While the paint is drying on the pulpit handrail and safety rail it’s a good opportunity to continue making up the glazing and frames for the roof windows.
I started making these a while ago and as the cabin now nears completion they will need to be fitted soon.

The roof windows on the real harbour pilot boats are heavily tinted so that the crew, and the helmsman in particular, are able to look skywards when alongside a vessel that the pilots are about to board without being blinded by strong sunlight. I’m sure that this is not the case during a night time boarding but perhaps that’s where the two small searchlights come into play?

I did search around for some dark tinted Perspex or similar for these windows and although it is available in Perspex in thicknesses of over 6mm it’s not generally available it seems.
Tinting spays for car windows and lighting clusters would be an alternative but better than that is the tinting film that can be applied to car windows.
This stuff is readily available in a range of translucency from just 5% light transmission to about 85% translucency.
Normally it is bought by the linear metre but I found an eBay seller that could sell ‘sample sizes’ and very little cost and as I’m only covering a tiny area this was a very economical way to do it.

I started by making a template of all three roof window apertures and transferred these to my chosen window plastic which is 1.5mm clear Lexan. Each window was initially roughly cut from the sheet with a craft knife and then shaped very carefully by cutting and filing. I kept the protective film on both sides of the Lexan while doing this to preserve the faces of the plastic.
All three windows were made to be a friction fit in the apertures and will be eventually glued in place with canopy glue. All of the edges were bevelled very slightly so that the window film, when applied, would not be lifted by a ragged edge.

The tinting film I bought for these roof windows is described as ‘Limo’ grade with a 5% light transmission so they will in effect look black from the outside 😎.
A piece of this was roughly cut to size for the centre square window and the protective film peeled away from the outside face of the plastic. Following the supplied instructions for applying the film, which I won’t go into detail here, I was able to get the film on without any ripples or bubbles.

I repeated this for the two smaller roof windows and set them aside for the film to fully bond and cure before trimming away the surplus with a very sharp knife.
I decided to make the window frames for these roof windows from strips of 1mm Plasticard sheet rather than cut them out of a sheet in one piece which is quite wasteful and one slip of the knife could easily ruin the piece.

Another template was made of the window apertures and these were re-drawn with a 1.5mm internal and external overlap to give an overall 3mm wide frame and I cut some 1mm Plasticard into 3mm wide strips and tacked these down on the drawing paper to form the basic frames. The internal corner gussets were cut and glued in place on the paper too. Styrene cement was used to bond all of the frame pieces together and when fully set the three window frames were released from their paper backing.
It was then a case of laboriously cutting, trimming and filing the internal and external corners to make the final frame shapes 😮
The corner joints needed very little filling to conceal any blemishes and the frames were gently flatted on some mild abrasive paper.

A light coat of primer followed by two coats of silver spray paint and finished with clear gloss lacquer saw the frames nicely finished and ready for fitting.

These, like the roof window panels will be fixed in place with canopy glue.

The cabin front and side windows will be made in a similar way but with a much milder tint which I’ll describe in a separate blog update.

Before I could solder the safety rail to the pulpit I had to wind the rope handgrip around the handrail as doing it after the rail is in place would be very tedious and be a bit like a ‘needle and thread’ process.
I had previously done some tests with some rigging cord left over from a previous build and it looked very good indeed 😊.

While applying the ‘rope’ so I found that the chrome paint was very easily dulled and smudged even after leaving it for a couple of days to harden so I have abandoned the idea of a chrome finish on the exposed sections of the handrail and now I’ll just use some good silver paint that I know I can lacquer over to provide the required shine and give it some protection too.

After tacking one end with cyano I had to wind the ‘rope’ around the 2mm brass rod as tight as possible and then tack the end where it met the next joint. The process was repeated until all the handrail was covered and the effect is very realistic and all that I hoped for.

The rope was given three coats of matt acrylic lacquer applied by brush to fix and consolidate it. I did consider dyeing the rope to a darker colour but it doesn't really need it as in most of the reference photo's Im using it does appear quite light in colour.

The brass safety rail was then fixed in place with tinned copper wire loop through the pairs of 1mm holes that I had pre-drilled and the loops tightened to hold them in place. The rail was adjusted in height using the cabin handrail and safety rail as a guide.

Some flux was applied to the joints and soldered. The fast heat from the 100w iron had little or no effect on the paint or the rope binding.
The twist of wire was cut back as close to the safety rail as possible and the remaining ‘stump’ filed flush to the rail. Any remaining flux was then cleaned off and the joint tidied up where required.
I will finish off by masking off the rope and handrail and spraying a coat of etch primer, silver gloss and gloss lacquer. The Pulpit joints will be brush painted and lacquered.

