druxey

With lack of any other evidence, you'd be safe to go with a standard lion. Wait - wasn't there the story of Androcles drawing a thorn from a lion's paw?

In my early years, it was the other way around. You had many preserved ships of many kinds, right up to battleships and Queen Mary. We had Victory, Cutty Sark and not much else. Peking could have stayed but went to New York instead. Now she has gone to a more appropriate home in Germany as the South Street collection withers.
 
I suspect that it is a case of an initial surge of enthusiasm, then the bills pile up, volunteers dry up, maintenance falls off, the public gets complacent -- and before you know it, its time to start over with a whole new round of preservation.
 
Trevor

@Kenchington Trevor, my first thought was sadly how America's disgraceful lack of attention to historic ships. Poor Falls of Clyde which had been fully restored in the late '60s has been so severely neglected that she's just about lost forever. I remember seeing this magnificent 4 masted ship was often seen as a background vessel on the original "Hawaii 5-0" TV show. Meanwhile the SS United States still blue ribband record holder for the fastest Atlantic passages is being prepared to be sunk when she's still seaworthy. Thanks for sharing this, it's always nice to see a vessel treated with the respect she deserves.

When navel hoods can be naval ...
 
I was trying to tie down the origins of the painted ceiling in the Commissioner's House of Chatham Dockyard (don't ask!!) when I blundered into this image:

That's HMS Gannet of 1878, now restored. The shipwrights who built her may have called the structure extending from hawse holes to figurehead the "cheeks of the head" or some such. Still, looking at that, it's not hard to see why McLean chose "navel hood" for McKay's reinforcing structure, if his early versions enwrapped the hawse holes of his clippers.
 
Not identical structures, of course. Nor the same kind of ship, nor quite the same time period. But when a term was needed for something new and rather different ...
 
Trevor

@sob if that was the case, then the height of the inner forecastle deck on Glory of the Seas should have been almost 8 feet. It was not. Author Michael Mjelde sent us a specific article, actually correspondence between ship's owners and prospective installer of a new windlass. As accuracy was critical to ensure proper fit, ship's surveyors were hired to measure exact internal forecastle deck dimensions. They reported that the height was precisely 5 feet, 9 inches. Since all deck thickness was 3 & 1/2 inches, that put upper forecastle deck height at 6 feet 1/2 inch. Consistent with the 6 foot main rail height of the ship. I have no idea where Crothers sourced his information from but this is documented fact supplied by author Michael Mjelde. He's spent six decades interviewing captains and crew of Glory of the Seas and has receipts to support every fact he supplies us with. I do agree with Crothers assertion that deck orientation was kept level. But an article shared by Michael Mjelde (of which I have a copy saved) tells me that even with level decks, since they apparently followed plansheer line closely it's just not possible that roughly two feet of height could be added over the length of a vessel. 

Okay, on to landing gear. These were a bit of a challenge.
 
We start with the stacked wheel disks -- no resin wheels offered for this kit. 🙁 Once they dried, I soaked them in thin CA.

 
After that dried, I prepped the wheels for sanding by first trimming and filing their shoulders, then gouging out a hole for the screw to hold them on a Dremel shank. The screw is not long enough to hold a wheel without the rebate.

 
Using medium grit sandpaper followed by fine grit, sanding the wheels to shape takes very little time. One of the wheels wound up slightly lopsided because its axle hole wasn't drilled dead-center. Next the wheels, or rather the tires, were painted, and the printed hubs were added.

 
Wires for the struts were then formed. Take note that only one template is shown on the parts sheet, but the left and right struts must be formed as mirror images of each other, not identical to each other.

 
Then we add the main struts. Note the white portions -- that is the portion of each strut that gets inserted into a wing in the basic version of the model (i.e., no wheel wells). If you're adding wheel wells, those parts will be visible, so they'll need to be painted. BTW, all of the tubular parts of the gear are printed on card stock, not on bond. I find that rolling the card stock makes the diameters of the tubes too large, so I always delaminate the parts by wetting them and peeling off the inner layer of paper, reducing the thickness of the part by about half.

 
I made sockets for the struts by rolling some paper strips, soaking them in CA, painting them, and then gluing them into the wells. This makes a much stronger joint when the struts are added.

 
I skipped photographing a couple of steps, but here are the gear glued into their sockets. The remaining strut pieces and gear doors have been added as well. I don't use a jig for positioning the struts -- I just eyeball them until they "look right."

 

 
The outer gear doors look a little off-kilter, but that is the way they are supposed to look according to images of MiG-15s seen online.
 
Whew! Glad that part is done! Of course, there is still the nose wheel to do, so we're not quite out of the woods yet.
 
TTFN!

We used the fences as part of the recognition clues for a test. The very similar MiG-17  had 3 fences per wing. Not too useful if you really encountered them in flight. Who had time to count fences?🤔

I decided to add the wing fences next, even though they are not the next item in the instructions. I do think they add to the plane's "cool" factor.
 
Fences (left wing) vs. no fences (right wing).

 
All fences on.

I noticed that there were a lot of doubled parts coming up, so I decided to take care of this task all in one shot. Exciting, right?
 

 
BTW, there are two different schools of thought about how to do doubled parts. This kit includes both the fronts and backs as outlined parts, like so:

The obvious problem with this method is that it is difficult to get the two outlined parts to match up exactly when the piece is folded (though there is a way to partially deal with this).
 
