Hello folks back again, I hadn't given up but life sometimes has a habit of getting in the way of modelling
After priming the hull time to mask up for the gloss coats, I found it impossible to accurately mark out a line for the blue top part of the hull as drawn on the plan, so I simply marked where the waterline 'appears to be' at a mid point along the hull, took a measurement up from this to the underneath of the rubbing strake and masked off a line parallel to the strake. The width of a roll of masking tape combined with 6mm Tamiya tape sufficed nicely. The underside of the strake was not a completely smooth consistent curve so a few minor adjustments to the line of the Tamiya tape was made by eye and worked out well.
Three coats of white gloss, one horrible big blob, a little rework to the blob and all came out well in the end.
While that's hardening off ------- to the dreaded cabin windows! No matter how careful I try to be I always manage to scuff, scratch or leave a glued fingerprint on these but worse than that I paid the price for haste and learned some valuable lessons for not following logic along the way
In short I had cut out the window openings following the guide lines impregnated in the superstructure, during a different build session, the window frames were cut out to the outline printed on the styrene and painted up ............... they didn't match!
From the outside some of the frames only just covered the aperture and even then had to be a bit on the squint to the profile of the cabin, and looking from the inside out they looked flippin' awful, barely 0.5mm of frame showing in some places and up to 4mm in others so not only did they look ---- it made marking out the gluing areas a nightmare. This may not be so important if you can't see inside the cabin but you can on this model, especially if trying to enhance it with lighting
NOT a happy bunny.
Memo to me, next time, never mind what's marked 1) cut out frame templates 2) check size and shape against cabin profile 3) allow enough margin and some room for glue 4) consider what the frame may look like from the inside including the colour 5) cut out the apertures in the cabin/superstructure wall to match the frames allowing equal coverage around the periphery --------- write out one hundred times I must ...............
Just gotta live with it now so with a bit of cutting and carving achieved the best of a bad job that I could. For the five front windows I marked out for best fit and where I could remove paint for gluing, cyanoed the frames in, used a black felt pen to colour the inside and used non fogging cyano for the glazing.
I then re-painted inside the cabin around the windows matt black to try and deceive the eye, helps a little.
For the two rear orange windows I tried a different method. Positioning where the frames should go I used Tamiya tape as a guide lines, felt penned the inside of the frames, and applied thin VHB double sided tape to same, stuck them in place and placed the glazing against the tape from the inside. No glue or fingerprints, no paint removal, no mess - great! (VHB = very high bond) After all of this decided to do something simple and less stressful so I painted the nav light boxes and removed the masking tape from the wet and dry paper that represents the nonslip areas. Leaving on a happier note for now