Frigate Chapter Twelve: Deck Items
I always enjoy this section as everything that you do has a quick impact on the appearence of the model.
This is not to say that did not hit any issues. The first one came fast with the hatches. The issue here is that cutting to correct size nearly always resulted in broken 'teeth' no matter how many different methods, or carefully, I cut. After scrapping all the hatches made I found a marginally better solution. Here I stoped trying to avoid having the straight edge fof a hatch against the straight edge of the hatch coaming and also cut 1 strip further than the required size before sanding down. This made the hatches much neater.
The bitts went up easily enough though the aft one seems awfuly close to the skylight. The baricades were also both simple enough.
The capstan went up then I noticed it was supposed to have a wooden floor.... resulting in halving the required peice of wood, extending the available hole and then using filler to hide the obvious cut mark.
Placing in the hammock cranes showed what appeared to be a discrenancy between side plan and hull plan. In the end I used the hul plan and the gunports as the primary locators.
After the ladders were built I was also required to do some remedial work on the gun deck as some items were needed there that were not mentioned in the instructions - or perhaps not thought to be important enough to be mentioned. These were some 'handles' that appear to be used for belaying some ropes later on which needed 2 angled on either side of the gun deck and the ropes preventing people falling down the ladders. All these are on the plans and all these had been happily ignored by me sweetly following the less than elaborate written instructions.
With the ships wheel I remembered to paint it before assembly and after it went on I added the first of my visible crew members. The others will appear after the rest of the deck furniture is placed. Mainly because then I will have a better idea where all the ropes will be going.
Finally I built the carronades and rigged the already built pdrs. Before finishing the remaining odds and ends.
