This is another fitting that needs to be detachable and the construction is very similar to the others.
The base was formed from some brass bar and ‘turned’ to the desired size and profile on my ‘Black & Decker Bodge lathe’ and then the centre hole was enlarged with a needle file at an angle to accept a 5mm brass tube which was silver soldered into the base. The piece was then cleaned up with some abrasive paper and wire wool.

A 2mm brass nut was press fitted into the base of a short piece of 4mm brass tube and soft soldered in place and this this piece was inserted into the base assembly to act as a threaded retainer and spacer. I continued making the flagstaff from some brass rod with a 2mm threaded end and some tubing to make up the diameter but having mostly completing it I decided that it just didn’t look in keeping with the boat ☹️....... and so I made a new mast from some 4mm beech dowel which I sanded to a taper and made a rounded plasticard ‘finial’ top button 😊......... much better.
A short piece of 2mm rod, threaded at the end, was cut to length and inserted into the end of the new wooden flagstaff and the whole piece was finished with three coats of antique pine stain.

Some thin brass wire was formed into a double loop and fitted around the top of the mast to form the upper fixing for the halyard and a short length of 5mm tubing with a brass wire loop soldered into it forms the lower fixing for the halyard.

The flagstaff base was painted with etch primer and two brushed coats of gunmetal grey before being epoxied into an angled hole bored into the rear deck.

The flag was made for me by Mike Allsop of Scale Flags & Ensigns to the correct dimensions for the boats scale. The halyard is actually elasticated cord finished at each end with some thin white heat-shrink tubing with another short piece at the bottom of the ensign to keep it in position.
The elasticated cord is in tension and as it’s fixed to the flagstaff top and bottom the whole assembly can be easily screwed in and out of the base with the ensign attached, the threading of the flagstaff is also set so that the halyard and ensign always ends up on the trailing edge 😁.

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Another cabin roof fitting is the radio aerial, this also needs to be detachable for transport and storage.

For the base I cut and formed a disc from some brass bar and ‘turned’ it to the desired size and profile in my makeshift 'lathe' (a Black & Decker horizontal drill stand) and then the centre hole was enlarged to take a 4mm brass tube which was silver soldered into the base. The piece was then cleaned up with some abrasive paper and wire wool.

A short piece of 3mm brass rod was then threaded and soft soldered into the bottom of the base to form the fixing stud.

For the aerial rod I used a short piece of 3mm tube and some 2mm brass rod, the tube fits inside the base tube and the rod in the centre, and this was soft soldered together into the base. Finally a piece of 3mm tube was soldered to the end of the rod and turned to shape it into a ball. The rod was also given a slight taper with files and abrasives.

The whole piece was sprayed with grey etch primer and when dry the base was brush painted with some black acrylic and finally some clear satin lacquer finishes off the part.
😀

The aerial fixes to the roof through a white plasticard base with a 3mm wing nut.

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When I built my RAF Crash Rescue Tender my brother made a searchlight base for me on his lathe from a drawing I supplied and at the time I asked for an additional one in case I made a hash of it. Fortunately I didn’t need it at the time and still had the spare one in my bits box and so it made sense to use this for the searchlight on the Thames Police Boat.

The new base was made in much the same way as the previous one, the detail is in my Crash Tender blog:

https://model-boats.com/blogs/23951

The white metal casting of the searchlight body is very well made and only requires a little fettling to remove casting lines and as this searchlight will not be a working one I used the prototype lens from my previous searchlight build to fit into base. A short plastic rod was push fitted into the lens base with a disc of silver foil at the lens end to enhance the reflection in the optical path. This piece acts as a support for the lens instead of the LED unit and is glued into the body which I had previously painted black internally.
A perspex disc was made to cover the front of the lens, and a ‘tri-form’ front piece was made from some 22mm copper pipe and some brass wire which was soft soldered together.
Before the front was glued in place all the parts were sprayed with a grey etch primer and a couple of coats of satin lacquer.

The finished assembly is fixed to the roof with a 3mm threaded stud and a wing nut to make removal easy with a circular plasticard base between the two.

The twin horns are from RB Model in Poland and they just needed to be sprayed with etch primer and lacquer before fixing to the roof.
The boat is now looking more like the real thing, just a little more detailing to add including the life ring, roof aerial, flagstaff and a few more deck fittings. 😊

https://model-boats.com/blogs/23951

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The mast on the drawing supplied with the kit is rather simplistic and I want to reproduce the mast in a more authentic style so with reference to the NMM ‘photos of the museum boat I set about modelling it.

The timber mast is held on the cabin roof in a metal socket and I produced this from some 6mm & 7mm brass tube and some brass bar for the base.
The tubes were cut to length and assembled onto a brass bar which was previously drilled to take a 3mm bolt with some flux paste between the parts and a nut and bolt used to clamp the parts together. This was all silver soldered together, the bar cut off and the temporary bolt removed and the base reduced to a circular form by filing and the piece cleaned and polished.
The mast is a short length of 6mm dowel with one end turned down to 5mm to fit inside the brass base tube.

