yvesvidal

So after a few days visiting one of our kids in Falmouth I've returned to find that the decals I've ordered have arrived. But first a photo of the lovely boats in the harbour and the fantastic coastline for your enjoyment...
 


 
So on to the decals, I ordered them from Kitsworld in Essex and they also included some free samples. There's a couple of their Diorama airfield display bases, these are stickers effectively, plus some 3D cockpit decals and stencil masks. I'm not sure which model these are for but it's a nice touch and good promotion from them.
 

 
The decals look to be good quality, I'm a long way from using them at the moment though, so let's see later how they go on.
 

 

Some more progress. I've installed the wales, the lower one was difficult to bend at the stern but I got it done. I've also gone ahead and trimmed the frames to their (almost) correct height and made the cutouts for the upper gun emplacements (not shown on the first photo which is from a week ago).
I'm now turning my attention to the interior, I installed the keelson and will start on the strakes on which the deck beams are resting.

Minor update on the deadflat frame. The chocks and cross chock are now cut out and I think my approach to doing this (at least provisionally) works ok. As noted above, I made a few billets of boxwood for the cross chocks and the chocks, since I felt that it would be very hard for me to make these if I was just trying to cut them out of the larger sheets along with the futtocks.
 
I position the template of the chock/cross chock at the end of the appropriate billets - in this case, they were all cut from 10" stock - with the angled side at 1 edge. I then use the disc sander to shave the angled portions down - not quite fully, so I can finish them off more carefully by hand with a sanding block. I then cut along the straight edge on the scroll saw to release them from the billet - I was worried that this would be really hard to achieve since the pieces are so small, but it actually proved not too difficult. Some light final finishing with sanding block and files and presto! I now only need to refine the futtocks and then get into the joinery....the kind of finnicky work that normally defeats my lazy and distracted nature, but that I'm determined to really get right! The final shot, below, shows the chocks loosely put together with the futtocks, and it shows I've got some ways still to go before I can finalise the assembly and raise the frame....but I'm enjoying this far more than I feared I might! Hopefully that feeling lasts!!
hamilton

The cranes for the stern. These where a right pain. Attaching the sides to the jibs was so finicky. And three of them didn't have the small tabs used as guides. And one had the front part damaged. 
I have gone with the jewellers wire for the lifting cable. I am also displaying them flat instead of the 45°raised angle suggested in the instructions. I don't like raised look and much prefer them this way. They are roughly in their finished position.
Now need to add all the fittings that I have painted  ready to be added to the stern before gluing them in place. Then the docking bridge and onto the boat deck detailing. 

After four days in the dryer, it is Still NOT dry. I guess I used the wrong paint. Oh well putting it together tacky. Lol
I am going the have to redo the hood, it is that bad. But sometime in the future. This was a fun model, there are some differences between plastic and wood, pros and cons  for both. This was my truck so I had to build one, now it's back to my ships lol. 
Some final pictures of my truck. Someday I'll come back and fix it all. But not today.lol
 This was fun, goodbye my friends sea you on the next build.


Oh yes I have to put the decals on as well but another day lol  😆 
This is where My 1972 Ford F100  will be parked for life , thanks for  looking.
Bob M.
I'm marking it finished. 

 

Motoring along all was fine, lol.  I painted the inside of the door panels  a Suede color, chrome window cranks with a black button rollers.
 This model shows a shift lever on the steering column.  Mine was a 4 speed with a handle that ran all the way to the floor. It took seconds to slide it in to third gear. Maybe that's why it was hard on back tires lol.



So I put the cab interior together and set it aside for now.
Now this is were the fun started happening, lol . I put most of it together, jack,  windshield washer fluid container put on. I even put the windows in. 
That's when it happened , I had a big Neanderthal finger print on the hood and the roof of the cab. So I taped it all up and resprayed it.  Ok Fine it looks great. Nope , I flip the hood on the floor, can't fix it till it's dry. So I will put it all in front of the heater for a week. Lol
 Then I will repaint the hood, and put it together.  That will leave the chrome and the decals, and lights.

 Well the paint is going to take a week before I will handle it again.

I can't wait that long, so I am off to start a log for a Drakkar Viking boat. Soon as the paint is cured, I'll be able to continue. 
 Thanks for looking. Plastic is fun and quick to glue together, it's the drying time that's a killer lol.
 Later  Bob M.
 

