hexnut

Just an hour or so after I posted the last photos, the canopy mask set arrived in the mail from England. Because of the complexity of the masking required for this model, the pre cut masking set is a huge benefit for a small cost. 
 
 

The Avenger crew consisted of three men. A bombardier-radioman, turret gunner, and the pilot.
The bombardier-radioman sat in a bench seat underneath the turret gun, where a .30 caliber machine gun was mounted pointed to the rear to serve as a ventral defensive armament. 
The gun turret was electric powered, the gunner having his own seat and a .50 caliber machine gun to help fend off enemy fighters.
 
In order to join and cement the fuselage halves, the turret glass must be installed first as it will not fit after the fuselage halves are joined. Consequently, this will cause a delay as the canopy mask set is inbound from a vendor in England. Because this model was originally produced in 2005, very few aftermarket items can be found for it now. If you find one you're almost forced to buy it even if it must come from across the ocean. 
 
I've been checking the fit of the internal details to the fuselage halves as I'm progressing, trying to avoid any unexpected fit issues when the halves go together. So far so good, as everything seems to be very well engineered and fits well.
 

A dry run to see if the cockpit/bomb bay/gunner stations fit correctly into the fuselage halves. So far, so good. 
There remains the ventral gunner's station and tail wheel compartment before the fuselage halves can be closed up.
No doubt, this is the best opportunity to see the internal details as I'm sure much of it will not be seen after the halves are closed.
 

Some bomb graffiti
 

The focal point of this model are the interior components. Not sure how much of it will be seen once the fuselage halves go together, but it does have an open bomb bay, and open hatch for the gunner's station in the ventral position. While even now the interior parts look complex, this is only about 50% of what will be the sum of it, while I still must add a lot of detail including the gun turret, the ventral gun station, and options for an extra fuel tank, or a torpedo, or four bombs in the bomb bay.
 

The TBM3 Avenger was the heaviest single engine aircraft of WW2. To pull it along, the massive Wright R2600-20 14 cylinder twin row radial engine, producing 1900 horsepower was used.
 

Display base complete:


...on to the mast, sail and rigging!
 

Staining the base pieces in "dark walnut"

Tiller is just a friction fit at the moment as there is another blue paint spec to deal with (visible in the below pic).  But after that, the rudder assembly is basically complete and it will be onto the display base. 

Got the pintles and gudgeons onto the rudder piece.  In hindsight it would probably have been easier to attach the gudgeons to the hull first but it's too late now...  I actually used JB Weld up to this point due its ability to bond metal well but will probably have to go with a glue that dries clear and is easy to clean off the hull as I'm bound to get a little glue where I don't want it while attaching this assembly... More pics coming soon!

Got the bow line attached.  I decided to add a ring fitting rather than just tying the line directly to the stern post.
 



I need to make the rope lay down a little flatter and trim just a smidge off the end that hangs off the side.

I've been working on getting the centerboard installed into the trunk along with the associated details:



I opted for a brass button head nail on both sides for the centerboard hinge pin.  I just thought it looked more nautical.
I tried to tie off the centerboard line with a correct cleat hitch but when I added a dab of glue it kind of made the whole knot look like plastic. I didn't want to redo it though so I'm chalking that up to lessons learned.  From a distance it doesn't look that horrible. 
The only other issue was drilling the hole for the pin that holds the centerboard up in place.  It's drilled at a slight angle do to the side of the hull not allowing me to drill straight across. 
I could have ordered some finger drills but didn't want to wait.  Like the cleat hitch, it doesn't look that noticeable from a distance. 
Also, what looks like a black line on the corner of the centerboard in the first 2 pics is actually just a shadow. 

Mahogany trim boards attached. 

Soaked mahogany trim rails in warm water and set them on a jig to give them some shape.  Will hopefully make attaching them a little easier.

 
The instructions say to use CA glue for this step, but I don't want to risk having it soak into and stain the mahogany so I will be using wood glue. 

Paint touch-up completed successfully.   It actually looks a little better than it did before the "incident" 🙂 .
Now it's on to completing the hull which is basically going to just be adding the trim boards along both sides and getting the rudder and tiller attached. 

The pumps on the Sultana are quite beautiful, particularly in the long curve of the handles.

Here is the initial 3D design.

I 3D printed parts, painted them, and tried them out.  They were good, but looked a little too tall.  Also, the interesting transition from octagon to square at the bottom wasn't distinct enough.  I revised my design and created a new set.  The old version is on the left, new is on the right.  The new pumps also have wire out the bottom to help hold them in place. 

Here are the pumps installed on the deck.

I started work on the binnacle by creating a 3D design with the lid on.

This was not bad, but a bit boring.

The best picture of the open binnacle I have found is from ship25bsa.smallsquareddesigns.com, which has been a great resource for reference photos.

I first tried adding the details of the instruments as raised parts of my 3D design, but it was beyond the ability of my 3D printer to render them in sufficient detail, so the result was just little plastic blobs, which were made worse after painting.  My revised design replaced the instruments with a little piece of paper.

Testing the binnacle on the model.

And finally it is glued on and tied down to rings on the deck.

 

The Sultana has four hatches.  Two are small: one is located aft of the windlass and the other is forward of the binnacle.  A long, medium sized hatch is on the quarter deck, and will be open to expose the ladder on my model, as it is on other Sultana models.  Finally, there is a large hatch on the main deck.  Most models depict the main hatch covered with boards, but on the Sultana replica, the large hatch has grating and a ladder down.
 
The picture below is of the medium hatch, with the grating in place to cover the ladder.  Note the white cover.  All of the hatches on the Sultana have these covers, which keep out water.  However, I think I will omit the white covers.