The mast head is formed from some obeche hardwood shaped to replicate the original with a 6mm hole bored through the base piece to take the 6mm dowel mast. I used a spare 6mm porthole that I had surplus to a previous project as a supporting flange that also adds an interesting detail to the mast.
Lastly a fillet was added between the mast and the base and the whole piece was then finished with a few coats of Teak stain.
A filed down the head of a 3mm bolt so that it would fit into the brass tube and superglued in place before glueing the dowel mast into the base.

A plasticard disc was made to fit between the mast base and the roof and reinforcing plate fitted to the inside of the roof for the securing wing nut to bear on.
The light fitting is standard part available from various suppliers, mine came from RB Model in Poland along with some other brass fittings for this boat.

All of the tall fittings on the roof will be made to be removable for safe storage and transport.
Next up...the Searchlight.😁

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The fittings supplied with the kit include some bollards for the deck but I’m less than impressed with them and decided to make my own by adapting some brass handrail fittings intended for locomotives.

As readers of my blogs will know, I don’t have a lathe but there’s a lot that can be achieved using a horizontal bench drill and files.

The first job was to reduce the diameter of the base to fit inside a couple of steel washers that were superglued together and then to the reduced base to form a large flange for the bollard. This was then spun in the drill and files used to radius the edges and blend them into the base.
Some brass rod was then used to form the cross piece of the bollard, some tape the same width of the ‘ball’ was used to protect the centre section and the outer end reduced to a taper with a file, finally the pieces were reduced to the correct length and the ends rounded off.
The cross piece was then superglued into the bollard base and then all four were given a coat of etch primer and then two brushed coats of Tamiya gunmetal grey.

There is another bollard on the foredeck and this is just a simple wooden post with a brass cross piece, it’s fixed through the deck into the underlying structure by a brass pin.

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Some hardwood dowel is supplied in the Vintage Model Works kit for the handrails that would look perfectly acceptable for most builders but as I’m going a bit overboard with the detailing of my boat I chose to fabricate mine differently to look a little more authentic.

This involved selecting some obeche stripwood of suitable dimensions and carefully measuring and marking out the positions of the supporting legs and the spacing between them. Again I used some ‘photos of the NMM model as a guide for this.

Fortunately I had previously treated myself to a vertical stand accessory for my Dremmel drill and I used this as a milling machine with the addition of a suitably sized sanding drum and an improvised ‘fence’ attached to the base of the stand. After making a test piece I also chose to attach a vacuum cleaner hose to the stand to extract the dust as the process generates quite a lot!

Milling out the recesses in the obeche strip was a remarkably quick process but the subsequent hand finishing using abrasive paper glued around a dowel and some abrasive pads took a great deal longer to achieve the final profiles.

I was very pleased with the final result and so I applied several coats of Teak stain before hand drilling a 2mm hole in each of the supporting legs to take a plasticard rod which was superglued in place.
These form fixing spigots that will enable me to easily fix the rails through the roof without using epoxy or superglue on the roof surface but on the underside of the roof instead.
The legs at each end of the handrails were drilled to take 1mm rods as the legs are a bit smaller.

The rails were then laid out on the cabin roof and with the aid of some masking tape the position of each plasticard rod was marked and then the drilling centres marked with an indent through the tape onto the roof.
The fixing holes were all hand drilled through the roof and the handrails pushed into place before being secured with a drop of superglue on the underside.
When set the excess plastic rod was cut flush with the roof panel.

The finished result is very pleasing 😀 as seen in the last pic along with a sneak preview of the searchlight.

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All the glazing on the cabin is fixed except for the forward windows on each side which are on runners for the crew to slide open.

The glazing supplied in the kit for these sliding windows is 1mm Perspex so I made some runners by laminating two strips of 1.5mm obeche strip, one of which was shaped beforehand to be narrower and thus forming a rebate for the window to run in. The upper and lower runners for each side were made in this way.

All the runners were then given a couple of coats of Teak stain before they were epoxied to the cabin sides, a temporary window template was used to get the spacing and positioning correct during this stage. A vertical piece was also made, with a rebate too, as an end stop which was also fixed in place.

The template was then used to produce the actual windows which both have a handle glued to the outer rear edge with canopy glue and both run very well but with sufficient friction in the runners to hold them in although I will fit a removable retaining pin at the ends of the runners to prevent them from sliding out completely 😠.

The two white metal navigation lights supplied in the kit were painted with some metallic silver acrylic and the lenses painted red and green, these fix onto some obeche pieces fashioned and formed to complete the lights, then both were Teak stained and epoxied to the top window runners.

In part 2 I will tackle the handrails for the cabin roof 😁.

