Thank you for your comments.

I have done the top in Mahogany and the rest in cedar, I will be fitting porthole rod's and grab rails as well.

Over the last ten days I have only been able to get out to the garage for a short time to work on the boat, I have done most of the cladding on the deck housings and I think that it is an improvement.

I have enclosed a before and after, looking forward to your comments so don't hold back.

SWMBO has said the the Ensuite bathroom needs a new coat of paint so that will be next weeks job. ( maybe Battle Ship Grey)

Fred

Hi
Just a quick update, as the weather has been fine for the last few day's I took opportunity to paint the hull, now these are not the colures that are recommend by Dean's, but they are going to be my new tug fleet colures👍.

Fred

As yesterday (02/10/2020) was a wet and windy day I moved in doors,
I turned my hand to the deck winch, now this all white metal, the one thing I did was to replace one of the rods for a brass one just to make it a bit more rigid, when finished it was back out to the garage were I sprayed it satin black.

Fred

As I said in an earlier post I was not happy with the way they looked painted, so I spent some time trying out how they would look cladded, this is how it turned out.

Fred .

I should have put this before "Got fed up"

One thing that I did was to mark out the hatch openings from the plan so that I would have all the deck beams in place before fixing the decks,

Deck fitted, I cut out the hatch opening's in the stern deck, now in the instructions it mentioned a hatch opening in the fore deck, but there are no markings for were to cut out the opening, so I decided to leave it as is.

With all the deck beams fitted and deck fitted I found out that the shaft was short by a few inches which put the motor under the deck, also the rudder servo was also in the wrong place. (not a good thing)

(Think that this is now back on track🤞)

I got fed-up with trying to get the decks to fit with out filler but in the end I got them to fit, I then moved on to the deck housings, as they are just a series of box's.
I painted a few of them but just did not like the out come, now as I had some strip left over from another boat I decided to use that to clad them.

I must mention that before I fitted the deck beams I fitted the motor mount.
I used the one that is supplied in the kit, I fixed some of the 1/4 x1/4 timber to the underside of the mount, as I am not a fan of the hook and rubber band method for fixing of the motor, I like to fix my motor's with a strip of brass over the motor and then bolted to the motor mount, (sorry I do not have any photos) the motor is a 385 from dean's. I lined up the motor with an alignment tool that a mate made for me.

I then moved onto the battery box I glued some ply into the hull and again I used the good old 1/4 x1/4 to make the box you can see that I used an old eight cell battery just for sizing this will be replaced with a six volt when the time comes.
I also used spring lever connectors as a temp fix, these will be replaced at a later date.

Next time fixing the Deck.🤞

O.K just a quick one this time,
After filling any low points on the inner face of the bulwark I used an engineering depth gauge to mark out were the deck beams were to go, I used some 1/4 x 1/4 inch timber from my local DIY store for the beams, as for sticking then to the hull I used clear gorilla glue you have to wet the hull side then stick and clamp the timber to the hull, after 48hrs I started to make up the deck support frame again using the 1/4 x 1/4 timber.

So far the gorilla glue is doing its job, all the deck beams are still in place.

I now moved on to the Rudder, in my kit this was made from casting resin with the rudder shaft all built in, now this is were I run into a bit of a problem, as my kit is so old it is in imperial and not metric like today's, and when it came to fitting the rudder tube I only had metric, so I had to find a way of packing out the rudder shaft to fit the rudder tube, as I was making brew for the wife I had to open a new bottle of milk, and the top of the bottle is covered with an aluminium cap under the coloured cap, so I just wrapped it around the rudder shaft and low and behold it worked.
As for the rudder horn the kit one is made of white metal so that went in to the lead box, I made a replacement out of an old three pin plug,
I now moved onto the shaft, this was supplied in my kit, after drilling out a piolet hole I enlarged it wit a rat tail file until the shaft was a tight fit, I fitted the shaft 1mm out from the hull as per instruction and flared it in with filler, I used some filler to fix the shaft on the inside of the hull, later on in the build I found that the shaft was short by a few inches so keep an eye on this.

I then added the rudder foot for some reason this is set with a gap of 3mm from the rudder.

More to come