This will be the method I’ll use when finishing the handrails on the main cabin.
It’s disappointing that the chrome finish proved to be unsuitable ☹️ but I’d rather use conventional paints for the sake of durability.

I would like the handrails on the boat to have a nice shiny chrome finish and having seen jbkiwi’s ladders for his Hartley Flareline with a chrome paint finish I thought I’d give some a try.
I couldn’t find any of the Duplicolor paint that he used and had to choose one of a number of alternatives that are available. I also ordered some etch primer which I’d used successfully before.

The paint test was to be certain that the primer and chrome finish didn’t react with each other and to see if the resulting chrome finish could be enhanced or at least protected by a gloss lacquer.
I used a piece of brass tube with a silver soldered brass piece on the end as my test piece and after cleaning it with emery paper and panel wipe I sprayed a base coat of etch primer and left that to dry overnight.
Then I sprayed the first coat of chrome and was relieved to see no reaction. A second coat was sprayed half an hour later and also left to dry and the resulting chrome finish looked excellent. It was left to harden over night.

I tried a coat of Halfords acrylic gloss lacquer and although there was no adverse reaction the lacquer actually dulled the bright chrome making it just look like silver paint. As an experiment I sprayed over the lacquer with another coat of chrome and the bright finish was restored with no adverse effects.

My conclusions are that this chrome paint works as well as I had hoped and I can now proceed to spray the handrails with some confidence.

I’m not certain how long the chrome finish will remain bright and shiny, only time will tell.

With the cabin handrails in place I can now make the ‘Pulpit’ which is an area at the bow of the boat enclosed by a handrail and safety rail.
I’m not certain of the actual use of this but I assume it’s a safe haven for observation or forward deck activity by a crew member and the height of the ‘pulpit’ is dictated by the continuation of a line from the cabin handrail and safety rail.

I started by sketching out the size and shape of the pulpit on some graph paper and then transferring the dimensions to a piece of scrap of ply with 2mm holes drilled for all of the uprights to form a jig. Some round styrene rod was used as formers for the bending of the corners.

Some 2mm brass rod was annealed and formed into one half of the top handrail and a rear upright and then a mirror image piece made as the other half making sure that I inserted some of my ‘Tee’ pieces in the correct places as the bending progressed.
The remaining uprights were cut to length and placed on the jig to join to the handrail tee pieces.
All the uprights were made 'over length' so that I could trim them once the correct height of the pulpit was set. The rod ends were not threaded as I have no access to the underside to retain them with nuts so they'll eventually be epoxied in place.

There are two bracing uprights that meet the frame at an angle and I made some joining pieces from some 3mm tube cut and joined at an acute angle and silver soldered together.

The safety rail is a piece if 3mm x 1.5mm brass bar annealed and bent around some slightly larger corner formers and temporarily fixed to the framework with some tinned copper wire through 1mm holes drilled through the safety rail.

This complete framework was then soft soldered together with the exception of the safety rail which will be soft soldered in place after the rope handgrip has been wound around the handrail.
The forward deck of the boat was then drilled using the assembly jig holes as a template and the pulpit framework temporarily pushed in place with a 2mm brass washer at the base of each of all the uprights.
The height of the pulpit was then adjusted to follow the visual line from the cabin handrails and the brass washers soldered in place using my foil barrier method to prevent to prevent the heat from the soldering iron affecting the deck paint finish.
Soldering these 'in situ' ensures that all the washers sit flush with the deck and conform to the deck curvature.

The etch primer and chrome paint I ordered has arrived today and if the ‘paint test’ proves successful I’ll be able to paint the pulpit 🤞😀

I've been putting off making handrails for some time but ....time to get MOTIVATED 😀.

I started experimenting with making the hand rails some time ago when considering what detailing was practical to add to the new version of the cabin.
The handrails and the safety line attachment rail are an essential and prominent safety feature on these Pilot Boats and although it concerned me that they could be a bit tricky to make for a novice metal worker like me they are definitely worth the effort of detailing properly.

Now I’ve not made railings before but surely all it needs is some brass rod and a bit of soldering so how hard can it be? 🤔

After examining the reference ‘photos I’ve collected it became clear that the handrails will need to be carefully positioned and fixed to the cabin correctly to get the correct ‘run’ and alignment so a means of adjusting the height and angles of all of the uprights would be necessary, so clearly not so straightforward as I had first thought.☹️

My early experiments involved making some brass tube ‘Tee’ pieces so that I could join the handrails to the uprights and thus allow me to make all of the required pieces and assemble them on the cabin ‘dry’ so to speak.