Creating a grating in Fusion 360 isn't too hard.  Draw a rectangle, draw one of the square holes, use a rectangular pattern to create the remaining holes, then extrude the sketch.

For the grating on the Sultana, I need to have the holes and space between holes at roughly .6mm in size.  I ran an experiment to see how small I could make grating that still retained square-shaped holes.  As you can see, the pieces in the lower right are acceptable, while the ones in the upper right are not.  This shows the limits of what I can do with 3D printed grating.

After some experimenting, I found that having the surface raised in one direction makes the grating look better.

Next is the hatch coaming.  From my earlier work, I already knew the exact curvature of the deck camber.

From there, I created the profile of the coaming.

And then the profile was extruded.

I created a new sketch on the coaming surface to indicate where the recess is.

And the relevant parts were cut out.

After 3D printing and painting, here are my final hatches.

And here are the hatches on the model.  The aft-most small hatch hasn't been glued down yet, because I need to place the binnacle first, then glue the hatch an appropriate distance from the binnacle.


 

This details building the ladder.  First, one side of the ladder is created.  The fillet feature allows the ladder to be rounded off at the top.

One step of the ladder is created, and a rectangular pattern operation creates the remaining steps.

Extrude the steps and add a copy of the side piece, and the ladder is complete.

Using a knife, I scribed some lines into the 3D printed part to simulate wood grain.  The piece was painted a wood color followed by a brown wash to enhance the texture.

And finally, the ladder is glued into place.

Let's build the windlass, starting with the ratchet gear.  After studying a number of pictures of the Sultana's windlass, I determined that the ratchet gear has 12 teeth.  I created a 12 sided polygon and added one tooth.

Then I used the circular pattern function to copy the tooth for a total of 12 units.

An extrude operation created the final shape of the ratchet gear.

Adjacent to the ratchet gear, I created an octagon, then a second smaller octagon the correct distance away.

I used the loft function to create a shape between the two octagons, then mirrored that shape to the other side.

The holes were added and both rectangular and circular patterns were used to place the holes around the windlass.

And finally, the supports were modeled.

All of the windlass parts were 3D printed.

The windlass pawl and galley stack are connected.  Here is a picture of the galley stack.  For now, I have decided to omit the white cover on the galley stack.

This is the galley stack 3D model.

And this is the 3D printed part.  I used some burnt sienna paint to indicate rusting.  (There is no rust in my photo of the galley stack, but it is present on other photos I have found.)

The windlass and galley stack glued on to my Sultana.

 

Plastic hull, i needed Stabilit Exspress. I wanted a RC sailing scala boat from Norway 🙂 
More gluing with white glue "ponal exspress"

On the Sultana, lifejackets are stored in containers at the sides of the main deck.  These are arranged to resemble hammock storage, with rails and netting around them.  The picture below is my own of the lifejacket storage.

I tried several methods of creating the shape of the lifejacket storage.  The top shows an attempt using modeling clay.  The lower attempt was using blocks wrapped by fabric.  I was not happy with either result.

The method I settled on was to create a mold of the correct size, fill it with modeling clay, then press fabric against the side, giving it an imprint of the fabric texture.

The metal rails were designed and 3D printed.

All the pieces were assembled and wrapped in netting, which was produced using the method I have described earlier.  Bars across the top were added.

I was mostly satisfied, until I saw this photo on ship25bsa.smallsquareddesigns.com which shows that I omitted the covers.  The covers wrap over the outer bar and on the inside is a hanging flap which identifies the contents as lifejackets.

I went through the fonts on my system and was pleased to find that I already had the correct font: Gabriola italic.  The covers were printed on paper and glued on to the model.

With the rudder in place, all it needs is the tiller to be complete.  However, it will be difficult to work on several final features of the transom with the tiller in place, so those need to be completed first.  Of those, the first is the boom sheet traveler, with a black plate behind it.  You can also see the holes that were drilled for the window cover ropes.

The transom windows were laser cut, so I already had their exact shape an size from the laser cut template.  From that, I was able to produce the window covers in the correct size.  Hinges were added in black, and the rope was threaded through each window cover.

Here are all the window covers in place.  I also added the lamp, whose "glass" was made by building up layers of clear glue.  The small diamond shapes next to the lamp, both here on the model and on the real ship, exist to hide where the ends of the boom sheet traveler puncture the transom.

On the other side of the transom, the ropes are tied off on two very tiny cleats.

Finally, I can make the tiller.  Here is the 3D design.

The tiller was 3D printed, painted, and installed on the ship.

Here is a photo I took of Sultana's tiller

Strips for the pintles were added to the rudder.  I determined that, at this scale, pins were not needed and would be hidden from view anyway, so they were omitted.

The gudgeons were added to the hull.

After watching a few tutorials, I managed to create a reasonable propeller in Fusion 360.

I wasn't sure what the right size would be to fill the space, so I printed it in several sizes.

The rudder and propeller were glued into place, and the rudder chains were attached.

Here is my reference photo for the rudder, found on sultanaeducation.org.

There is netting along the aft railings of the Sultana.  My first thought was to use some tulle.  However, the scale was wrong, and the tulle was too thin and light, barely noticeable.  I tried painting the tulle to darken it and thicken the strands, but the paint failed to adhere.
 
It was clear that I would need to make my own netting from thread.  My next attempt started by trying to form netting from individual strands of thread, which I would saturate with glue to hold them together.  You can see how far I got below.  It was immediately clear that I didn't have the patience for this method, and the mesh would be uneven.

Of course, there is a 3D printed solution to every problem.  I 3D printed a jig to use for forming the netting.  Then glue was applied to hold it all together.

And the netting was put on the ship.  Also note the deck steps which were added around the same time.

Here's a reference photo I took which shows the netting.  Mine is a little lighter in color, but acceptable.