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Time to make a decision on what colour the hull should be…🤔
The instructions say ‘Navy Blue’ but that just doesn’t look right, just too light.
In the ‘photos of the splendid model in the National Maritime museum the hull appears to be black while in the colour video clips on YouTube it appears dark, possibly black, but in keeping with the ‘boys in blue’ nature of the vessel I think a very dark blue would be more appropriate. I have seen this on some other Thames Police Launch models that I have admired and it looks ‘right’ so to speak.

Just to convince myself I generated a ‘colour palette’ in Photoshop to make a direct comparison between black and a couple of deep blues that looked like possible candidates.
I used the RAL co-ordinates of the two blues in question to generate the colours and decided on RAL 5004 as the favourite and then ordered a couple of 400ml rattle cans from a custom paint supplier, I chose a satin finish rather than full gloss.
They arrived a few days later and I did a spray test on a scrap piece of board with the anti-fouling below with a white waterline between and was very pleased with my choice.

The red oxide was carefully masked off and the area to be painted cleaned off with some panel wipe on a clean paper towel, then into the spray booth for the first light coat. This painting was done during a very cold spell in early January 2019 and I took the precaution of taking the boat indoors the night before to keep it warm and also pre-heat the workshop before bringing it out, I also used my hot air gun to gently warm the hull prior to spraying and then again after the first coat was applied.

I’d like to think that this helped the process and prevented the seasonal temperature and humidity levels causing any adverse effects on the finish. The second coat was applied about 20 minutes later and the solvents flashed off by the heat gun again. I’ll add that the heat gun was used at a distance of about two feet and the booth is fan vented to outside and…. ‘I am that masked man’.

Back on the bench and with the masking removed the paint finish looks very satisfactory to me, I just need to apply the white ‘Trimline Tape’ for the watermark to finish the hull before spraying with a couple of coats of satin lacquer.

Then it will be ready for it’s first showing at the London model show at Ally Pally on the St. Albans Model Engineering Society stand alongside my RAF Crash Tender.

More on that ‘Trimline Tape’ later……🤕

https://stalbansmes.com/

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The ‘box’ of the prototype I’m building is made of balsa wood, later production models are produced in ply and have the planking lines laser etched on the floor panels, and as balsa doesn’t take stain particularly well I have used separate obeche panels to line the box internally that can be finished with the Teak stain that I’m using.

This does, however, mean that I can apply the deck lines using a black indelible marker pen and incorporate some detail lines around the motor housing.

I started by cutting and shaping two obeche panels that join along the centre line of the deck and fit neatly around the motor mount and prop-shaft, then I used some tracing paper over the panels to make a test pattern for the planking lines.

When I was happy with the layout of the lines I first applied two coat of Teak stain to the panels, and when that was dry I used a .8mm pen to mark the deck lines, the ink takes a while to dry fully and I found it all too easy to smudge some lines 😡 which had to be very quickly taken off with a dampened cotton bud and re-applied.

After 24 hours the ink had fully dried and was impervious to smudging and resistant to removal by any means (except a solvent).

The floor panels were then glued down to the balsa floor with an even spread of aliphatic glue and weighted down over all of the area as there was a tendency for the panels to curl and lift.

Each side panel was made in one piece and then separated into two parts to make the fitting easier, the join will be covered with a vertical detail strip, and they were also stained before being glued and clamped in place. No lining detail was applied to the side panels as I’ll do this with other surface applied pieces later but only in the area outside of the cabin.

All the panels were given a couple of coats of satin lacquer to enhance and protect the finish.

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There’s no putting it off any longer, I need to start painting the hull before I do any more on the boat so the hull was given a final rub down with a fine abrasive and then the deck and gunwales carefully masked off.
I used some panel wipe to thoroughly de-grease all the surfaces and then put the hull in the ‘spray booth’ on my turntable and applied two coats of Halfords grey primer. I left this for a couple of days to dry and harden off before setting it on my bench.

The next stage involves levelling the hull fore and aft and side to side so that the waterline can be established. Fortunately the well deck floor is meant to be perfectly level when the boat is afloat and at rest and this is the datum I used to level to using a couple of spirit levels.
The rough waterline points were measured off the plan and transferred to the hull to be used as approximate starting points for the waterline.

For my previous build I bought a self-levelling laser to indicate the waterline so this was brought out for the same purpose.
The laser level was placed on another workbench a couple of metres away and gradually raised with packing pieces until the projected line agreed with the rough position marks I’d made on the hull and then finely adjusted until the line was correct and pencil marks made at intervals along the projected line.

The process was repeated for the other side of the hull and then also marked across the stern, fortunately the stern line and bow markings joined up accurately confirming that the levelling was spot on.
Good quality low tack masking tape was then applied all around the hull and the area above the line masked off with a couple of layers of newspaper.

The exposed hull was then keyed with a fine Scotchbrite type pad and cleaned off with panel wipe before two coats of Halfords red oxide primer applied as the anti-fouling.

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