The bulwark keeps killing me.
I had decided to paint the supports before fitting.
Logically (!?!), I also painted the insides of the bulwarks before installation - leaving naked space for glueing the supports to it. These spaces were made a lot wider than the thikness of the supports, as I saw difficulty in making the supports match any positions I could ever have marked and masked on the inside of the bulwark. That was the clever thinking in my bulwark project. All the rest has been a mess.
Despite my efforts, the supports are not straight, they meet the bulwark quite poorly leaving gaps here-there. Filling the gaps has been a real pain and slowed down the painting
The idea in the first place was to avoid the difficult masking that would be necessary, if I would have chosen to paint the bulwarks after installation. Did I avoid it? - No
I ended up making plenty of corrections and filling the extra unpainted spaces around each bulwark support. The result was so ugly that I then had to do the masking (that I wanted to avoid) and repaint all of the inside of the bulwark. So far, I have only finished the bow (see pic).
And yes - I messed up with the masking...
So - I have maximised the effort and the number of complications... and ended up in a bad mood
Now fellas - let this be a lesson for you
Next time - I think I will not paint the supports and the bulwark off the build in advance. The masking is difficult, but I guess it will be less tedious than what I've been through here.
Is there "the right way" to install the bulwark?
The Billings design is such that the supports have notches that go into holes on the deck. The joint is strong in theory, but If one would fit the supports first - as proposed by Billings - it is very likely that the bulwark would not find the supports in a way that would make a smooth line of the bulwark edge, but rather make it curve in random waves.
With supports without the notches ( and no holes in the deck ) it would be far easier to fit the suppports after the bulwark - as I have seen some other builders do with their models.
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