Starting the week of the 25th (well the starting from the 23rd if I counted the weekend) I was on leave looking after the kids before they went back to school. I thought that I should be able to make some progress then.
I started drawing up plans for the bridge/crew areas in Sketchup as I had the engineering spaces. This, due to being a bit more complex, took a bit longer and I had several hours invested in it, when, during the process of deleting some of the guidelines I had put it, I deleted the entire vertical face on one side and discovered that I had skued some of the services on the drawing as well. Correcting this took about two hours and I chose not to correct those items that where mirrored on the other side of the structure, recreating those items that I needed to just the once.
I haven't shared the Sketchup file, but if anyone wants to see it, I'm happy to do so.
So during that week that was about all I did apart from marking up the forward side (face, wall?) of the SS. I also started to cut it. You can see from the photo that I had to use an eraser in a couple of spots and that I used a drill to give me a start on the getting the radii correct on the gussets.
It wasn't until this weekend that I was able to do anything else, and to be honest, I was procrastinating a bit about some of the stuff that I had to do. In anycase, when I got down to it, doing the gussets (for want of a better term) wasn't too bad. Just a case of drilling out with a smaller drill than the diameter I needed and then using a needle file and sandpaper wrapped around a length of tube I shaped them. A mistake was made and that was not putting a gusset on the place where the outside vertical meets the horizontal on each side. I shall have to try to retro fit.
This bit (and the same on the other side):
Also the height of this face is not as high as it should be - I have cut it at this height because this is where the deck goes and I wanted to use a width of plastic that was more suitable to the scale than the 1mm plastic I was using for the structure.
Several of the parts cut out:
These are the front and rear faces, the lower side pieces and a single big piece that goes in to act both as deck above the lower sides and as a support and straightener for the front and rear. Which would have been OK - IF it had actually been square. I ended up re-cutting it...
This shows the assembly of the rear face and the lower side, plus the big deck/support piece. As yo can infer from the photo, the plastic had bowed and I had to glue half of it in place then straighten the bow and glue the other half.
I put a side piece in place and glued it the bits I had together:
The sides are made of two separate faces as there is a recess that runs vertically in between them where there are doors etc. All will become apparent when constructed (I hope!).
And that's where we are.