jpalmer1970

Welcome to MSW ! Good luck with your project. I am sure you will receive lots of useful advice.

I have been able to make some good progress with the build in the last few days - it is amazing how much more time you have when you don't have to go to work 😃 I finished stropping all of the blocks and then attached them to the mast, the various spars and the deck. There weren't actually that many of them to do compared to Alert so it didn't take long at all. I also attached the topmast to the lower mast and added the spreader bar. I also added the eyebolts that hold the belaying pins at the base of the mast and two cleats, the latter items again filched from some spares from previous builds. The instructions suggested adding the thick lead cleat castings as used on the deck to the mast but these just looked too clunky to my eyes, hence the swap to the wooden versions. Here are some images of various parts of the lower and topmasts before and after gluing them together. One tricky Item to make was what the instructions call the lee fange spanner boom which is situated to the rear of where the tiller will be placed. It holds a block that holds the boom sheet and is made of a piece of brass rod 1.5mm in diameter which sits in two eyebolts in the deck. Attached to the rod are two glass beads which the instructions name as trucks and in between the trucks sits the two brass hoops I made earlier to which the block is attached. The problem that arose was that the glass beads have a 1mm wide hole in them and so cannot slip over a 1.5mm diameter brass rod! It is also not possible to widen the hole in the beads by drilling or filing, as unsurprisingly the beads shatter pretty easily! In the end I swapped the beads out for two wooden rollers or sheaves which could fit on the brass rod - another example of the pretty poor planning from Artesania Latina. It always pays to keep lots of spare parts and little items on hand even when you intend to stick pretty much to the kit specs! I also decided that I didn't like the pedestals I had made a few months ago so I made another pair, this time using pieces of 16mm Tasmanian oak dowel. All I had to do was cut the slots to match the hull shapes and give the pedestals a couple of coats of wipe on poly. The pedestals will eventually be reduced in height but I will firstly need to get the baseboard ready before I can do that. The baseboard is also made from oak so I am hoping that it matches nicely with the pedestals and the masts and spars. I also had to fabricate a couple of smaller turnbuckles for the rigging of the bowsprit and the forestay, and these were down in the same manner in which I made the chainplates - gluing eyebolts into a short length of brass tube. So the next task is to fix the bowsprit and the mast in place and then the rigging will start. I have decided not to include sails on my model and I'm not sure if that will help or hinder the rigging process. The Artesania Latina instructions for rigging the model are not clear at all unfortunately. There are a few line drawings on the back of one of the plans and some photos of parts of the rigging in the manual but I think I will have to work it out as I go along.

I started work on stropping the various blocks that need fixing to the deck and the masts and spars. I thought I might detail the process and tools I use for this in case it is of assistance to anyone. I am lucky to have a variety of fly tying tools which do double duty for fly tying as well as this sort of rigging work with my model ships. I certainly find the rotating fly vice a great help in holding small items with its adjustable jaws. It is also much more solid than a set of quad hands or a third hand type tool. I also use some hackle pliers to securely grip small items or thread, I have a good pair of sharp scissors for accurate trimming work, and some varnish and a needle to secure the knots when completed. Of course it isn't necessary to have a fly tying vice but I would certainly always use it in preference to other options, especially as it has this movable arm attachment which is very useful for holding the hackle pliers in any chosen position. The blocks that are provided in the kit are a little chunky so I have swapped them out with 3mm pear blocks obtained from Vanguard Models. I am also using some of the Syren 0.20mm brown thread as the strop and some Guterman Mara 120 thread to secure the strop. Before starting any of the work with the blocks I make sure that the hole in each block is nice and clear by running a small drill bit through the hole to clear any obstructions or rough edges. I begin by holding the eyebolt in the jaw of the vice and threading the 0.20mm rope through the eye and securing both ends with the hackle pliers. A length of the Guterman thread is then placed over the two strands of the strop and secured underneath with an overhand knot. A second overhand knot is then tied on top of the strop rope and then another one back underneath the strop. I then add a little dab of varnish to these knots before opening the hackle pliers and trimming off the short end of the strop rope. This is done near, but not too close to, the knots. The long length of strop rope is then threaded around a block and this is held in place with the hackle pliers. These are positioned so that there is a gap of a few millimetres between the eyebolt and the end of the block. The length of strop rope is then brought over to the left of the eyebolt so that it is parallel to the section that has already been secured with knots. The Guterman thread is then placed over both lengths of the strop and a series of overhand knots are added, alternating them above and below the strop rope. I try to position the knots next to each other, rather than on top of each other, so that they proceed down the strop towards the block which results in the block being held tightly and securely. Finally a double knot is tied adjacent to the block and then further varnish is added to secure the knots in place. I don't trim the remaining excess lengths thread for some hours to ensure that the varnish has had time to set. This ensure that the knots won't unravel if I am a bit enthusiastic with the scissors when I do eventually trim the ends away. Here is the finished eyebolt and block ready to be added to the model. I want to thank everyone for the interest you have taken in my build of Pen Duick so far. I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and hope you have a great New Year! Jeremy

