Painting and Installing the Transom Pt.1

Using the instruction sheet as a guide, I started painting the transom by painting all the raised surfaces first. After the paint dried I painted the flat brown hull color to the lower part of the transom and Camouflage gray to the upper part.

Forecastle

First, the beakhead bulkhead ( don't we just love this termanology) was painted and cemented in place.

The carriages for the cannons were painted dark brown. A bronze look for the cannon barrels was achieved by painting them dark brown and dry brushing with Testors copper. Super glue was used to cement them in place in the forecastle and the bulkhead and deck were cemented in place with liquid cement.

Installing the Main Deck

I painted the main deck Model Master Flat Dark Tan and dragged a dark Umber prisma color pencil over it to highlight the wood grain. After assembling the other parts of the deck, I fitted the deck in place inside the hull and cemented it with liquid cement. Masking tape was used to make the bow and stern of the hull conform to the deck profile.

The Hull Pt.4

The center parts of the hull were attached with liquid cement. I began painting the hull exterior with Testors Flat Brown and the interior with Model Master Flat Insignia Red. To get a wood grain look to the hull planking, I dragged a dark brown prismacolor pencil over the flat brown after it dried. Using the nut I attached to the bottom and a screw, the model was fixed to a piece of balsa to make handling easier. The threads from the holes in the hull look like they could be a major pain for the rest of the assembly so I pulled them taught and taped them to the bottom of the balsa board to get them out of the way for the time being. According to the instruction sheet, the top sections of freeboard are to be painted white. In cases like this I prefer to use Camouflage Gray instead. On relatively small models like this one, white looks very bright and stark. I think the camo gray looks more "in scale".

The Hull Pt.3

After tracing the outline of the hull onto a piece of .020" sheet styrene, I cemented it to the hull using liquid plastic cement. The stern piece is only installed temporarily to give the hull the correct profile and will be removed, therefore it's important to keep cement away from it. A few hours later, when the cement has dried, I trimmed away the excess styrene and sanded the bottom to the hull profile. For extra strength I applied a filet of 5 minute epoxy around the inner joint and added a nut for attaching the model to its' stand.