Hi All.
The Southampton Pilots Boat is finally finished and I'm eagerly awaiting the first opportunity to do some 'sea trials'.
Meanwhile here are some photographs of the finished article.

I have added a short video to show the functional features (lighting and radar).

I'm very grateful for your continued interest and I hope you have enjoyed my build blog.
Thank you 😀.
Rob.

Southampton Pilot Boat 'Hamstead'

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The only fitting missing from the deck now is an anchor that is stowed within the front ‘pulpit’.

I’m guessing that as the Southampton Pilot Boats are always moored at their base in Gosport at the mouth of Portsmouth Harbour there’s very little need for an anchor unless they need to hold fast in open water. This also probably accounts for the absence of a permanent rope of chain attached to the anchor and I suppose that it is stored in a locker somewhere on the boat.

The Gosport base can be seen in Google Maps in the link.

I found some good drawings of the plough anchor on the web and started by sketching out the shape of the plough blade and transferring it to a piece of paper (Post-it-Note), folding it and placing it on the deck to see if the scale was about right by comparison to the ‘photos I had. The shank of the anchor was sketched and sized in the same way.

Once happy with the sizing I transferred the shapes to a piece of 1.5mm styrene sheet and cut them out roughly to shape with a knife and then refined them with files and abrasive paper.
The plough blade needed to be bent along the centre line and I found the best way to do this was to apply heat to a thin metal edge (short ruler) and using that to ‘hot bend’ the blade to the correct angle and then the wings of the blade were then gently heated and given a slight curvature too.

The shank was cut to form the hinge and further laminated with 1.5mm styrene to thicken the section and provide a means of attachment to the blade. The hinge was fitted with a brass pin as a pivot and then the shank refined with files and abrasives.
I made a shackle from a short piece of styrene sheet heated and bent over the ruler edge and then drilled and fitted with a brass hinge pin.

The finished shank was then glued to the blade and left to set firmly after which the whole piece was cleaned up with and abrasive pad and then painted with some Halfords metallic silver.

There’s no rope or chain permanently attached to the anchor and it is held down on the deck by some retaining straps within the confines of the front pulpit and so mine is fixed down with some brass wire ‘staples’ painted gunmetal grey with the anchor sitting on some thin rubber dots cut from a neoprene sealing ring and glued to the deck with some canopy glue.
The hinge of the anchor was also set into a fixed position with a dab of canopy glue just to immobilise the hinge to stop it moving on the deck.

One last small detail…the addition of some black self-adhesive vinyl to the front and side air vents and intakes improves the look and gives them the appearance of internal depth.

As soon as circumstances permit I’ll do some action photo’s and video of the boat on the water but in the meantime I’ll try to do some decent photos as a final reveal.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/50%C2%B047'28.1%22N+1%C2%B006'51.6%22W/@50.7914979,-1.1160565,446m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m14!1m7!3m6!1s0x4874687e6af10149:0x6d3fd9d771d90367!2sPortsmouth+Harbour!3b1!8m2!3d50.8439183!4d-1.1576504!3m5!1s0x0:0x0!7e2!8m2!3d50.7911397!4d-1.1143418

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Following Skydive130’s tutorial on the making of the roof vents for his Pilot Boat I had several attempts to make the roof ventilators using his method, none of which I was entirely satisfied with and so I decided to adopt a slightly different approach.

I did some research into the actual size, shape and workings of these things and found sufficient information on the web about them 🤓.

Known as ‘Dorade Box Ventilators’ they are designed to admit air flow and funnel it through the device to the cabin interior and at the same time to block the ingress of water by using a clever valve mechanism with the water draining away through slots on the base.
Not that much of that was relevant to making them but identifying the type, and then the manufacturer, and finding drawings was a great deal more help than the grainy low resolution photographs that I was looking at previously.