Most of the recent work on Pen Duick has concentrated on making the remaining masts and spars. The lower mast and bowsprit had been drilled and tapered previously but now I did the same for the boom, the gaff, the foremast, the topmast, the yard and the sprit. The technique was the same regardless of which piece I was working on - I firstly drilled any holes for eyebolts or other metalwork in the full sized untapered Tasmanian oak dowels and then used the lathe to resize the dowels and taper according to the dimensions on the kit plans. Two coats of wipe on poly were then applied to the finished piece before the metalwork as added. Brass collars made from brass tube were then fitted where required, along with eyebolts and other pieces such as cleats and chocks. Some eyebolts will have a block attached to them and so these have not yet been added as it will be much easier to rig the blocks to the eyebolts whilst the eyebolts aren't fixed in place. The gaff was the first one I made, as this was just a length of 4mm Tasmanian oak dwelling cut to the right length. The gaff jaws were made of 2 pieces of brass strip and formed to the appropriate shape. It was drilled and pinned to the gaff. Three wooden chocks were also added, these were leftovers from my Alert kit. The section of wood at the far left is what the instructions call a cable hole. It was made from a 2mm thick piece of oak strip. The yard and the sprit were also fairly simple spars to make. They started off as lengths of 4mm dowel which I reduced to 3mm on the lathe before tapering each end even further down to 2mm. Finally the spars were cut to size length wise - I had left them extra long to allow for better setup in the lathe. The next dowel was for the foremast. This was again formed from the 4mm oak dowel and all that was required here was reducing the diameter to a consistent 3mm. A brass tube collar and eyebolts were again added as required. The boom was made from a length of 6mm oak dowel that was reduced in diameter to a consistent 5mm along its full length. Again there was a fair bit of metalwork to attach to this, including a cleat that I scrounged from further leftover parts from my previous build of Alert. Finally there was the topmast to make. This was length of 6mm oak dowel that needed to be reduced to 5mm and then tapered to 3mm. A 4mm brass collar was added to the top to which eyebolts were fixed. I also sanded two parallel edges to the heel of the mast so that this could fit securely in the yoke of the lowermost. The yoke and the cheeks were cut from a piece of 2mm oak and I used the parts supplied in the kit as a template for making my own versions. So that is now most of the wood work completed on the mast and spars, and the next job will be to rig those blocks to the eyebolts and then get them attached to the various spars. Here is a picture of the model with the lower mast and topmast just slotted into place. As you can see it is quite a tall mast and I want to do as much work on it as I can before finally fixing it in place just to minimise the chance of knocking it in my small work area!

I haven't had a great deal of time to work on the model this week but I have been able to make a little progress. I continued working on the bowsprit and glued all of the brass collars and eyebolts in place. The two eyebolts on the brass pillar near the centre of the bowsprit proved to be a bit tricky to fit as the vertical brass piece is very thin and there really isn't much depth into which the stems of the eyebolts can be glued. i found that I could put one eyebolt in place but then when I tried to put the other one in as well it would push out the first one! Clearly having two separate eyebolts wasn't going to work so eventually I put one eyebolt in place with the stem left at full length poking through the brass pillar. I then used tweezers and pliers to curl the eyebolt stem into a circle to form the other ring. It was pretty fiddly to do but I got there in the end thankfully. Here it is all ready to be installed on the deck - but I will leave it off for a while yet, just to make handling the model a little easier on my small workbench. I was also able to work on the lower mast piece. This is a 6mm diameter piece of Tasmanian oak and as with the bowsprit I first of all used the mill to drill a lot of the required holes for the eyebolts and other attachments whilst the dowel was still a uniform shape. I then used the lathe to give the mast a gentle taper to 4mm diameter at the top. Two coats of wipe on poly were then added to slightly darken the oak. I have also been experimenting with my plasticene trying to make the lifebelt. I have a had a few goes at rolling out a tube of the required size and squashing it into shape and my attempts are getting better, but it is still not quite uniform and symmetrical. I am wondering whether making a cutter, like a biscuit or cookie cutter, of the required shape may be easier and then simply cutting out a lifebelt from a slab of plasticene - I may give that a go this week. One success I did have though was with some waterslide decal paper I purchased from eBay. The lifebelt of the Pen Duick has the name of the boat stencilled on it and so my lifebelt will need the same. I wasn't sure if it would work but it appears that waterslide decals can be fixed to plasticene, as shown in the trial run below!