I think you are doing more than an outstanding job with this kit beauty or for the ship modeling world. Everyone may know my opinion for that matter! 🙂

Update
 
made the updated forecastle bulkhead and support for the front mast, also the seawater tight access doors. The mushroom-anchor chain end will be connected to the ringspring buffer element on deck
 
Nils

One completed keel assembly.

Still needs finish applied, I may opt just to use sanding sealer.  I'm not a huge fan of wipe-on poly.
 
Everything pretty much fell together once things were tweaked just a bit.  

Couple of things...
Be very careful with the knee of the head, I sneezed and broke one. When trimming the apron blocks, be sure to use a very sharp blade and very small slivers, as I chucked a couple I popped the first frame out of it's sprues (and yes I think USPS played football with my box, as most everything was detached).  I'm going to look like Popeye after sanding all the char off these frames.
 
I need to probably tackle putting the build board together before I get to far ahead of myself.

Shawn

Got the two long pieces of veneer on the upper hull attached.
 

 

 
Because these pieces are so wide, they are terribly unforgiving of any error in hull fairing, and that point is made apparent toward the bow. Here you can see that the natural curve of the veneer creates some small pockets where too much material was removed during the hull fairing process.
 

 
You can't simply smash these down, because that will cause the veneers to buckle. Nor can you simply ignore them, because doing so will cause the wales (the next belt of planking) to sit too low relative to the upper veneers. Nope, I'm gonna have to add some material in those areas to raise the surface slightly and allow the wales to sit level with the upper hull veneers. An unwelcome task, but necessary.
 
In the meantime, I may be hitting the pause button yet again on this build, for reasons I'll discuss in a separate topic. 😮 Don't worry -- nothing bad!

It can be tricky, especially following the curvature of a hull.
 
The Nautilus is one of my all time favorite submarines from fiction.
 
Jules Verne is one of my all time favorite authors.
 
So, I am very excited to see this build.

An easy day today.
I finished the weathering on the hull and conning tower.

 
I just realised that I forgot the air vents on the side air tanks (all 34 of them!).
Better get started now!

 
An hour later and they're on.

Cheers,
 

Dear all,
these are last steps with the fuselage interior. I added the gunsight to the cockpit and these are its last images before enclosing it in the fuselage:



The fuselage interior was painted black and then mottled with the interior green. The cockpit posed with the port half:

And with the starboard half:

The first important milestone, the fuselage is now buttoned up:

With few additions, the parts of the kit allowed to fabricate a nice and detailed cockpit. The last piece of equipment glued on the edge of the coaming:

The bomb bay with the false breeches of the four cannons now looks like this:

For @Old Collingwood, I tried to take a picture of the cockpit seen through the open hatch, but it is not in focus:

That's all for now, thanks for following,
Dan

That would be so nice but it probably would put the builder at risk of being abused.
 
Anyway....those gratings
 
You will basically get all of the laser cut parts in this chapter.  There are only four hatches with gratings.  They are not very large.   Here are all of the elements needed.  You will get two layers for the jig.   The two layers are glued together to form the jig.
 
You also get a right angle jig which is 3/64" thick.  The thickness is very important.
 
Lets get started.
 

Start with the coamings.   They are laser cut and 1/8" thick.
 
The fore and aft sides are already shaped with the round-up of the deck....or camber as usually described but is an inaccurate term.
 
Use the right angle jig to glue two sides together...dont worry about the laser char just yet.   Then glue the remaining two sides together using the same jig to make a nice right angle.
 

Glue the two right angles together to form the coaming.  Sand the sides clean which are left a bit longer as you can see in order to remove the char and leave a nice bright smooth surface.   Also sand the top sides to clean the char.  You can see the cleaned coaming below.
 
Then you can start working on the grating.  Again just like my other smaller scale grating kits.
 
Insert the laser cut grating strips in the slotted jig.  NO GLUE of course!!!   This is just for alignment.
 
Then start adding the cross battens.  These are glued in position.  They may be too tight as you want a press fit.  So just run the small strips 1/16" x 1/16" through your fingers with some fine sandpaper.  Not much.  Just enough so the battens fit into the slots. see below.  There are seven batten strips and seven laser cut grating strips for three of the hatches.  The fourth is made the same way but is much smaller on the fcastle.
 

