Decisions were made, for better or worse on the center planks forward and aft, now that it is done I wonder why I was so worried about how it was going to look with my interpretation of Teds description.
Making the forward and aft center planks was a very time consuming job.
Starting with some old school tracing paper to make a template. The paper was taped down to make sure it was flat then I used a sharp scalpel to cut the outline and wind up with a shape that is pretty close to being right.
Once cut out the template was stuck down on the board using a glue stick, then traced around with a pencil this ensured the plank would be bigger than needed (easier to remove material than put it on) then roughly cut out with a scroll saw.
Next came the slow part of carefully trimming down to fit inside the required space without gaps, then removing the required amount for caulking would be easier or at least thatโs what I thought, didnโt quite work out that way on the first one, as I removed too much material, winding up with too much clearance I had a look at trying to save the plank by moving it forward to close the gap but in the end there was nothing I could do except make another one. Apart from the wasted time the most upsetting part was the waste of material.
Once the fore and aft center planks were done I pinned them in place temporally before removing them to enable gluing in place, when gluing I only caulked on one side to ovoid getting my glue and paint mix everywhere.
Once glued and half caulked I pushed glue mix into the remaining gap.
Each of the other center planks needed to be custom made either slightly wider or with a slight taper, these were quite quick to make and install.
Unfortunately gluing the aft cabin skylight in place before planking turned out to be a bad idea, I managed to damage the paint work several times with the drill chuck, you would have thought I would have learnt my lesson the first time, when the drill chuck hit the paint.
There is some cleaning up to do and I have been reducing the severity of some of the weathering to give a more unified look, this is more because when looking at the model I couldnโt help but think I had gone a bit far and it just looked poorly made.
Next time I start on Coal hatches.
Thanks for looking in and reading my ramblings or just looking at the photoโs and stay safe.
Cheers,
Stephen.