Well no further photo's at the moment, just a quick update.
I decided to carry on as I had so many hours involved. The stern doors - the big problem, now solved.
I had to completely destroy and rip out the stern decking and the starboard hangar (the one with the boom in ) to reach the stepper motors. The back end of the ship is at the moment a complete mess and needs some major work to put right. I have to remake the deck and all the support structure, remake the hangar deck and remount all the oil boom and its operating mechanism. I'll get on with that this week.
Couple of bonuses to this, I wasn't really happy with the hangar deck, I found out on the real craft it is a metal grid to allow oil spill to drain through to a catch tray and tank underneath, so I can rectify that. I had made a mistake on the main deck, not noticible unless you were familiar with the real ship so I can correct that as well.
OK so what was the problem with the stepper motors?? Two things, first when I glued down the main deck, some drips of pva glue had dropped onto the screw shaft. When they had dried it was impossible for the travelling carrier on the screw shaft to move along it, so the motors were just jittering. Secondly the motors were small so although they worked well on the work bench, they really suffered from a lack of torque when having a plastic door hung off the end of them - good job I changed out the brass doors for plastic!
So the ongoing problem to solve this week so I can reassemble everything. The door mechanisms. Instead of having nice controllable steppers, I'm thinking of using a couple of servo's with an extended arm, not too sure yet, it could be that the arm will need a centre pivot, with the door at one end and a servo at the other. Bench top trials to commence tomorrow. So after a couple of weeks of ignoring the problem and doing other stuff on the build, I will complete this part and do a full photo update next weekend hopefully.