With a much clearer idea of what they should look like from the info I found I started by laminating some square section styrene for the bases and cutting them into blocks of an approximate length.
There’s a raised circular section at each end of the ventilators and I simulated those with some 8mm and 6mm styrene rod and then trimmed the blocks to a rough tapered shape with a knife using the circular pieces as a guide.
Further shaping was done using a sanding plate, file and abrasive to shape the bases with a taper in length and in height. I also filed some bevels on the underside of these bases to simulate the water drainage slots.

The bases for the two ventilators on the forward engine room roof are circular in shape and were easily made from some 10mm diameter rod that I was able to ‘turn’ to a tapered shape in the chuck of my makeshift Black and Decker ‘lathe’.

A distinctive feature of these ventilators is the air intake funnel that has a particular shape which I wanted to look as realistic as possible and involved multiple experiments to get a repeatable method.
These parts were made from 8mm styrene tube and being a thermoplastic it can be readily heated and formed and to form the distinctive mouth shape of the intakes I made a wooden former suitably carved and shaped that could be pushed into the end of the styrene tube during the heating stage and using finger pressure mould the walls of the styrene tube around the wooden former.
The end of the former has a rounded end that will stretch and distort the plastic so that the tubing can be bent to 90 degrees while maintaining the curved shape.
The styrene cools and hardens very rapidly and so it took many attempts to form the desired shape successfully and I must have used almost a complete 300mm length of 8mm styrene tube perfecting a technique to form the piece in a repeatable way.
Probably a dozen or more such pieces went into the bin until I was happy with a repeatable process 😥.
As I need six of these ventilators I was very careful to perfect this without running out of material 😮.

Each piece needed to be trimmed at each side of the bend and the ‘mouth’ heated and refined on the wooden former. The base end of the piece was re-heated and reformed into a roughly circular shape so that it mounts neatly on the 8mm raised disc at the large end of the tapered base.
This was not a particularly easy process at all and a few ended up in the bin after the repeated heating and forming rendered them irretrievably miss-shaped as can be seen in one of the pictures ☹️.

I probably spent a whole day making eight usable pieces (six to use and two for spares) but I was determined to see it through despite aching and burnt fingers 😢.

After a final trim and clean-up with file and abrasives they were glued to the ventilator bases and left to set.

I used a ‘ScotchBrite’ type abrasive pad to clean the completed parts and to provide a key for the white gloss paint.
One good thing about styrene is that it’s not always necessary to spray a primer coat if the surfaces are well keyed.

The mouths of the vents were painted inside with satin matt black as a finishing touch and a 1.5mm brass rod superglued into the base as a fixing pin.
After careful measurement and positioning the roof was drilled to take the brass fixing pins and a dab of canopy glue used to secure them in place.
The forward vents on the engine room roof are fixed in the same way but I had to add a reinforcing piece of ply on the inside as the roof there is only a 1.5mm ply panel.

I had been putting off making these vents for a while and now that they are made and fitted they do look quite good and I’m very satisfied with the end results 😊.

A little more detailing as I get closer to finishing this epic build 😉

There’s a short handrail on the roof above the cabin door, very simply made from a short length of 2mm brass formed at each end and finished with a soldered brass washer. A couple of coats of silver and clear lacquer had the handrail finished in no time and it was glued into a couple of holes drilled in the roof panel.

The mast was finally glued into the cabin roof, this mast has been purposely made shorter than ‘scale’ for practical reasons so that the boat can be stored in a large plastic storage box with the mast and rigging in place but with the mast antenna removed from its magnetic holder as described in an earlier blog update.

For the rigging I obtained some turned brass ‘eyes’ from RB Model (Poland) which are perfect for a number of features on the cabin and engine room roofs, they were painted with an etch primer and then some VW Brilliant Orange.
Two were used on the rear of the roof for a couple of flag lines that run up to the mast, these were extended with a short piece of styrene tube so that the rigging cord does not foul on the edge of the roof and were simply ‘self-tapped’ into a couple of holes either side of the roof handrail.

After very careful measurement and marking using a paper template four more ‘eyes’ were fixed into the roof through some 1.5mm holes pin drilled through the roof panel.

