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Well the Ben Ain didn’t progress a great deal during my last leave, mainly as I wanted to complete the revel U-Boat so that at least I could say I had finished something.
I did however progress the bridge unit a little and, although it doesn’t look like a great deal I actually progressed it in such a way as to be able to be very pleased that some of the tricky bits and ideas actually worked.
The whole issue with the bridge is that it has to be a removable unit, unlike the kit intentions. To this end I have been building up the unit on the ship in such a way as to be able to slide it neatly off the decks and have a strong but light piece that sits securely on the model. The thing that has taken a lot of time patience and perseverance is the way in which the removable piece interfaces with the model. Just to keep it complicated research suggests that the design of the kit bridge deck bulwarks is not accurate either so that had to be considered.
The next job was actually to recover the original planked deck with another layer of planks. I did this as I was not happy with the finish of the original planks as I had laid them on a not very strong backing, not realizing that they would not sand down evenly to remove the caulking. Consequently I first of all replanked the decking over the top of the original which worked considerably better and I had a nice deck surface to work with.
Next I was very lucky to find a book at a book stand at Doncaster Model Show which was a history of the Ramsey Steamship Company, who operated the Ben Ain for a number of years and which contained three photo’s of the ship. These photo’s helped me to design the arrangement of the bulwarks to fit to the deck and helped to clarify the arrangement of the area.
First though I needed to progress the bridge housing itself as this had to be taken to a stage whereby it could be fitted to the bridge deck. It is considerably easier to fit detail into the bridge before it is glued down so I worked on the flag locker, chart table and internal painting. The flags are actually real signal flags in paper, rolled up and inserted into the locker so the correct colours are actually visible in the correct holes. The inside was painted and the wood varnished and the window frames were fitted before shaping the top edge to follow the correct contour of the flying bridge deck to be fitted above.
One thing the pictures showed quite clearly was the way in which the bridge deck bulwarks lean in and how the bulwark capping rail meets it at either end. I fitted the bulwarks, cut from ply, then added a forward bulwark stay and a centre bulwark stay before actually cutting away the ply rear bulkhead. This ensured that the aft bulkhead was cut away in just the correct shape leaving the opening for the ladder to be added later. This bulkhead will be further cut away when the bridge is finally fitted to leave a perfectly shaped and strong support for the whole piece.
So that was really about as far as I got. I am now very happy that the removable piece matches up very neatly with the hull and the bulwarks look a lot more like the real thing than the kit suggests. I have had a lot of uncertainty up until now as to how the piece was going to be constructed so to see the bridge unit fitted with bulwarks and looking as I wanted it has given me quite a renewed sense of enthusiasm so I am really looking forward to getting back next time and progressing the model a bit more.
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