Thanks El Capi, for the suggestion about the heated can...it's a good idea for the strips that you showed being bent (you did a nice job on those). I had already done this part of the build a few weeks ago, and I used a slightly different technique, shown below.
The curved front wall
The front face of the wheelhouse is curved, and the panel is the same 2mm thick 3-ply used for the other walls, so I need to come up with a way to form that curve over a fairly large area of ply that doesn't really like to bend. In the end I found some strong PVC stormwater pipe that had a suitable diameter to form it around. The ply was then soaked for about 20 mins in hot water until I felt it had enough ‘give’ to bend without any splitting or delamination of the ply. While it was soaking, I prepared some covering to go over the ply panel - these are the slats from a PVC venetian blind (recovered when a neighbour was having a clean out) and some tie wire to put some pressure against the panel and pipe.
The laser cut panel was cleaned up prior to bending…
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Soaked and bound to the form…
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It didn’t look pretty while drying, but the next day it came out very close to what I was after. However it was still keen to relax back toward being flat so it needed to have some internal formwork to hold it to the desired curve while it dried completely. The kit comes with a single thin panel to glue in at floor level, but nothing else. They probably assume that you will glue the roof on to provide the upper support, but that doesn’t suit me, so I made up a form from residual 4mm ply from the laser cut sheets. Both of those were used to temporarily hold the curve while the final drying occurred (another day), then later glued-in in their correct locations.
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Close to the final product…
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This panel was then planked and window framed to match the rest of the cabin…
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