In addition to the flag lines the mast has four lines of rigging ‘stays’ that extend down to the roof and these were made from some .8mm diameter black elasticated cord which was looped through holes in the mast reinforcing gussets and down to the brass eyes in the roof and finished at each end with some 1.4mm black heat shrink tubing.
A piece of paper was used to shield the roof from the heat of the soldering iron tip to protect the paint on the roof during the shrinking….damaging that now would be a disaster ☹️!!

All of the rigging cords were tensioned sufficiently before fixing to remain taught for, hopefully, some reasonable time (years I hope!) although I have plenty of the elasticated nylon cord to replace the rigging a few hundred times over!!

Four more of the brass eyes were used to simulate the lifting eyes of the removable roof section of the forward engine room, again simply self-tapped into holes drilled through the 1.5mm ply panel.

I may do some additional research to identify the correct flags that should go on this boat and get some made up in silk as a nice finishing detail.

All that remains are the roof ventilators, I dreaded making those and left them ‘till almost last 😨, and the anchor.😁

https://www.rbmodel.com/index.php?action=products&group=001&set=en

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Getting very close to completing my Southampton Pilot Boat and time to do the final installation of the lighting system.

I designed, built and tested the lighting circuit board some time ago along with the navigation lights, searchlights and deck floodlights so now it’s time to fit it all into the cabin.

I started by sticking down four cable tie bases to the inside of the cabin and securing the circuit board to them with some cable ties. The first lights to be fitted were the port and starboard navigation lights and these are simply glued in place with some canopy glue with the wires passing through the cabin roof.

I’m using small dabs of canopy glue in preference to epoxy because any surplus glue can be easy cleaned off with a damp tissue, dries clear and doesn’t form an aggressive bond as it could be necessary to remove a light fitting at some later date…a good decision as I’ll explain later.

The mast was next, I made this a friction fit for now as I will need to remove it at a later stage to add some additional roof details.
The eight deck level floodlights were given a final bit of detailing and a coat of clear lacquer before being fixed in place with a light dab of canopy glue and by now I had quite a bundle of loose wires inside the cabin!

The two roof mounted searchlights were next, once again fixed with canopy glue and both angled outward by virtue of the angled bases I had built in.

The final light was a rear deck high level floodlight made in much the same way as the other floods but with a much shallower profile and with a fixing flange on the underside. Running the wires from this fitting was not particularly easy in order to conceal them but I managed it with the aid of some epoxy glue and paint.

There were quite a few wires to be tidied up and formed into ‘looms’ so they were labelled to identify them and tacked with dabs of hot glue and also fed through some cable clips. The cable looms were arranged so that they all arrived on the correct side of the circuit board according to their function and then some heat shrink sleeves used to consolidate them into two separate bundles.

Each of the cable pairs were terminated with a two pin socket and connected to the corresponding circuit board mounted plug according to its function and each light has a separate current limiting resistor. The wires from the radar motor also connect to this circuit board.

All of the lighting circuits are carried through a ribbon cable to a multi-pin plug and socket to make connection with the lighting battery supply, R/C switches and Radar control board.

Testing the system threw up a few problems, the first being a dry joint on the radar circuit that meant that the radar motor operated intermittently and a similar problem with the navigation light circuit too. The common denominator to these problems was the 9 pin connector 😠.

The solder connections of the very fine ribbon cable conductors to the pins of the 9 pin multi-plug were proving to be a little too fragile so I changed the ‘solder bucket’ type of plug to an IDC (Insulation Displacement Connector) which has a much more robust cable clamping system and this cured the problems.

The second issue was that two of the deck level floodlight were not working and after testing it was evident that the SMT LED’s had failed 😡 (despite being tested thoroughly during the making of) and the remedy for this meant removing the faulty lights and replacing them with the two spare units that I had the foresight to make for that very reason, but leaving me with no further spares!
Similarly the use of canopy glue fix the all the lights was a good decision as they were fairly easy to remove without much trauma 😅.

