HI all, the following will be a few pics of my progress of my Victoria Class 1/50. I have made many errors along the way and i'm sure i will continue, not a bad thing if i learn from them. This project was started about 5 years ago, lifes curveballs had taken me off of this project but i finally got back into the build.
When i dropped this build i had made a foam master "With Errors" and made a glass mold from it "my process wasn't the greatest and is why i am fixing so many faults now, Oh well live and learn", i had made a upper and lower hull and cut the bow section off and was ready to glass this in place. i have no photos of the above process as it was so long ago. the following pics will start from a point where the upper bow section is glassed on onward. Hope you enjoy watching me correct many errors.
In the pic below i have added metal strips to the joint between the bow section and mid section to aid line up, i have also added some back aft to hold the aft section when i cut and glass the aft section on. the first major error was the line between upper and lower hull "mold issues" and that the hull wasn't perfectly straight.
i had to find a way to fill this gap and correct the lines in the hull at this point. What i came up with was a set of rails, this rails would serve 3 proposes, 1- give me a backing for filler, 2- give me a hard point correct the hull "push/pull from" 3- able me to put location keys between the upper and lower halfs.
Here i am adding the first of the rails, cutting the stiffeners to recieve the rails, after all the rails were in and semi lined up i worked on the keys, for the keys i used parts from old valves that fit nicely together and had a small tapered section on them.
The rails are going to be glassed in but only after the aft section was cut and glassed to the lower section encase adjustments were needed. they are tacked with CA at this point.
Now the rails are sort of in position it's time to layout the aft cut line.
i found the top point of where i wanted to make the cut and pointed the line a couple mm to the midship figuring that a true straight line would possibly give my grief later with removing and replacing the upper section to get inside.
With aft section cut it was time to temporarily fix it in place and glass it on.
With the aft section glassed in it was time to glass the rails in and start filling some gaps with filler.
With this done i decided to start work on the keel, a rough glass keel was in place but it needed some touch-up.
While laying out the keel with the aid of a few big squares and a lazer i noticed the bow and aft section had some profile defects so i was set to correct them as much as i could, i have the profile of the frames and frame lengths so i cut some metal strips to match the proper profile and filled the areas needing adjustment, i did this per frame as it would give my at least one point per frame that was correct and i filled in between. it wasn't the whole hull that needed work but the forward section and a small section in the aft had to be adjusted.
With that done it was time to give it a good sanding and give it it's first primer coat so i can see the minor defects and start some layout of major details.