| Thanks for your coments Chris. I have just actually written the latest installment of the build thread with the progress so far and a couple of pictures from this leave. Glad you are getting back to your model and I look forward to seeing some picture of her. It really is a very rewarding kit to make and, although I am making a lot of modifications to mine she still looks good straight out of the box. Anyway here's chapter whatever!
Once again I find myself at the end of a leave and the Ben Ain not progressed as much as I’d hoped for. Never mind, Rome wasn’t built in a day but it was probably done a bit quicker than this model!!
This leave started with a go at a rowing boat which ended up taking far more time than I had intended so I had to make the break after a couple of weeks to get back to the steamer. Then, of course, I ended up doing a bit of work on the house for a couple of weeks so we now have a nice lounge but not a much progressed Ben Ain.
Having said that I have still put a lot of time into it but as with all my modifications to the kit they eat up time. The first step was to caulk the deck so I used a slightly modified method this time whereby I didn’t spread my glue mix all over the deck before sanding it down but I simply syringed it along the plank joints. This is strangely enough exactly the same way real teak decks are caulked so it must have something going for it. After the glue had set hard it was a lot easier to sand down to the wood level and after touching up a couple of air holes I had a neatly caulked deck again.
The next step involved making the flying bridge sidings which are supposed to be constructed of ply and then covered with a printed overlay. Once again I was not very impressed with the idea of an overlay so I glued the ply core to the deck first then I commenced the very time consuming task of planking the sidings myself with 5mm x 1mm stripwood. I cut the wood to length, 25mm, then carefully sanded a chamfer on each edge of the plank. This chamfer is necessary to allow the planks to appear quite distinctly separate and will allow a wash to flow into it when I eventually get around to weathering the model. I used 5 x 1 metre lengths of stripwood cut into 25mm pieces so you get the idea of where the time went. I also fitted a skirting around the bottom edge and a double thickness capping rail along the top edge. I still have to fit a decorative bead around the outside according to the plan which is the first job next time home. The skirting proved to be particularly tricky when it was fitted across the camber as the curve is quite significant and the plank required wetting to try to get it to conform. To help with this I cut the 5mm strip down to 4mm, which conveniently gave me a pile of 1mm strips to be used for the decorative beading! After the vertical planking had all been completed I then had the task of levelling it all and ensuring the front and back were both of the same curvature and they were level. To help with this I made a tool by glueing a piece of sandpaper to a piece of an old wooden yard stick and then proceeded to very carefully sand the tops of the bulwarks down to the required level. This actually worked very well and left me with a nice flat top to glue the capping to relatively easily.
The other main part of this work has been the fitting of the navigational lights and how I was going to get power to them. I ran some fine cable up through a box at the back of the wheelhouse which was then run into a channel along the back of the flying bridge, held in place first by the vertical planking and then finally by the skirting. The cables then had to be joined to the lamps so I had to decide how best to go about that. I bought some brass lamps of Ebay for the Navigation lights as I wasn’t too keen on the white metal quartered lamps supplied with the kit. I painted them up with primer then a coat of copper paint before a top coat of red or green. This allowed me to scrape a bit of red and green away and reveal the copper below which I then gave a dry brush with a Verdi Gris colour before a wash with a brown. The lamps were installed into the boards and the cables run through a hole in the deck before looping back up through another hole on the other side of the siding. This then gave me the two ends of the cables together and I then constructed a planked door which you will actually find in this situation on a lot of vessels which is there to enable easy access to the Navigation lamps for maintenance or, in those days, for lighting and extinguishing the Navigation lamps. I employed a little bit of poetic licence here and instead of just having an access door I incorporated the door into a raised box which then gave me somewhere convenient to make the electrical connections to the lamps, neatly and completely concealed.
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“Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack, Butting through the Channel in the mad March days" |