Thanks Bob! A lot of my workarounds arise simply because the way the instructions suggest you do things seem to be too complicated for me! Hopefully, easier is better sometimes!

Hi, I have a similar clamp to the one you describe. I find that it does depend upon the actual model and what stage of the build you are at as to what is the best way to hold the keel. I sometimes use the keel clamper but I have also find that a desktop vice (or even a pair of vices) is sometimes more convenient. Sometimes I also make a simple building board jig or cradle to hold the model, especially when a lot of the hull work has been completed.

I have been working on more of the deck fixtures this week. The turnbuckles were the next little project and they were constructed from various pieces of flat brass strip, brass wire and a few little pulley wheels. I believe these are used to tension the running backstay in connection with the little pulley wheel structures mentioned in the previous log update. I also constructed the nicely name lee fange spanker boom, which may normally be called a horse (I'm not quite sure - basically it is a sliding attachment point for the block at the back of the boom). The instructions asks you to make this by forming two ovals from thin brass wire but it seemed to me to be easier just to squash a brass split ring into an oval shape - this way it was much easier to control the shape and size of the oval. A block needs to be attached to the split ring linking the two ovals but I am holding off on that for the moment as I like to do all of the block rigging at the same time. I then moved on to consider the tiller and the head of the rudder stem. You may recall my rudder is non-functional as the rudder stem does not extend through the hull. Consequently all I needed to do was get a stub of dowel the right size and drill a hole in this into which the tiller - a brass wire - could be inserted. I tried to give the end of the tiller a little ergonomic shape by dipping it into a pot of black paint and allowing a blob of paint to form at the tip of the tiller. I also considered what to do about the lifebelt. The kit provides what can only be described as a lump of metal which is to be used as a representation of the lifebelt. The instructions want you to paint this orange and thread some rope around the outside and call it done. That doesn't strike me as very lifelike and so I wondered what I could use to make a more releasing version of the lifebelt. Online images of the Pen Duick show the lifebelt on the yacht is actually yellow rather than orange and after some pondering I realised that a local office store sold yellow plasticine. I purchased a 500g block of plasticine and had a quick go at rolling out a tube shape which could be bent to look like a lifebelt. Here is a picture of the first attempt - I realised later that I didn't get the size right initially but this is a work in progress. It was surprising hard to roll a consistently size cylinder of plasticine - my skills have obviously faded over the decades! I'll come up with a better version in due course and I have an idea of how to trick it out to make it even more realistic, but that will have to wait until much later in the build. And I also have 499.5g of plasticine left over for more attempts! 😃 I was pleased to also find some time to start working on the bowsprit. I had previously cut a length of 4mm oak dowel to use for this and began by marking out the points at which holes needed to be drilled into which eyebolts would eventually be fixed. I use a small drill bit in the Proxxon mill to make sure that the dowel was level and that the holes were drilled centrally. I find it is easier to drill these holes into the dowel before it is tapered to shape - it seems easier to keep everything square and centred that way. There were various holes ended at both ends of the bowsprit and these were drilled and then I moved over to the lathe to taper the dowel to a 2mm thickness at one end. When I cut the dowel for the bowsprit I had deliberately left extra length at each end of the dowel as I know from previous experience that putting the dowel in the lathe to taper it can often result (for me at least) in a breakage at one end when the tip gets thinner and thinner. This did in fact happen this time too but luckily the break took place past where the end of the bowsprit needed to be. There are three brass collars that need to be fixed to the bowsprit into which the eyebolts are mounted. I had some brass tube on hand and was able to drill and cut a section of 3mm tube to act as the collar at the thinner end of the bowsprit. I did the same with some 5mm tube for the inboard end of the bowsprit but found that this was a bit too loose. I therefore cut through the section and removed a slither of the tube so that it could be squeezed more tightly onto the bowsprit. I mocked up these collars on the bowsprit and put it in place to see how things were looking so far. I need to paint a few more eyebolts with the brass paint in the next couple of days and then I can fix the collars onto the bowsprit properly and secure the eyebolts in place. The third collar sits near the middle of the bowsprit and actually include a vertical section pointing up from the bowsprit into which two eyebolts are fixed above the bowsprit. I will need to make this from some brass strip rather than a section of tube so hopefully I will be able to get to that in the next few days too. At this point I glued the deck fixtures mentioned previously into place on the stern part of the deck. That is almost all of the deck fixtures finished now apart from a few blocks that need to be attached to more eyebolts in the deck. So here is where things stand now. And also a bonus picture with the lifebelt in place just to see if it was a great idea or a ridiculous one 😃 It will get better - trust me!