When all the strips are glued in position,  remove the grating from the jig.  Snip off the edges as shown below.  Then sand all four edges clean.  Try and not distort the perfect square shape.  In the photo two sides have the ends snipped off.   The smaller hatchway will have fewer battens and more to snip away.  Also sand the top surface clean and smooth.  Once again try and maintain the proper shape with the round-up.  You will know when its all done when the char is cleaned from the laser cut grating strip squares.

The photo below shows the top of the grating and sides all clean and nice and smooth.  It makes a nice grating.  The holes are 1/16" or 2" on the real ship and perfectly in scale.

You should but dont have to sand the bottom side as well.   Here is a look.  The battens are clearly less thick than the grating strips and these are pretty close to actual construction methods.  Or at least the impression of it.
 

And almost done...you will see how nice and tight the grating fits in the coaming.   Dont over sand the edges and you should test the grating in the coaming as you sand the edges.   In fact, the coaming normally has ledges on the port and starboard sides inside the coaming.  These create a ledge that the grating sits on so it doesnt fall through.  You can add those if you like.  But in my case the gratings fit so snug that they were not required.  I simply glued the gratings into the coamings making sure the top of the coaming was flush with the grating.  I sanded it smooth with some 400 grit paper.

The four corners of the coaming are very sharp at this point.  You dont want that.  They should be rounded off.  But they are only rounded off down to the deck level.   That is when you take that same right angle jig and use it.
 
The jig is the same thickness as the planking.   So you can place the coaming into the corner and use a sharp #11 blade to slice away the corner.  Slice it down to the top of the jig only.   You can make a stop cut at the jig level before slicing off the corner.  Then just round off the corner.
 
 
Dont slice off too much.   Just a little bit to round off each corner.
 
To finish it off I drilled three holes with a #76 bit.  I used 20lb black fishing line to simulate the bolts on the top of the coamings.  Three on each side.   They cut flush with the top of the coamings with a sharp blade.
 
All done!!!
 
 
 

I finished the hull planking on May 3, about 2 months later than I had wanted to finish it. Life just gets in the way sometimes.

As of the last post, I estimated I was halfway through the planking. It was time to rip more lumber for the build. I try to take a photo when I rip more planking, so that hopefully I can go back afterward and estimate how much I really ended up needing. The planking stock is Castello boxwood. It has been a pleasure to work with.
 
This will mostly be a pictorial essay, but I will add some commentary at certain points.

The junction of the sternpost and the transom was tricky. I had to do a lot of fine carving to remove enough underlying wood to get the planks to lie down right.

I used some basswood to create a feeler plank that guided how much wood needed to be removed.

At this point I created a short strip that could be temporarily fixed adjacent to the sternpost, so that I could work on the next plank up, which ends adjacent to the lowest portion of the transom.

There is a planking seam very close to the sternpost, which was nice. I was able to create this very short planking segment, which was easily tunable to make sure things were right.

The next portion of this plank is temporarily fastened in so that the next plank can be worked on before gluing in this one.

 

I haven’t been able to examine the real transom on the real ship to see how this planking looks. This first plank that ends against the transom gets pretty wide at its end, and that may not be the way it looks in reality. But it’s time to move on to the bow.

This band of planking consists of four planks, but it was necessary to drop one plank toward the bow. So the space at the stem was divided among three planks.

 

Sizing up the three planks, gradually reducing the size of each so as to end up with three of similar width.


Turned out pretty well.

Time for more lumber.

This bump is a short segment of wood to fill in a dip that occurred when I applied a plank butt to a frame that was a little small. It was sanded down flush.

The bow portion of the port side is finished; just a few more stern planks to go.

All done on the port side. Next is a series of photos showing the closing up of the starboard side.

Down to the whiskey plank. I had a plank ready to go, but it was just a little off. So I made a new one.

Whiskey all around for the building crew!

No time to rest on laurels, though. There is plenty of cleanup to be done before I can move on, so I will probably do another post showing the things that need to be straightened up with the planking before working out the interior structure.

Almost done lifeboats and davits installed and rigging started just minor bits to finish off. 

Hull complete
 
I have completed the hull. I replaced the plywood cap rails with mahogany using the plywood as templates. These were glued on with CA glue more or less accurately.
Last thing to do was to mask of for the stripe. It looks read but is in fact orange. I think it adds a nice touch to the hull. 

