La Toulonnaise-Billing boats-1:50 build by runold

[Runold]

Hello everybody!
The story started as a friend of mine discovered a wooden set for La Toulonnaise from Billing Boats, which he got as a present from his colleagues as he changed job (probably 1993). He was an ex sailor from German Navy, likes the sea and ships of all kind, but not relations to modell building. I got it to build it and unfortunately there was a fitting set missing. So I mailed to about 25 German distributors, if there were a fitting set 483 from Billing Boats somewere in their stock. All of them answered that it is not available, but one was willing to sell it together with the original kit (170€). Than I used "Kleinanzeigen" and two weeks later I got an offer of the set which ends up in about 36€.
This was the start at 3rd of Oktober, where I inserted the keel to a "slipway"

 

[Runold]

Next step was inserting the frames, which were seperated on the keel by small strips of differrent length. Remembering a lot of problems of fitting the deck building CUX87 last year, I cutted the decks and tried to adjust the frames. But two of them seemed to leave rectengular position. The mistake was the building description, wich says forut times strips of 37 mm twice 39 mm and than again 37 mm and so on. But deck and 1:1 drawing shows twice 37, twice 39 followed by several 37 mm strips. After changing that, I glued all frames in one step and adjusted them at the bottom by the keel strips and at the top with the deck.

 

[Runold]

After glueing the deck, I am now working on planking the hull. The hull stripes 1,8 * 7,0 mm are long enough to cover the whole hull length.
Most difficult is the stern with the second plank. The first is vertical at the end, but the second has to turn from vertical to horizontal from the last frame to the stern, which is only about 40 mm distance (see first picture). I took warm water and painted the plank several times to bend without breaking it. Also learned from previous CUX-build I took water resistant Ponal (last year I wondered why planks loosened again after glueing with classic Ponal)

 

[Papatotalos]

So far nice job Runold.