Some very skilful and accurate building here its going to be a great model when finished.

Hi all, some more progress has been made.

First I have fitted the bilge keels. I first drilled the hull along the length of the bilge keel locations to take short lenghts of 1mm brass rod which will act as locating pins for the keel (Pic 1).

I then cut 4 5mm wide strips (2 per keel) from 1mm thick plastic sheet and cut 1mm wide slots at each of the pin locations (Pic 2).

I then glued a small piece of 0.25mm plastic sheet on either side of each slot to form a locating hole for each pin (Pic 3).

The strips were then taped to the hull and glued using Deluxe materials super-phatic glue which bonds plastic to GRP and is runny so 'wicks' into the gaps between the strip and hull (Pic 4).

Once the glue was dry, approx 30 minutes, the tape was removed and strips of of 0.8mm plastic 2.5mm wide were glued along each side of the 1mm strip in place. I then left everything to dry over night and then back filled each side of the keels with P38 filler to give the triangular shape to the keel (Pic 5). The keels will be sanded to final shape later.

On measuring the beam of the hull in several places and matching the locations to the dimensions given in the Anatomy of the Ship for HMS hood and the plans I have I found that the hull had obviously sprung in by up to 8mm at the widest point so 3 pieces of wood were cut and fitted using P38 to push the hull out to the correct dimensions (Pic 6).

I then glued plastic strip around the inside of the hull to support the edges of the deck. I will then build an internal structure from 8mm plastic 'I' beams supported on lengths of wooden dowel to support the deck and give it the correct camber.

The under deck will be cut from 1.5mm plastic sheet. I am using plastic sheet as the under deck because all the superstructure will be fabricated from various thicknesses of plastic and glued directly to the deck. The surface will then be covered using wood planking for those areas that are planked and strips of 0.25mm plastic cut to the scale size for the steel plates used in other areas.

Pic 7 shows the plastic strip being fixed in place. It also shows the finished 'A' frames and prop shafts in place although I have still to make bulged entry points where the shafts enter the hull.

As an aside, the plans that came with the hull were for the Hood as she was in the 1930's and as I am building her in her final configuration I had to buy another set of plans for the correct configuration. These plans are at a scale of 1/192 and arrived folded. Even though I haven't used them that much as yet I noticed that they were already starting to tear along the folds so I decided to scan the plans into the computer as pdf files in overlapping A4 sections. For the 2 sheets of plans this amounted to 86 scans but means I should only rarely need to use the originals. There is an added bonus in that I can print out any sections I need at 150% which gives prints at the correct 1/128th scale I am building at.

Well that's it for now

Graeme

That thing is Hugh!!, looking great so far

This will be an epic build, loving it.

Thanks for looking in guys. Just a quick update. Yesterday I produced my second attempt at photoetch - watertight doors for the superstructure.

For the first go I used 0.12mm brass sheet, the same as I used for the UP launcher but as I was etching approx half the thickness of the door away to allow the hinges, handle and clamps to stand proud I ended up with one or two pinholes in a couple of the doors.and very flimsy doors. I repeated the process using 0.25mm brass and was quite pleased with the results. One of the doors has a couple of defects on it but the other nine seem ok.

Graeme

Cheers Ian.

I did some more work over the weekend and started to add the internal framework to support the decks.

The framework is made up from 8mm plastic 'I' beams supported at the centre by lengths of 9mm dowel fixd in place with P38 filler. I first glued small sections of the same 4x2mm plastic strip I ran around the inside of the hull at the locations of the transverse beams to give a full 8mm depth to glue the beams to. I then added a small piece of 3mm angle below this for the beam to sit on. The ends of the beams were shaped to match the slope of the hull, Pic 1.

Lengths of 9mm wooden dowel were cut to support the centre of the beams and fixed to the bottom of the hull with P38. The beams were spaced to match the length of the 1.5mm sheet I am using for the deck with 2 further intermediate beams fitted for each length so approx 110mm spacing.

Further lengths of beam were cut to fit between each of the transverse beams on a 3-2-3 basis. My progress so far is shown in Pics 2-5.

All the beams are fitted level and the correct deck camber will be achieved by gluing appropriate thicknesses of plastic card to the centre and quarter beam positions before gluing down the deck.

I am leaving the bow and stern areas just now until I finish off the props and drill out the hawsers.

Graeme

Looks fab, very nice work indeed....

Regards

Alan

Looking good Graeme

It certainly looks like the whole going to be nice and stiff with all that bracing in there

Blimey making your own photo etch, great stuff.

looking good