Now it's time to put the bottom piece on. I freed the two bottom pieces from the sprue and cleaned up the edges with a needle file. I also files the surfaces to give some grooves for the paint to bite. Also, it is important to anneal these as I will be bending them when it comes time to attach them to the stern of the ship.

As with the rest of the lantern, I went ahead and attached each bottom piece to a piece of scrap wood - the same piece I used for the lantern - in preparation for painting. Finally, and I have failed to mention this in the past, I cleaned each piece with acid and let it dry thoroughly.

An acid bath for the brass/metal pieces, if they are to be painted, helps clean the surface of oils and allows the paint to adhere much better. The acid bath I use is about as simple as it gets. I pour a wee bit of distilled white vinegar into a small canister and dip the piece into it. I swirls it about for 30 seconds or so and then remove it and let it dry. It is very important that you let it dry completely before you try to apply the paint. Of course, you could skip the acid bath but in my experience it makes a big difference. Without it, the paint tends to flake away at the slightest brush against something.

Confession time:

These pot holders just look strange to me. I can't tell you exactly why, maybe it's the pattern, or the size, not sure, they just look strange to me. I am also not a big fan of the through dovetail joint. Don't get me wrong, this is a classic wood joint but I just don't think it was traditionally used on a top surface. Typically, these days, you see them as joiners for drawers and the like. So this isn't me sticking to any type of period specific thing, it is simply I just don't like the look as it is used on these pot holders.

Second confessions:

When I first saw these were pot holders I thought to myself "my goodness, how many pots did they use for the galley?" Stupid, stupid me. After reading through the Anatomy of the Ship for the Bounty I found that the great cabin was actually converted to a green room and the entire space was utilized for tables and shelves to hold plant pots. I have not yet found how they kept the plants alive given the environmental conditions onboard a ship, especially below deck. And the amount of light that actually penetrated the stern and great cabin windows was quite limited doesn't seem to me to be enough for plants to flourish.

Another fun fact:

The redesign of the Bounty, remember from my earlier post it was originally to be named the Berthia, converted the great cabin into a greenhouse. And the designed called for just about every square foot of the space to be covered with potted plants. Not just on the deck of the lower deck, but also pot holders on the walls, as well as on the sloped areas by the stern windows. There were literally hundreds and hundreds of places for potted plants.

Now for the model:

The pot holders were really straight forward and don't need any real additional descriptions. However, as I mentioned earlier, I am just not a fan of the final look so I am contemplating ways that I can make it more to my liking. I may also decide to leave them as is. For now, and until it is time to assemble the main deck (month 10) I can dwell on it. So give me a couple weeks and I will have a decision.

That's about it for Episode 9. Shouldn't be but a week or so and Episode 10 will be here. Looking forward to working on the main deck and getting closer to some of the hull planking.

Cheers!

Month 10 arrived over the weekend so I was able to get rolling again. This month's subscription also included all the tiny bits and pieces needed to add details to the ship. I am quite impressed with the quality of these pieces. The belaying pins are made of wood and of excellent quality. Typically, in kits like this, I have received the stubby metal belaying pins - these are typically not well scaled and never appealed to me when on a ship. The wood ones are my personal favorite and I have bought many to replace the metal ones. But in this case, the wood ones came with the kit. Excellent!

Also, the gratings are of really nice quality. These are fairly simple things, but typically I have seen kits come with gratings cut from less than superior wood and the results are different width's and poor fits when trying to assemble the pieces to make a grating. Again, excellent job on these as well.

Fabulous display of modelling skills and a superb diary too..... Love following this build.....

Regards

Alan

Now I can move on to the main deck. I decided to remove the deck supports as I was not a fan of them. They are not actually what would have been on the HMS Bounty and are instead an aid for attaching and aligning the deck beams. If you are new to this sort of thing I strongly suggest you stick with using the supports as it does make things a bit easier.

A key component of building the main deck is to make sure it is about as exact as possible, especially where the mast holes need to align with the lower deck mast holes. Because I am not relying on the prefab deck supports which have cutouts to help with this alignment I need to be very careful that I build to scale. To help in this effort I went ahead and created a couple full size print-outs of the main and lower deck. To do this I simply imported the respective page from the instructions into a vector editor and scaled things. Then took that to the local office store to get a cheap print-out. I have these full-scale files saved as PDFs, but need to make sure I am not breaking any forum policy before sharing them. I will have a later post on this once I have clarification. In the meantime, here are some lo-res images of the end result.

Wonderfull build and very interesting reading clean and crisp and not a spot of glue.

Well done

Trev

I am breaking the main deck into sections in a manner that allows me to be sure that the masts line up properly down through the entire structure and that masts align bow to stern as well. Once I had the main deck built from the stern up to the mizzen mast and all was fitting nicely, I went ahead and stained it and attached it to the ribs.

Before the glue set I put the mizzen mast in place temporarily to ensure alignment.

IMPORTANT! There is an error in the instructions for the main deck framing. Please make the following adjustments:

Part 10-05
Swap the numbering for pieces 11A/9A and 11B/9B as indicated in the image below.

These pieces are very, very similar however, if you try to follow the numbering on the instructions you will discover that the cross beam will not line up properly. I checked these pieces against my full-scale main deck print-out and turns out pieces 9 and 11 are simply mis-identified in the instructions.

MONTHS 1 THROUGH 5

Rib Assemblies

The assembly for the ribs all follow the same process. Be sure to carefully separate them from the sprue using a sharp knife. I then did some very, very light clean-up of the edges. So light that I didn't even remove the char...mostly concerned with getting any burrs removed from where the piece attached to the sprue.

Next, I placed each piece on the associated rib template to ensure fit/size. Once satisfied, I assembled each rib starting with the keel section and building my way up to the top section. I would first do a piece on the port side, then a piece on the starboard, then port, then starboard, and on and on. This way I could continuously check that things were even as I worked my way up.

To glue the pieces I used my typical wood glue. I purposely left most the char on the edges of pieces to help accentuate the seams. However, I have seen others on this forum who have added a dab of India ink to their glue to help accentuate the seams a bit more - I am going to try this on a future build. In the end, it is all personal preference and up to you.

Once the rib is assembled, leave it to dry overnight. No matter how tempting, don't mess with it. Leave it be and let the glue dry thoroughly.

Repeat this process for all the ribs.