Other designers will do the back side of the part (usually the interior side) as part of a colored field (imagine the gray interior part [above left] printed on a gray field, with no part outline). The benefit of that method is that there are no white areas if the back side of the part isn't perfectly aligned.
 
That's it for now.

Horizontal stabs on. This is the photogenic side. 😑  Hint: Pay attention to not man-handling the vertical stabilizer too much during the earlier stages of construction.
 

 
There is a serious dearth of internal structure inside the stabilizers -- just a single spar. Again, easy to build, but not particularly sturdy.

After commenting in my previous post about the lack of spacers in the wing frames, I decided to add some on this side, made from scrap pulp board.
 

 
I then skinned the wing -- same process as the other side. Everything was then ready to mate the wings and fuselage.
 

 
The MiG-15 and its derivatives had an anhedral wing mount. I was hoping that this was factored into the design of the wing ribs, i.e., the negative angle is produced by the internal framing structure even though the connecting rod is a straight piece. It looks like the framing was in fact designed that way.
 

 
The wing/fuselage joints produced some significant gaps. Suspecting that the wing fillets would not entirely hide these, I added some coloring to the white spaces before adding the fillets.
 

 
Fillets prepped.
 

 
My suspicions were confirmed. As you can plainly see if you look closely, the fillets do not come close to bridging the earlier white gap. It's a pretty disappointing fit, actually, though from a stand-off distance it doesn't look bad.
 

 
The horizontal stabilizers are next!

Production has slowed a bit due to some distraction in the form of binge-watching another Apple TV series. But last night I felt motivated to get the right wing framed. At least now we can get a sense of the size of the finished model.

 
I almost, almost made the horrific mistake of assembling the frames as a second left wing instead of a right wing (I have made that mistake before, doh!), but I caught the error in time to fix it without too much difficulty. Part #59, seen here dry-fitted, is a 3.8mm-diameter rod that pins the two wings to the fuselage; you can see part of it in the photo. I presume that most people, like me, don't happen to have any 3.8mm rods or dowels laying around, so mine is made from a bamboo skewer wrapped in card. Whatever works, baby!
 
The wing framing is worth noting in comparison to far more robust designs, such as those seen in my Halinski builds. This kit is intended for intermediate builders, so perhaps the low parts count simplifies the construction in that regard, but I do think that some additional parts would have made this a better structure. In particular, some spacers in between the spars and ribs would have been welcome. Also, if you compare the above picture to the earlier left wing picture:

you can see that the wheel well does not have the same dimensions as the gap it fits into, and some spacers would have been useful there as well.
 

On to the wings. The kit provides two sets of spars, one for the complete wheel wells option and the other for w/o wheel wells.
 
For parts that will only be partially visible on the finished model, like #108, I use only the visible portion of the printed part.

 
The English directions are a bit cryptic. The upper part of the wheel well doesn't fit the interior framing exactly, so I tinted the surrounding areas of the wing skin that might show around the edges of the well. Note that I have added joiner strips to the trailing edge -- these aren't included in the kit.

 
The interior framing is a little wobbly. I suggest putting as much of it together as you can before gluing. (EDIT: There's actually a rod, part #59, that fits inside the framing and will help align things as well.) The leading edge piece is the key to getting everything aligned properly. Notice that no spacers are provided around the wheel well.

 
Test fit the framing inside the folded wing until you get the wheel well positioned properly, then mark the inboard edge of the framing -- it doesn't sit flush with the wing sheathing.

 
Once you're satisfied with the location of the interior framing, you can tack it to the topside skin. Once the glue has set, you can glue down the bottom skin, but don't try to do it all at once. Do the inboard stringer and wheel well surround in one go, then zip up the trailing edge separately. After that you can add the wingtip piece and close up the wingtip.

 
That's one wing down and one to go!

BTW, I just received an order from Widget Supply. The owner is retiring and selling off his inventory at deep discounts, limited to stock on hand. I was able to snag a whole bunch of goodies: knife blades, sanding disks & drums, drill bits, Dremel bits, mandrels, needle files -- even zip ties. You should check them out!
 

The framing of the vertical stabilizer is not difficult. It consists of a number of laser-cut elements and a length of 2mm styrene rod, which fits down into a hole in one of the fuselage bulkheads.

 
This is just a dry fit for now.

I have a story for that, a wealthy banker stored it in a barn at the start of ww11 so the Germans didn't get hold of it and maybe died or went abroad and forgot about it.

Hi all more done to this, did the exhaust with a combination of pastels and paint, quite pleased with how it's coming along, doing the corrosion on the water pipe with a combo of talc and pastels ground up (need to get more texture on it yet, may use a bit of salt)

Mine's a Drascombe Longboat:

That image is from last summer. Just got her back on her mooring this afternoon, with lots of work still to do to clean her up for the season, then get the sailing gear on board before she looks like that again!
 
Trevor
 
 

Those wedge-shaped fashion pieces are nasty beasts to tame! Well done.

Those wedge-shaped fashion pieces are nasty beasts to tame! Well done.

I fixed the anchors and fish davit
 

more pictures:
 









 

Main studding sail booms:
 






 
 
 

first wing:





 

After a break, I started to prepare and set up the figurehead; everything is still provisional, I don't like it very much, I had to remove some details to make room for the bowsprit, but I'm going ahead and I hope it will be more presentable.