Next in the line of adornments in the aft deck are the ladders, these were made from 2mm mahogany to the plan included in the kit. To make sure that all parts were identical I cut pieces to slightly longer and wider than required then clamped them together and drilled two 0.4mm holes through them all and tapped a 0.5mm brass pins through to hold them all together for machining. I made use of the Lidl disc sander and shaped the sandwiched block to the dimensions/profile taken from the drawing. I now disassembled the four pieces in preparation for drilling the holes which will determine the position of the stair runs. I need only to mark out one side piece so I can set the drilling machine stops to hold (by hand) each piece for drilling a single hole, then reset for the next hole/s until all pieces have a set of 4 identical holes. Next the stair pieces need to be made, again to the correct sizes as marked on the drawing (out with the sander). Having made the hole position of the sides so precise the same needed to be applied to the pre drilling of the stair runs, so I made a small jig to drill the pilot holes, just clamping each piece under the aluminium angle and spotting through each hole. Some final sanding of the individual pieces and then the assembly was put together using
cyno adhesive
. I wanted to include a brass stair lip on each step, so using some small angle brass, these were cut to extra length and then again using a small jig they were sanded to exact length; (trimming this small section brass is difficult for all the available sections so using the sander and an appropriate jig give a great finish). The brass pieces were stuck on each stair front using cyno. The ladders now need to be fitted in place, I used some brass angle on the rear of each step and then drilled and tapped the rear of the step 10BA. I could now drill a hole in the rear wall to clamp each step in place.