Hi Bryan, There appear to be a few build logs on the site so perhaps they may be a useful resource for help with instructions and the construction order?

Looking very nice. Alert is a great kit to build!

Hello and welcome !

Well done. That is great work with the PE. The model gets much bigger now the bowsprit is attached so be careful turning it around in a small workspace !🙂

It has been a little while since the last update and whilst I have been busy with the build I don't seem to have made a great deal of significant visible progress. The first task to accomplish was the painting of the various pieces of metalwork that needed to have a brass appearance. I used the Vallejo brass paint and my airbrush to give the stanchions, eyebolts, binnacle and various other parts a couple of coats of paint. The Artesania Latina instructions show the capstan to be left as bare wood but online pictures of Pen Duick show it to have a brass appearance and a flat greenish coppery coloured top. The wooden capstan in the kit has a distinctly domed top so I sliced that off and painted the whole thing with the brass paint - I decided to omit the greenish tinge to the top face. Other items that were given a coat of paint included the brackets for the four pulley wheels that are fixed to the deck. I believe these are to do with tensioning the running backstays - my research into the rigging is only at a preliminary stage so far. 😀 You would imagine these little pulleys to be a fairly simply item to complete as they only comprise of three parts: the U shaped bracket, the pulley wheel and a short length of 1mm brass rod used as the axle shaft. However, in their wisdom AL have made the inside distance between the two sides of the bracket 2.5mm and yet the pulley wheel is 3mm wide! I therefore had to grind down the width of the pulley wheel a little on the bench sander so that it would slot into the bracket. It was then that I discovered the next little hiccup - once the wheel is in the bracket the axle hole in the bracket and the axle hole in the wheel don't line up as the diameter of the wheel is larger than the depth of the U shaped bracket! What would have been a fairly simple job turned out to be much more involved than it needed to be simply because of the poor quality of the fixings supplied with the kit. I got around the mismatch of the axle holes by sanding a little edge off the bottom section of the pulley wheel where it sits inside the bracket - this had the effect of dropping the axle hole in the wheel just enough so that it matched with that of the bracket. Luckily you can't see that the bottom of the wheel is no longer round! I also spent some time working on the chainplates. the instructions suggest that you just take a length of 0.8mm brass rod and form a little loop at each end of it by which it can be attached to an eyelet in the deck and to the shrouds. Six chainplates are needed and it seemed to me that it was going to be difficult to form these consistently, getting the loops to be the same size and the straight section to stay straight and be a consistent length etc. I therefore had the idea of using some lengths of 1mm brass tube that I have on hand and glueing an eyebolt into each end of the tube. This method therefore allowed me to produce much more easily six identically sized chainplates. I have attached the deck eyebolts to one end but I am leaving them off the model for the time being until I start work on the rigging as they will undoubtedly only get in the way in the meantime. Most of the deck fittings were now glued into place - things such as the cleats and eyebolts, and the pinprick and belaying pins etc. I basically started at the prow and worked backwards along the deck - the next items to consider are the assemblies that the instructions describe as turnbuckles, these are the the lever mechanisms used to tension the backstays I believe. There is also the assembly the instructions call the lee fange spanker boom (!) to make and then I will hopefully be able to turn my attention to the masts and spars.

Coming along very nicely !