This I decided would be the best way to make the railings as I would be able to make adjustments, and correct mistakes, very easily. I also made some plain uprights using 2mm rod and 3mm tube.

The technique for making the ‘tee pieces’ involved filing the end of a tube with a 3mm round needle file to create a concave end that could be set down on another piece of 3mm tube at 90 degrees and silver soldering the two together. The piece was then cut from the end of the tube and the process repeated until I had sufficient for all the tee joints to be made. All of these pieces were dunked in a ‘pickling’ solution to remove the flux residue and then they were all filed down to be equal in height and width.

The plain uprights were made in a similar way by drilling a hole into one wall of the 3mm tube then a 2mm rod was slightly chamfered on a grinder so that it sat neatly on the hole in the tube and then silver soldered.

I chose to silver solder all of these bits so that when assembling the rails I could soft solder all the other joints together without worrying that the tee pieces would be affected by the heat.

After very carefully measuring and marking the fixing points for the handrails I used a 2mm bit in a pin vice to drill horizontal holes in the cabin sides and then I made the supporting uprights for the rails from short pieces of brass rod, annealed and bent to approximately the correct angle. With the uprights in place I was then able to put the tee pieces on the uprights and adjust the height of each by filing so that the handrail could be passed through them and made to follow the correct line and angles. Just to complicate matters the handrails rise in a curvature and slightly inwards towards the bow.😠

The engine room roof was then drilled using the handrail position to get the correct angle for the holes. After dry fitting all the pieces and checking all the parts were properly aligned, the handrail, tee pieces and uprights were soft soldered together.

After setting the correct height and angles of the engine room roof uprights I used some 3mm diameter brass washers to make the base of all of the uprights but I had to solder all of them ‘in-place’ to ensure that they all sat flush with the roof.
The danger here was that the heat of the soldering would damage the paint and lacquer finish so after a quick experiment on a test piece I found that some aluminium foil folded to 18 layers was sufficient to protect the paint from the short but instant heat from the 100w iron to solder the washers.
The washers for the cabin side supports were done on a jig as the position and angles were all the same.
I also tapped a 2mm thread on the end of all the upright pieces so that they can be secured to the cabin and superstructure with brass nuts should I ever need to remove any to make repairs or modifications.

The handrails are one continuous length down from the rear cabin roof, along the length of the whole cabin to the front which I don’t think I could have achieved without jointing the brass rod as I have and overall I'm quite pleased with the way they have turned out (so far) !!

Next I will need to make and fit the safety line rails, paint everything with a chrome finish and then fit the rope binding 'hand-grip' along the length of the handrails. The binding can be seen on the real boats in the last ‘photo.

The forward ‘pulpit’ also needs to be made up as well as some stern guard rails.

The two roof mounted searchlights form part of the lighting system and I although I had considered buying some ready-made ones the effort involved in converting them to LED operation I didn’t think was worthwhile.

After some success scratch-building some other detailing in styrene I chose to make my own 😊.

The basic construction is some 10mm diameter styrene tube capped with some 3mm sheet which I ‘turned’ in a drill chuck to produce the domed end of the searchlight.
I had to temporarily fit a short piece of 8mm styrene rod to the inside first to act as a mandrel. I also put a short styrene strip on the top of the light and blended this into the domed rear.

The support for the searchlight was made from various diameters of styrene tube and had to incorporate a bevelled base so that the light could be fitted into the sloping roof to be vertical.
I mounted a 3mm ‘flat top’ white LED onto an 8mm disc, snipped the leads as short as possible and soldered the wires to them. The back of this disc was then painted black along with the back portion of the light fitting interior. After testing the LED I fed the wires through the mounting tube and glued the LED disc into the fitting.
I masked off the LED with a short length of styrene tube and then sprayed the searchlight with a couple of coats of silver paint and one gloss lacquer to try to simulate a chrome finish.
Just for a little more realism and optical efficiency I found some silver metallised polyester film from some packaging material and made an 8mm diameter ‘reflector’ and used a hole punch to make a 3mm hole to fit around the LED and glued it in place with some canopy glue.

The front lens of the searchlight is actually an 8mm acrylic ‘window’ from a brass porthole fitting that I had left over from another project and these were glued into the front with canopy glue too.

The sloping cabin roof was carefully drilled with a vertical hole and the lights tried for fit and I have arranged the bevelled bases so that the two searchlights are aimed slightly to port and starboard rather than both dead ahead. The wires will routed down from the roof interior along with all the others and terminate on the lighting distribution board that I described earlier.