With all the lighting on the boat looks really good in the darkness of my study and the floodlights look to give deck a fairly well spread of light all around the cabin and the rear high-level flood illuminating the stern very nicely too 😊

Although I could buy some ready-made bollards I couldn’t find of any of the right style and scale to resemble the bollards on the Southampton Pilot Boats so I decided to make some from styrene now that I am feeling more confident working with plastics.
Fortunately I had the right sizes of styrene rod in my materials collection for the job and so to start I made the rectangular bases first from some 2mm styrene sheet.
Some 4mm styrene rod was bored out with a 3.2mm drill bit in a pin vice and some 3.2mm rod inserted through two pieces and glued in place with the correct spacing to form the cross pieces.
I chose to trim all of the upright posts to length after this process as drilling them accurately at the correct heights was proving to be very difficult, it was far easier to get the basic piece together with the correct horizontal spacing of the posts first and trim to height later.

The trimmed pieces were then glued to the bases and when set the horizontal bars were trimmed and filed to length. To finish the pieces off I cut some very short sections of 4mm tube and 5mm rod to cap all of the ends and sanded them down to the desired thickness.
I used the tube as I didn’t have any of the right size rod for the horizontal caps but after glueing they were filled with some Humbrol filler.
After cleaning up all of the bollards they were given a couple of coats of Halfords metallic silver and gloss lacquer.

I don’t want to rely on just glue to fix the bollards to the deck so I pin drilled up through the bases and into all of the uprights so that I could insert a piece of 1.5mm brass rod to form fixing pins that will go through the deck skins and into the ply panels beneath them for a good mechanical fixing in addition to the glue.

To ensure accurate positioning of the fittings I made up some paper drilling templates and then drilled the deck to take the 1.5mm pins. The front and rear bollards were all glued in place with canopy glue for ease of clean-up with water if any oozed out onto the textured deck surface.
The side bollards were glued into the cabin recesses with canopy glue but for those I used some epoxy to secure the pins on the underside of the cabin deck. I was then finally able to glue the front pulpit and rear railings into the deck, again using canopy glue.

For the fairleads I thought I would definitely cheat and use some really good ready-made ones cast in white met that I have previously used on my RAF Crash Tender.
These fairleads were very generously supplied to me by Mike Cummings at Vintage Model Works and they are a perfect style and size for my needs and only required a bit of fettling to remove casting marks.

Thanks Mike...much appreciated 👍😀👍

They were etch primed and then brush painted with some Tamiya acrylic ‘Gun Metal’ paint and when dry, drilled pinned into the deck in the same way as the bollards.
That very much completes the deck fitting with the exception of an anchor which can be seen in ‘photos of the real boats.
It’s a ‘Plough’ type anchor and should be fairly easy to fabricate.......I hope 🤞😀

Either side of the radar unit are a Foghorn and a Loudhailer which are nice small details to add to the roof of the cabin 🔈 📢 😀

Cheating slightly…I used a couple of ready-made units from RB Model (based in Poland) as a starting point as they are just about the right scale and made from turned aluminium and brass to a high standard.

The foghorn needed very little modification other than a supporting leg at the ‘loud’ end and a few coats of Halfords ‘Appliance White’ gloss paint.

The Loudhailer on the other hand needed a great deal more modifying to convert it from a foghorn.

I started by cutting off the flared tube halfway down its length and flatting the flared end to increase its surface area so that I could superglue a 3mm thick piece of styrene to it which, when set firmly, I could roughly shape using a Stanley knife to extend the flare of the aluminium horn onto the styrene and also trim it to a circular shape.
Prior to gluing this piece on I had drilled a 5mm hole through it which I will later open up to create the internal flare.
I put this piece into the chuck of my crude Black & Decker horizontal drill holder ‘lathe’ and shaped the styrene end with files and abrasives to blend the metal and plastic together to form an enlarged horn.