I can understand that. I think I am going to be making some of it up as I go along. It would be nice if the pictures in the manual weren't quite so blury when it comes to the little details. 🧐

It is from a company called Arrowmax. They sell a couple of different versions of the drill and you can choose to get the drill stand with it or not. I find it very useful and much better suited to our purposes than a dremel or other drill like that. The Arrowmax I have only rotates at 550rpm so it is much better for drilling small holes compared to the several thousand rpm of the dremel. It also takes 2.35mm drill bits and the set it came with seem to be pretty solid - I have only broken one of them and that was entirely my fault. They are much better quality than the cheap PCB mini drill sets you get on eBay. I bought my drill from Amazon but I see the prices there are ridiculously expensive now but you can get them much more cheaply Here.

The work on the build this week mainly focussed on some of the many little metalwork fixings on the deck. I firstly collected together all of the metal fixtures supplied with the kit such as the cleats and the stanchions etc and gave them all a spray coat of grey primer. I then separated these out into two groups - one that needs to be pained black and the other that needs to be painted a brass colour. The group that need to be blackened were then given a spray coat of satin black paint and then a coat of satin varnish. Hopefully I can paint the other group of pieces with the brass paint this weekend. I also have to paint some of the copper Amati ringbolts a brass colour too, so I will do all of that together. There are various brass structures the instructions call pinracks which I constructed out of 1mm and 1.50mm brass wire. One pair of pinracks is also made out of 2mm wide brass strip and each holds two belaying pins. Interestingly, the bottom section of the belaying pins is only just under 2mm in diameter so I decided to pare those down a little so that I still had some metal left in the 2mm sheet after I had drilled the holes for the pins! I used the mini drill press for drilling the holes for the belaying pins and the eyebolts that secure it to the deck. I started with a 0.50mm drill bit for all of the holes and then enlarged the ones for the belaying pins by working up in size through a variety of drill bits to 1.3mm. The brass strip was then carefully bent into shape and the belaying pins put in place. Other things that were constructed at this time include the fore sheet bar and also the wooden supports for the binnacle and the bowsprit knightheads/support. I have also started gluing some of the cleats onto the outside of the cockpit coaming and also attached the mooring rope guides at the stern and prow. All of this is pretty fiddly work and takes me a surprisingly long time! There are lots of eyebolts that need fixing into the deck but I am holding off on gluing those in place just yet until I work out which ones are actually going to be used for the rigging. I have drilled the holes for them but I want to keep the deck as clear as possible whilst the rigging is being undertaken and little things like eyebolts can easily get in the way and cause snags etc - they can easily be inserted into the holes in the deck later on. The pair of pinracks and the bowsprit knightheads haven't been attached to the deck in the picture above, and are only standing on the deck to show where they will eventually be placed. I also obtained a length of 4mm diameter Tasmanian oak dowel and so I was able to roughly cut out the sizes needed for the bowsprit and various spars. I am looking forward to tapering these and the masts once I have all of this metalwork safely in place.

Well done - you are a brave man to flip the model over to work on the rudder at this stage of the build ! Micropore medical tape can be used as a cloth type material too - I used some of that for the tiller cover. I'm looking forward to seeing the next steps in your build.

I have one of the Arrowmax mini electric drills and stand and find it to be very useful https://am-smart.com/en-au/collections/hot

With the hull painting completed I was able to return to a bit of construction work. I had previously attached the propellor to a thin dowel and so this was now glued into the hull. I was also able to attach the rudder - the short nub at the top of the rudder was glued into the hole in the hull and a thin brass pin was fitted through the bottom of the rudder and into the hull. A dab of the green paint covered up the end of the brass pin. Now it was time to move back to the deck. The instructions call for thin pieces of walnut to be added to the inside of the main hatch and the fore hatch to form ledges onto which the hatch covers can be mounted. The walnut strip is fixed in place so that the top of the strips sits 2mm above the deck. For some reason the middle hatch doesn't need these supports, at least as far as the instructions indicate. It may be because the cover for this hatch is the butterfly hatch and perhaps the walnut may show through more easily through the brass bars? It isn't clear if that is the reason but I stuck with the instructions and did as I was told. I then soaked the two pieces of the cockpit coaming in warm water for a short while so that they could be bent into a slight curve and mounted them to the deck via the three slots previously made there. The main hatch was also placed on the deck and weights and clamps were used to keep the whole structure together whilst the coamings dried and took on the shape needed. After the coamings had dried the whole structure was removed from the deck and the coaming pieces were given a coat of wipe on poly. After this had dried the whole structure was then glued in place and weights and clamps reattached to hold it in place whilst the glue set. The middle hatch was also glued into position. At this stage the fore hatch is only sitting in place on the walnut ledges as I still have to fit the metal skylight ring to it before the final fitting can be undertaken. I also have started considering the construction of the masts and yards. The kit provides various sized walnut dowels for these but in my case the 6mm walnut dowel that is required for the mainmast was rather bent. Luckily I have some 6mm Tasmanian Oak dowel which I thought I might use instead - and this is straight! I cut some lengths for the mainmast, topmast and boom from this. I will need to taper and resize these on the lathe in due course. The other yards and masts need a 4mm dowel and I'll see if I can find another oak dowel to use for these.

