as john says, the rearmost rib needs to be as flat as possible all the way up, from your photos it seems to curve away from the false keel/stern at the top. if you still cannot get 5 planks in don't worry too much you might just have to put 4 full planks and a slightly thinner 5th plank.

good luck with the build

Hi Tigershark. You are are going to frame them at a later stage,so you can fill in and adjust then. Hope this helps. Never fear I had to do the same.

Thanks for the info on the gunport Hans, good to hear I can sort out later.

Look forward to seeing how your future gunports turn out Karl, not game enough to try that out for myself

I have now finished cutting the gunports for both sides and just waiting on the postman for my next delivery , hopefully this week sometime.

I am pretty happy how my model has turned out so far! But as always rookies will make mistakes.

I made the mistake of pushing in my very first nail at the centre of the bow all the way in so I decided to do the rest of them. Was not happy with the end result so after a bit of peserverance I managed to dig them out and cut the ends off, this will hopefully look better once final sanding has finished but at the moment the craters are not very flattering.

The only issue I have now is my planking has not turned out as even on both sides, one side is slightly higher than the other,see the bow picture, I will be choosing my planks wisely and look for slightly thicker planks to even this up over the next few issues.

nice and tidy tony.

as far as staining goes looking at the colours you have i would go for the honey colour for aove the waterline, the aussie jarrah below waterline, and the brazilian roast for the wales.

aussie jarrah great for the masts, brazillan roast perfect for the fighting tops.

where the magazine recommends walnut the brazilian roast would be perfect, and the jarrah for any oak staining.

but all thats just my opinion, you go ahead and sort yourself out, i'm sure it will all look great.

hi tiger heres a few ideas of dressing up the launch.
http://forum.model-space...aspx?g=posts&t=1031
or just click on the link below,upgraded vic launch.
or click on the sergal's launch,that's a larger scale version of the launch.

Hi Tony, great job Regards Mike

Thanks for the kind comments Ian, Mike and Chris.

Thanks for the link Karl but as you can see I went for a woodstain finish so it looks nowhere like the real deal, however I am happy with the finished product as it looks better than the plain version. Would suggest to anyone else who is going for a stained finished to stain the parts before assembly when it comes to fiddly parts like the launch. I went fo a jarrah look and added some brazilian roast to enhance other parts, I have attached some before and after shots as well as some shots with flash so they mat look slightly different. Also took the oppurtunity to stain the anchor and the barrel supports.