On the Rails

So, I went with starting work on the railings, beginning with the side stern railings.  The first task was to 'clean' up the white metal stanchions.  This just involved filing down the casting seams and drilling out the holes.  I'd forgotten how time consuming this can be so am not looking forward to doing this with the other white metal parts.

Next up was forming the top rail into shape.  I used my x-acto knife as the former for the bends.  Second up was forming the bottom rail.  The parts are shown below.

I departed from the instructions in a couple of ways.  First, I cut off the pins on the stanchions, drilled out a 1mm hole and glued in 1mm wire pins.  I felt the original cast in pins were too big as whilst I could drill through the plastic tube, I couldn't get through the wire core.

Secondly, rather than just pinning the bottom rail either side of the stanchions, I have wire core all the way through to add strength.  Thirdly, I cut the white metal rail ends (part T17) down to better match the full size boat using the RNLI plans as a guide.

This pic shown the railing finishes all bar filling.  Next up on this vein will be the transom bar and railings but first I have to prep the dowel for this.

Floored

It's done, well almost.  After discovering that'd I'd assemble the liferaft storage on the wrong side or part 58, the new assembly had to work, and it has.  There is now space to have the full height port engine vent, which I'll scratch build soon, and all three 'storage' compartments.  The Starboard compartment though will be covered eventually.

I've just got a couple of cut outs to make which hopefully can be seen marked up in the photos.  One will be for the radar and mast light wiring and the other for for the starboard angine vent so the floor can't be seen through the grill.

I've also been cutting out more of the printed styrene parts.  From my point of view, this is one of the most tedious jobs on the kit, together with cleaning up the cast parts, but it has to be done!  So I have the cabin floor cut out, the vac-form seat bases and door surround roughly cut and also the strips which lock the floor into the cabin.

I'm not sure what I'll do next, I'll have to see how my mood takes me but it'll be the stern side rails, the transom railing or the cabin inside...   More next time.

Flying High

This time, I've been working on the flying bridge as well as finishing off the roof by fixing and filling all of the joints.  The cabin door entrance is now in place as is the flyingbridge steering position.  The door went together very smoothly.  I've cut off the roof former at this point and will also need to cut out the roof section under the door frame as both will be very obvious with the door open.

The steering console was more tricky.  I made several new parts using the kit parts as templates.  I also altered the side pieces as they have a crease so that they are a right angles to the cabin rear at the console and then angle in.  It's difficult to explain but hopefully the pics show this.

I've also cut the new parts for the flyingbridge floor and back of the superstructure.  This will accomodate the longer port engine vent.  I also discovered that I'd fixed the liferaft box to the wrong side of part 58 so my clever scheme on that was not so clever!