The finished searchlights don’t produce a narrow focussed beam but they are very bright 😎 and they do look quite like searchlights. Along with all the other fittings this will be added to the cabin in a final assembly stage.😁

Along with the radar unit the cabin roof is adorned with a number of other antennas which are presumably for communications, global positioning or other such purposes.

I chose to make the three vertical antennas removable in the same way as the antenna on top of the mast by the use of some very small magnets.

The antennas are made from some styrene rod and short pieces of tube at the base that has the 2mm neodymium magnet inside. The matching antenna base is made from various sizes of styrene tube to produce a socket with a mounting flange which houses the other magnet.

All three antennas have the magnets in the same polarisation so can be fitted into any socket while the antenna on top of the mast, which is a different length, has an opposite polarisation so it can’t be fitted to the roof. These antennas were primed and painted with white gloss with the bases all in silver.

There are a pair of very short antennas on the back of the roof which, I think, are for GPS functions and these were also made from various pieces of styrene rod and tube with the ends ‘turned’ in my makeshift drill chuck ‘lathe’. These are also painted white and silver.

The cabin roof navigation lights are simply some 7mm styrene tubing capped at one end and ‘turned’ in a drill chuck to apply a bevel and a slot filed into it for a 5mm LED that has had the top filed flat and the body ‘frosted’ with abrasive paper. The light fitting was painted matt black before the LED was epoxied inside and the wires soldered and insulated. The recesses in the cabin roof were drilled to accept the wires and then painted satin black so that the lights can be simply epoxied in place during final assembly of the cabin. 😁

Had I not decided to abandon building the superstructure supplied with the SLEC kit and build my own version I would have probably only fitted just the regular port and starboard navigation lights with LED’s or perhaps not even bothered at all and made them as painted dummy lights.

However the new superstructure, modelled on the Southampton Pilots Boats fleet, is an ideal candidate for a far more adventurous lighting arrangement. One feature of which is the deck level floodlights which I described the ‘making of’ in an earlier blog update.
Then there are the mast lights and the roof nav lights and two roof mounted searchlights. A good feature is to have all of these lights remotely switched and that means using some R/C controlled switches and a distribution board to accommodate the switching circuits and the current limiting resistors.
I did this previously on my RAF Crash Rescue Tender project and the circuit design is very simple and was ‘hand drawn’ but for this Pilot Boat I decided to use some freely available CAD software specifically developed for prototyping circuits using industry standard ‘Veroboard’.

VeeCad is one of those programmes that are very intuitive to use and after installing it on my PC I was able to draw up the circuits required complete with component designations and values. I was also able to test and verify the circuit design within the software too.

When I was happy with the design I printed out the Veroboard layout and working from the drawing very quickly built the circuit board with all the wire links, track breaks, resistors and connectors.
The switch panel was made from 3mm Plasticard in the same fashion as the main power and fuse panel and incorporates a fuse holder, power switch and a multi-pin ‘D’ connector for the 10 way ribbon cable connection to the distribution board. The fuse will only need to be no more than 250mA at most and is incorporated more as a convenient connection for the +ve supply to the three RC switches.

The Turnigy switches for the three lighting circuits are located in the hull of the model and are connected to the receiver and only the switched +ve outputs of the switches connect through the ribbon cable to the distribution board so only 6 connections through the ribbon are actually needed although the three lighting circuits use some doubled up unused cores in the ribbon just to improve the current capability.
There is a 7th connection which joins the lighting circuit –ve battery supply to the receiver –ve battery supply for the electronic switches to work properly.
At the time of writing I’m still trying to obtain the third RC switch but I have included the wiring for this in the loom.

The ribbon cable also carries the supply from the radar controller PCB to the radar motor in the cabin roof and this breaks out from the distribution board on a separate connector.

The cable is anchored to the circuit board using a brass link on a redundant circuit strip and so doesn’t rely on the soldered connections of the ribbon for security and it's long enough for the cabin to be detached from the hull and laid alongside without needing to be unplugged.

All of the lighting circuits are supplied from a separate 6V NiMh battery pack with XT60 connectors although in the photos I’m using some regular dry cells for testing while I await the required battery pack to arrive on the slow boat from China!☹️

I also need to replace the 6ch Turnigy i6 receiver with a Turnigy 10 channel one so that I am able to assign the four transmitter switches to aux channels for the three lighting circuits and the radar circuit too.

The distribution board was fixed into the roof of the cabin using cable tie bases as mounting points and the board secured in place with long cable ties. The board was positioned to allow easy access to the edge connectors to which all the wiring to the LED’s are connected.

The installation of the lighting will be completed in the final assembly of the cabin.