I have now turned my attention to the main mast - quite a bit to do here. It looks like I have all the needed fittings. 
I will show the progress in my next post 🙂 
 
/Lars Peter
 

I discovered some steps that did not have rails so I fixed those.
 

 

 
I also added a couple more ‘rigging’ lines.
 

 
I’m finding that the more photos that I take the more errors are exposed!

It is really nice to see a more prototypical Nautilus being built, than the completely romanticized Disney Nautilus. When looking at the Gustave Dore drawings, the original Nautilus was very sleek and very similar to the model you are building.
 
Yves

It is really nice to see a more prototypical Nautilus being built, than the completely romanticized Disney Nautilus. When looking at the Gustave Dore drawings, the original Nautilus was very sleek and very similar to the model you are building.
 
Yves

Done so far, phew. I have to continue to paint the figures and to clean up my bench, which I guess will take longer than the build itself .



















Cheers Rob

Final steps ahead, luckily. The huge airframe and the delicate details make working on the big bat more and more difficult. The issues fixed to parts torn loose ratio turns worse .

I assembled the elevators and the rudder and added steering cables for the rudder. the fittings were made from split brass rod to add some more detail.



Finally, I reassembled the guns, the worst part of the build and installed them into the gun mounts onto the gun rings.





There will be a lot of final touch ups and then the big bat is finished.

Cheers Rob

Thanks to everyone for looking in and laughing at my lame Barbie joke.  Hope I at least brought a smile to a few faces.
 
I've now pretty much completed the chassis as supplied by the kit with the addition of the spark plug wires.  I hope to add a few more wires and hoses around the engine based on pictures of the real thing, just to make it look a bit more realistic and a bit busier.  The one remaining part of what I'll call the chassis is a sort of shelf unit in the back.  The mufflers hang off of the underside of that shelf and then there are additional exhaust pipes to connect the headers to the muffler and then pipes out the back of the car.   The kit also has a fully detailed compartment under the front bonnet, including spare tire, and that is next.
 

Thanks guys...There are a lot of things I could work on next but I am eager to get the decks planked.   So next up I will make all the coaming and gratings down the center line so I can plank around them.   Once that is done I will add the waterway and start on the fun bits.   It should come together rather quickly once I plank the decks.  A quick look at sheet 5 still being tweaked which has all of those details.   
 
 

2 First up are the sources for drawings. 
 
I went to the Smithsonian catalogue and ordered the McManus design for both Oriole and Elizabeth Howard as prepared by Howard Chapelle.    Note this is actually very easy to do once you have hold of their catalogue.  It is unfortunate that it is not on line….[I think].
1.    Here are the hull plans they shipped. They are basically at 1:32 scale just off a hair.    
Before we get to the hull let’s gather all the other info we plan to use. There are no surviving drawings of the on-deck configuration nor sail plans, but artistic license should warrant a “close enough: / generic finishing above deck. So let’s find some photos.  Here is before bowsprit and racing with a bowsprit.
2.  this view is one of two images I am after….note there is no bowsprit in the image. This shows the working vessel.   
3    here we are racing in all her glory….the likely choice.       The other option having no deck plans could have been to use the great hull drawings and do all the in between framing and show it in the yard under construction.      I chose not to follow that approach for the "White Ghost" of Maine.  I think it is the sailing image of such a short lived thoroughbred racer to be the better way to go, so off we go.
To complete my outreach at this point for the above deck, I will use two photo documents and will annotate them.   Once again, I have taken a broadside photo and embedded it in cad and scaled it. I found it strange with the subtle roll to starboard of the hull in this image, the masts are absolutely plum.  I will add a bit of a rake as can be seen above.
4   .                          here is screen shot.  
5    by example of the next steps, here is the spar plan.    
6    here is the first sail plan. I will later do one for each sail. Where like this mainsail where they are larger than tabloid 11”x17” my printer limits, I have added coordinates to lay out the pattern manually.   Smaller sails will simply be printed. To place furniture on deck I will use the 1919 photo of her in the water swamped to give running on deck dimensions for the cabins that are visible.   There are also a few online images for Bulwarks etc.   
7    Here is the partially annotated photo of on deck.    
8    here is sample of online deck views .  Yes that is Columbia with I assume Captain Ben Pine ahead of us.
I will then use Gertrude Theobald and Columbia plans that I have rolled up somewhere [ the once upon a time to build list] for added guidance.  More on that when we get there.
Cheers