Of Life, Lofts and MDF….

 

And so it begins. The first 18 of the 24 ships I am building for the Royal Navy and the Turks for 1880. The Turks are at the top and the RN below. This is the early hull assembly stage as in each case the top deck has a white edge that I paint before sticking it to the hull. The Royal Navy will also have a brick red lower hull with a white trim or ‘boot strapping’. There are six models not featured above as these will require some additional attention.

It has been an eventful week. On Monday one of the sprung brackets that operate the loft hatch decided to shear a bolt. The net effect of this is that the entire hatch cover swerved alarmingly to the sprung side and headed downwards. It meant that it needed to come down entirely for safety reasons and so I began the somewhat fruitless task of locating a tradesman that specialised in lofts but not just installing them. I had mixed success but fortunately my son came to the rescue and so Saturday morning (in fact ALL of Saturday morning) between the two of us the loft hatch was recommissioned. In fact it now hangs more squarely than previously and so is less likely to have the same problem. One of the mounting brackets had been placed around the wrong way, hence the tendency to veer to the right and the increased strain on the side that the bolt sheared.

Thursday saw Laurel, Holly and I attending the funeral of a longtime family friend. It went as well as these things can do and my eulogy was well received despite the emotion of the occasion. We are still feeling the after effects of our loss and so, needless to say, life has been a little muted. 

In many ways the opportunity of today - now that the loft was back in commission - was a welcome distraction, aside from the fact that I needed to be ‘cracking on’ with stuff.

The picture above shows the progress thus far and I am pretty pleased with what I have achieved. The main part of the ship hull has been assembled in each of the above. All will need the top deck added (along with the appropriate deck detail) and in the case of four of the Turkish ships, the barbette. Everything you see thus far will be black. There are three Royal Navy vessels as yet unassembled and three for the Turks making 24 of the 23 of the 16 models I originally envisaged building….

Project creep? Moi? Nah, never gonna happen…