The internal flare was created by using a tapered grinding stone in the drill chuck while rotating the work piece by hand to create the correct profile, a very delicate operation because I was worried that the interface between metal and plastic was now very much smaller and they could very easily separate if too much force was used.
Happily this didn’t happen and the new enlarged horn was successfully formed.

I then reduced the length of the aluminium tube by using a saw blade as a parting tool and cleaned it up with a file. The base of the horn was formed from the foghorn base by filing down the remaining ‘stump’ into a taper and reducing its diameter until it fitted neatly into the new horn and then the two pieces superglued together to complete the assembly.

After cleaning, the new loudhailer was given a few coats of white gloss to match the already completed foghorn.

I carefully gauged the correct positioning of these horns on the cabin roof either side of the radar unit using some photos of the real boat and made a paper drilling template.
After drilling the mounting holes they were fixed into the roof using the 2.5mm threaded stubs and a corresponding nut on the inside of the roof which had to be recessed into the wood so that they would not foul with the radar motor.

There is a third unit between these horns on the real boats, a square black object.
Perhaps an infra-red floodlight for use with night viewing equipment?

I just can’t identify what it is from the ‘photos that I’m working from so any ideas or suggestions would be very welcome

Whatever it is, if I decide to add it, it won’t be as tricky to make as the loudhailer 🙄
Rob.

https://www.rbmodel.com/index.php?action=products&cat=c_ep&set=en

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The radar assembly needs to be fitted into the cabin roof before I can do the final fit of all the lighting features as I’ll need to incorporate the wiring to the drive motor into the loom of wiring that will be formed with all of the lighting wiring.

I made and tested the radar unit some time ago and it’s designed to fit through the roof panel and couple with the drive motor and gearbox on the underside.
I used some rubber spacers to add a small degree of resilience and adjustment and fixed the motor in place with two fine machine screws directly into the ply reinforcing block that I fitted during construction.
The wiring from the motor was terminated on a two pin plug which mates with a corresponding socket glued to the roof panel to extend it through the loom to the lighting circuit board.

With the motor in place I fitted the column into the roof, fitted the drive shaft and fixed the radar bar to the shaft with the grub screw.
After temporarily connecting a 1.5v battery to run the motor the gearbox fixings were loosened off and adjusted for perfect centring and minimum friction with the motor running before being tightened again.

Once I was happy with the alignment I removed the radar column and bar so that I could continue with the other roof detailing without the danger of breaking it 😨

It will be eventually fixed in place with canopy glue in the very final assembly of the cabin.
And now I can get all of the lighting and wiring installed 😁

A brief update on a small feature....

The boat hooks on the Pilot Boats are recessed into the cabin sides so that there are no protrusions for the crew to get caught on while walking on the decks and so when designing and constructing the new cabin for this Pilot Boat I included these recesses.

The hooks I have used are a ready-made item that I’ve used before on both my RAF Crash Tender and Thames River Police Boat, they come in set of three and are available in different lengths.
I chose the nearest size to suit, trimmed them to length and added some of the cotton cord that I used for the handrail to form a hand-grip. The white metal hooks required very little ‘fettling’ with files and abrasives and the poles were given two coats of some acrylic teak stain to finish them off.

They are fixed into the cabin recesses with a short length of tinned copper wire pre-formed into a kind of ‘staple’ which were also given a couple of coats of teak stain.
I drilled some 1.2mm holes through the back of the recesses and with the boat hooks in place I passed the 'staples' through the holes and secured them by twisting the wires on the inside of the cabin.

Quite a nice little detail I think 😀

https://www.battlecrafts.com/deck-fittings/1-24th-scale/311-boat-hooks-200mm

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Following up on Martin’s suggestion I have added a simulated track slot to the wiper boxes.
I didn’t have any black Trimline tape as used by Skydive130 on his model but I did have some silver self-adhesive vinyl that I trimmed a 1mm strip from and applied to all three of the wiper boxes.
The effect is very much the same if not better and is a great finishing detail to the wiper assemblies 😎