off at 45 degrees to make the next step a little easier. Fit the stealer in place.

This is where the tricky bit starts. You now have to cut a matching notch out of your new plank to fit against the stealer. You probably also need to taper the other end of the new pank to follow the curve of the hull.

Do all your carving and tapering on the side of the plank that fits against your existing planking.

*To be more accurate; the principle is that, at the end, you're using two planks to fill the gap rather than one, When you test fitted your next full length plank, you could check how wide a space you need to cover, If it's less than two plank widths you can taper your stealer such that its widest end is half the width of that space.

In your last picture there are a few off-cuts of planking in the background. Take three or four of these and temporarily lay them in place in the middle  of your hull. (Sticky tape works well.)

Now lay a full length plank below those and see where it wants to go at the ends. The odds are that the gap at the bow will get smaller and that at the stern will get bigger.

If you used four offcuts of 5mm wide planking, the gap at the bow would ideally be 20mm. If, for example, it's only 12mm, that means you need to taper each plank to be 3mm wide to make them fit.

The 'Rule'* is that you shouldn't taper a plank to less than half its width. If you follow that rule, that means that if, in this exaple, the gap was less than 10mm, you couldn't fit four planks into it. What you have to do is lose a plank before you get to the end. That's referred to as 'Dropping' a plank. Hopefully, by starting to taper your planks at this stage, you can avoid that, but if you find yourself with that problem and want to know how to do it, ask again later.

Somewhere there's quite a good guide to hull planking. | thought we had a copy in the 'Resources' section, but apparently not. There is a spreadsheet called 'Planking' that you can download. It's quite old and not perfesct, but it works pretty well, so that might help.

*There's a saying that "Rules are for the guidance of wise men and the obedience of fools"