More HMS Victory modeling

I know I haven't posted about my model for a while.  It's been a work in progress.  If you look at the picture below, you'll see all the paint; yellow and black on the outside.  You can see the little wire stairs on the side, also painted in black.  Painting is not the big deal.  Do you see the threads sticking out outside the ship?  If you can't, look inside.  Those were little loops I had to make, and it was a royal pain, let me tell you.  This step was holding me back for the longest time.  When I first did a few, I had them backwards, so I had to re-do them.  Arghh!  It's not easy.  Sometimes the knots would go through the hole and I had to redo it.  It was just a mess.  Solution?  I finally got a glue gun and made the knots bigger and it was very time consuming to get all those loops on the ship.  

Loops done!  Time to put the two parts together and I finally took the leap of faith.  As you'll see, the 2 sides have been glued and are clamped together quite nicely.  The clamping part and all was easy.  Looks like it took 6 clamps.  It's the fear and excitement that I was taking a step forward that made this journey a tad nerve-wrecking.
Here's to the start.  A new direction to the same journey.

This picture on the left, is the second step after gluing the 2 main pieces together.  This forms the cross bracing for the decks that will go over it.  I painted it white as per the directions, but in retrospect, it was a waste of time and paint to do that.  No one is going to be able to see these braces when the ship is all complete.  Why the instructions had me do that?  It's a mystery to me.  Or you can blame it on the French! I don't mean the language, I mean the people.  Their ways are just their ways.  Most certainly doesn't make sense to me

Here's the first deck that was glued on.  It looks simple but I will be repeating myself quite a bit.  It's not simple.  The process has not been intuitive.  The deck had to be bend and pushed to make it settle in place.

Remember the loops and knots I spoke about earlier.  Yeah!  Putting this deck in place meant having to be careful to not displace those loops.  I think I displaced a few and had to re-do them.

On a side note, being a dentist, you would think a 1mm loop should not be a bit deal for me.  I was trained to eye 0.3 mm chamfer margins on a tooth, but this is not about eyeing it.  It's about physically working with it.  Holding it and tweaking it and to be blunt, doing dentistry is easy.  This part is more painstaking.








And here I am painting the bottom of my ship.  Bronze!  How did I pick the colors?  I followed directions!  I know.  Boring!  I do believe the color works though.  If not, I would have changed it.  I don't have all the recent pictures in this blog.  My ship has progressed since I uploaded these pictures, but in my next post about this model, you'll see how I used my judgement on painting!




Look at the pictures on the top and bottom.  You can see the cannons sticking out of the cannon ports.  Do you remember the blog from a few months ago about making cannons?  Well, I finally put them to good use!  I think it looks gorgeous.  So happy about it!






This last picture above is my favorite for this blog post.  Just more complete and shows the most growth.  I promise I have more pictures.  It just takes a while.  It's on my iPhone and I have to send it to my blogger app and then it takes a while to upload.  I prefer to edit on the Macbook itself, so the process takes a while and meanwhile, the ship grows!

Until next time,
TTR