Coming along nicely!

I continued working on the hull painting by masking the whole hull except for the white band. It was difficult to tell if the line left by the tape in the white paint was raised or indented so I decided that the best first step was simply to sand the whole of the white section. I approached it carefully with a soft sanding stick with #400 grit paper and I soon found that this evened out the surface nicely. A quick clean up to get rid of any dust was followed by another two coats of white spray paint. This gave me a nice smooth white section and I was pleased to see that when I removed the masking tape I hadn't made any marks in either the green or black sections of the hull. As mentioned previously there were a few chips at the top of the hull in the black paint and so I touched those up with a small paintbrush and then remasked off the deck area and gave the whole hull (and the rudder) three coasts of gloss varnish. I was pretty pleased with how this all turned out and was very grateful that the varnish hadn't spoilt the previous paintwork. It was a great relief to have the painting and varnishing work finished as this isn't something I'm confident with. My next model is going to be just wood and WOP! So back to woodwork! The next step was to install the gunwale rails around the edge of the deck. These are 3mm wide pieces of mahogany and I used the plywood former that the false deck had come on as a guide to the curve that needed to be set into the rails. Using a little water and the heat from a travel iron I was able to bend the two rails to the approximate shape required (they sprang back a little bit when released from the clamps holding them to the guide). I wanted to use PVA glue to attached the rails to the hull but I couldn't work out an easy way to clamp the rails to the gunwales whist the glue set that didn't risk marring the hull or the deck. I contemplated using rubber bands but decided I didn't want to risk my nice paintwork! In the end I decided the best way to fix the rails was with CA - though I try to avoid this where possible. The forward section of the rails is pretty straight so I glued that part first and held it in place by hand whilst the glue quickly set. I then applied more CA down the rest of the rail, holding each section in place with my fingers until the whole of the rail was glued into position. Each rail was then given a coat of WOP so that they matched the rest of the mahogany pieces on the deck. The instructions now call for you to install the skylights and cabin and coamings etc on the deck but I decided that whilst the deck was completely accessible it might be a good time to pre-drill all of the various holes required for pins, ringbolts and stanchions etc. The ringbolts supplied with the kit are made from 0.7mm brass but to my eye they look a little thick and chunky. I have some Amati copper eyebolts that are only 0.5mm thick and these seemed to be more in scale to me. I will of course have to decide whether to leave them the copper colour or blacken them or even paint them brass colour - I was recently able to purchase some Vallejo brass paint. The pictures I have found of Pen Duick online seem to show all of the metalwork on deck to be that greeny grey colour that bronze(?) goes after being out in the elements for so long. Anyway that is a decision for another day. One other feature of the deck to consider at this point is the installation of what the instructions call the deck windows. These are little rectangular skylights set into the deck to allow a little more natural light into the cabin. In the kit these 'windows' are represented by little rectangles of grey metal - practically the least useful thing you could use to represent a window. I certainly don't feel that I want to use these in my model as they will just look like four lumps of metal set into the deck. There is a possibility of replacing them with little pieces of acrylic or perspex but I am not sure about that either to be honest. It would be possible to cut out the appropriate shape in the deck planking and fit in a thin piece of perspex but this will then only sit on the false deck and I'm not sure whether it will end up looking like a window or not. I'm not keen on cutting through the false deck too as I think it will then be difficult to glue the perspex squarely in place without having anything to support it from underneath. I am tempted to leave the 'windows' off the build entirely at this time - but again that is something that I can reconsider further down the build. Here is the current state of the build.

He is also the presenter of the Mariner's Mirror, the podcast produced by The Society For Nautical Research and Lloyds Register Foundation.

Was it a secret research trip? Will we see a Vanguard Models cruise liner next year? 😁

Looking very good. Top work!