The hull is planked and rubbed down awaiting some decent warm weather so i can give it a coat of glass and resin. I have now moved on to decking - more planking 🙄. I’m edging the planks with a black sharpie before I glue them in place to represent caulking. I am using a medium viscosity cyano to stick them down.

Fitted the gunwales this weekend and also the keel strip. Need to give the varnish on the deck another coat as it got a bit of glue on it that had to be sanded back off. Also need to give the gunwales a few coats of satin white inside still.

This is probably the reason that it takes me so long to make models..😁 I have spent an hour or so putting off doing the glass fibre covering whilst I made this jig to hold the hull steady when inverted.

I have started with the tricky stern and covered this in one piece. This will mean that i can get two long runs in down each side tomorrow when this is dry. Not the most exciting picture, but if you zoom in you can see the fine weave of the 0.6oz glass cloth. This will ultimately be filled with the second coat of resin. I have included a shot of the resin that I use. I like this stuff and have used it on my planes for a few years now. I always dab it on through the cloth with a torn bit of dish sponge. I have found that this does not pull the cloth around causing snags etc.

Added a few more pics as I have done the port side this morning and slightly overlapped what I did at the stern yesterday. It took about 20mins to do. The excess epoxy was dabbed off with toilet tissue as this is obviously absorbent, and for some reason does not stick to the resin.

Hi folks. So I have primed and rubbed back and re-primed the hull now thanks to a weekend of decent UK weather.
This week I now need to bend these. 2mm x 5mm walnut strips into rubbing strips. Do you think crimping them would work best, or steaming them… or a combo of both? It is only the stern I am really worried about as it is a tight-ish radius. I am going to sand a small (5mm) flat around the stern for them to sit on as the area is too sharp at the moment. Thanks in advance for any thoughts.

Been having a few nightmares with the deck. For some reason when I masked and sprayed the bulwarks (with rattle can car acrylic) yesterday, the lower edges of them reacted and blistered. Don’t know why. The oly thing they could have reacted with is the cyano I used to glue the bulwarks on. Anyway, I tidied that up and decided to give the deck a thin coat of satin acrylic clearcoat. Bad idea. Now the edges of the deck itself have reacted to where I had masking tape yesterday when doing the bulwarks 🙄. Any ideas? Should I try and rub the deck edges down and start again?

The longer I left it to cure the more the deck reacted. I think a full sanding and varnishing with something neutral/waterbased like the eze kote iswhat I am going to have to do now. Oh well, i guess modelling is 90% about solving challenges.

Update 24.05: the deck scraping seems to have worked thankfully. I have applied a couple of coats of really thinned down yacht varnish and all seems to be well so far. I think this coming weekend I will begin to make a start on the superstructure and possibly start the colour on the hull. I don’t know why but I don’t really want to paint it the box art colours so I am going to go with dark green and white above the waterline instead of the black that the box shows.

Now that the deck woes are finished (scraping down and revarnishing worked), I have made a start on the superstructure. I have to line the wheelhouse inside and out with strips of walnut. Should hopefully look nice when it is finished. I was pondering whether I could make the door functional - in real life would it swing inwards towards the cabin interior?

Despite being a long way from finished everything so far is resin coated or primed and therefore waterproof so I decided to give her a test outing. Ballast was courtesy of three 6v 4Ah batteries and a small amount of lead and it still needs some “finessing”. I sailed her for about 45 minutes and am pleased with her so far.

I have had limited time to build recently, but in the recent run of good weather I have made a start to the painting of the hull and superstructure on the Occre Ulises. All the paints are either Humbrol or Revell enamels and have been thinned about 40-50% for airbrushing. I still have to do another coat of the antifouling red and then I am going for a dark green upper hull to leave a thin white waterline between the two.

Well that is the hull done now I think. The green took several coats to get right. I decided Humbrol gloss #3 was a bit too bright for my liking so I mixed in some gloss black before I sprayed it until it looked about right to my tastes and I am quite happy with the result.