well it wasn't on the water Friday lol still working on it, pushing it a bit there i think
Firstly Ive sorted out the appallingly bad bad job to a standard which isn't perfect but satisfactory. Ideally the best coating was the first one but ruined it by changing to a dirty brush half way through. Ohwell live and learn
I rubbed down the abortion of a job on the hull and re coated it getting out the lumps and streaks doing what i rarely do taking my time!!
OK heres the mast, brass rods soldered togeather with a bit of pen tubing on the top. The plans show a round baked bean tin shape at the top i can only presume is a light. So a light it is:
the mast is removable for transport, albeit not particularly high but brings the height down just a few inches to avoid breaking. The legs push into tubes drilled and glued into the roof, i sourced the tube from blue birds suggestion lolly pop sticks which funnily enough i had saved some few months back when it had occurred to me they would be useful for something
They proved a snug but solid fit onto the diameter brass i was using and proved ideal.
Next up was the flag pole/antenna tube:
simply from a mechanical pencil, I actually buy them 5 for a pound just for this purpose. The parts of the mechanical pencils push togeather a fit into all kinds of ways, on a couple of boats i have i use them for 2mm prop tubes! Anyway that pulls out for transportation purposes too. Even though i have discovered its generally not necessary to have the antenna of 2.4 ghz RXTX to be elevated out of the boat i do just for good measure to make sure the reception is well above the water.
50cal Browning AA turrets:
I cant tell you how much i toiled with these things. I wanted a close to scale appearance as i could manage and being small it was very tedious and time consuming taking nearly a hole day to make one turret. The barrels are made from cocktail sticks (right diameter), the handles are made from pieces of wire and the stock is made from ply and plasticard. The bullets are pieces of wire cut to 3mm long and stuck to a wet n dry paper strip. I tried various materials and methods to make the ammo belts even considered doing it half **** and using tie wraps. My intention was to have them so that they swooped down and round into the flanks of the turret where the ammo boxes would be but after drying and construction being so small and brittle they snapped at any hint of persuasion sideways. In the end i had to either had give up on them altogether or use short belts. My missus justified my failing for me by saying the gunners have used some and nearly out of bullets
i felt a lot better.
20mm oerlikon AA
despite being more complex to build than the 50's it took only a few hours to build this. Bits of pen tube, a cotton bud for the barrel and soldered wire for the shoulder pads. It helped that i didnt need to make 100 off rounds of ammo on belt that surely cut the build time down. I enjoyed making this gun. The crosshair site turned out to be about 5mm across, it had been playing on my mind a bit exactly how to go about making such a small cross hair. A brainwave struck me and it resulted in using a holepunch, stamping out a circle in the see threw plastic i used for the windows then etching the crosshairs onto the circle:
Its very small and hardly visible on the camera and doesn't look as wonky as the picture makes out in real life. A bit of jiggling was done after i taken the shot. But you can look threw the rear site into front with the crosshair.
Anotherthing done is a spot lamp which basically a pen tube with a bit of see threw plastic on the front stuck to a stick, nothing flash and barely worth mentioning. There is however the start to the dashboard with a helm:
its made from a piece of plasticard seeing as its not a wooden wheel i saved me the hassle of making a wooden one and used a material which would splinter less. The wheel is 20mm in diameter to the further most outer edge of each handle. I cut the entire wheel out of one piece of plasticard then using files a thin strip of wet dry rounded each spoke:
I'm afraid to say its not exactly round and blatantly eggshaped if you looked at it close up. I marked it out correctly but cutting it out was a epic task of its own, itl do i suppose.
Still got more to do yet. More dash, liferings, exhausts, bit of lettering and bobs your uncle.