Looking good Phil. a lot of love and attention to detail in your build.

Nice work Phil, those rivets are going to look good.

Mark

All looking good Phil and nice additions

Great scratchbuilding Phil,this has to be the most detailed example of this kit anywhere.

Al

Thank you Alan. A bit more progress in the right direction!

Regards,
Phil W.

Hi Phil, yes, will be building the diesel engines as per the part-works instructions. They are pretty well detailed as they stand, so I can't foresee myself adding much more to these apart from the odd pressure gauge here and there. Getting to the point where i'll be working on them though is still a long way off yet, so stay tuned for when i do.

Regards,
Phil W.

I think they would be honoured to have her, when you run out of extra details to put on her and get her finished

Al

Good evening from 'The Dockyard'.

This weeks update sees the completion of the two water-tight ammunition canisters that are located on the upper deck of the conning tower.

After making the locking bars and grab handles last week, it was now time to scratch build the hinges. For these I used 0.8mm half-round plastic strip for the hinge brackets and 0.5mm diameter rod to form the hinge pins. All very fiddly I have to say!

The next job was to fabricate locating strips that will support the surrounds that encircle the canisters.

The locating strips were made from 1.5mm half-round strip. Four lengths were cut to 8.5mm in length for the larger of the canisters and four lengths cut to 1.0mm in length for the smaller one. They were all glued with PVA so I had time to position them correctly.

The next stage was to make the surrounds. A bit of trial and error [faffing about] ensued before i settled on a technique.

I used 0.25mm thick plastic sheet and cut two strips; one 8.5mm wide for the larger canister and the other 1.0mm wide for the smaller. By wrapping each strip around a piece of 11.0mm diameter tube leftover from when i made the larger canisters on the lower deck, i could cut each strip until their ends just met. I then cut two smaller strips to act as fasteners for each piece and glued these over the join of each strip while they were wrapped around the tubing. I then carefully slid them off, checked them for fit around their respective canisters and then fixed in place with PVA. There is a slight excess of PVA that can be seen in the attached photo on the smaller canister, but I will clean this up prior to painting.