Late comer HMS Alert 1777 by Glennb17

I did have to replace quite a few parts of frames along the way. It's tough without any plans. I managed to piece together things that broke and chipped, drew them up in Illustrator, and put them on the laser cutter.
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Here the bottom of the timber had been missing when shipped. I'll admit I knocked several off as well, the run of the grain is unfortunate for those frail sections of the timber.
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chipped from the kit above, new piece below.
 
Fairing time. You can see I had a number of replacement pieces, but I figure the char will just keep me honest on this leg of the project.
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Better...
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you can see one or two lighter or darker pieces where a frame piece was broken, too chipped, or defective. I think it adds character. The important part is no char.
Installing the keelson
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Installing more with fanct little clamps I made with the laser cutter and some M3 screws and wingnuts
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Took a little side trip to the guns. I finally came up with a good way to de-char the trucks from the kit sheet and maintain a round shape. Only one face of the truck remains centric, no matter how careful you are gluing it up, but it's fine.
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More being installed with fancy clamps. To get into some of the cant frames to clamp, I had to pick up some M2 screws and epoxy some nuts into the other side of the clamp. All the clamps were lined with silicon sheeting (because I had it, I'm not taking anything out of the oven with these).
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You might be able to see the bolts I installed in the mast step, keelson scarf joints, and breast pieces. For me, the framing would have been tedious and I like to have fun with these as much as I can (but like death and taxes, no one escape eternal fairing). According to AOS, the bolts are to scale and look proportional. I bought a great big bag of tiny brass nails and blackened them. They work really well for 1"-3/4" bolts at 1/48, but for the life of me, I can't remember where I bought them. I bought some that were close from 4 other vendors, and only one was really right. And I have nail driving pliers that is perfect for them. I knew this was going to happen so I reordered a ton of them right after I figured out they were right. My modelling career might end when that bag is used up, not sure yet.
 
I decided the lower piece wasn't right because the way it was lining up. The guides help, but forward to stern is harder to align. The use of the crossbars didn't become apparent until that stage. I did read ahead, and they did invent something. But I think the old saying should go "necessity is the mother of invention and the appreciation of how it works".
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1 demerit for not reading ahead better. There will be more, I'm sure.

Fancy clamp, a little closer.
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With all the stringers installed, the frames seemed to be stable enough to take out and allow for some fairing.
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I was wrong. I shattered two frames by accident with too rough an abrasive and had to fabricate them on the cutter again. I found many frames that weren't fully glued, so lots of discoveries followed by waiting for glue to dry. Eventually I got it the way I wanted it. Back into the berth.

The dogs have been incarcerated for eating a sanding stick while I worked. Collective punishment is wrong, but I had no idea who did it.
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I can't wait to clean up after them tomorrow.

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glennb17 said:
with the hot weather working in the garage
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LOVELY work!
Too hot in San Diego???? I loved the weather there whenever we could get down there from Orange County, not too hot in the summer, not too cool in the winter and a big plus was the albacore fishing out of H&M landing and the large mouth bass fishing at San Vincente Reservoir. Those were good days :) :)
Allan
 
AllanKP69 said:
LOVELY work!
Too hot in San Diego???? I loved the weather there whenever we could get down there from Orange County, not too hot in the summer, not too cool in the winter and a big plus was the albacore fishing out of H&M landing and the large mouth bass fishing at San Vincente Reservoir. Those were good days :) :)
Allan
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Yes, San Diego is awesome but my garage faces West and by the time I get done with work, it's 90 F in there during our hot weather. It's finally cooled down but still gets pretty warm after hours.
 
It took me a surprising number of hours to get the lower deck beams in, scattered over 2 weeks. It can be tough figuring out a kit manufacturer's solution without a scale drawing, especially those last few stern beams. The posts were an interesting challenge. I put together the planks for the sections of the two deck levels but am waiting to get all the main deck pieces fitted so I can apply finish below with some confidence.

I'm still trying to figure out what parts to use for the steps. The call out is only for the treads and I'm not finding any other callouts for the rest of the instructions for any other steps, so process of elimination is out. If anyone can help, it would be appreciated. I am close to just making something up and hoping it doesn't come back to bite me. I'll reach out to the manufacturer, maybe they have some comments. I can fabricate them without too much trouble, but I should be able to use what came with the kit.
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The main deck is much easier with the drawing and parts callouts, almost not fair. An interestingly, the mid ship parts fit very closely, just a little adjusting. This took about 4 hours. Now all the carlings! That's going to take a while, but it's nice work actually. I like making and cleaning up tiny mortises and such.
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glennb17 said:
It took me a surprising number of hours to get the lower deck beams in, scattered over 2 weeks. It can be tough figuring out a kit manufacturer's solution without a scale drawing, especially those last few stern beams. The posts were an interesting challenge. I put together the planks for the sections of the two deck levels but am waiting to get all the main deck pieces fitted so I can apply finish below with some confidence.

I'm still trying to figure out what parts to use for the steps. The call out is only for the treads and I'm not finding any other callouts for the rest of the instructions for any other steps, so process of elimination is out. If anyone can help, it would be appreciated. I am close to just making something up and hoping it doesn't come back to bite me. I'll reach out to the manufacturer, maybe they have some comments. I can fabricate them without too much trouble, but I should be able to use what came with the kit.
View attachment 474017
The main deck is much easier with the drawing and parts callouts, almost not fair. An interestingly, the mid ship parts fit very closely, just a little adjusting. This took about 4 hours. Now all the carlings! That's going to take a while, but it's nice work actually. I like making and cleaning up tiny mortises and such.
View attachment 474018
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Hi Glenn,

From the top of my head there are 4 steps, one into the powder room from the captains dayroom, one from the tween deck into the hold in the bow, one from the fwd deck onto the tween deck and the last one from the aft deck onto the officers day room.
There should be 2 x 4 different length of side parts of the steps. All the steps are the same and are in thin lasered sheet, you have to tailor fit these for every step.
 
Maarten said:
Hi Glenn,

From the top of my head there are 4 steps, one into the powder room from the captains dayroom, one from the tween deck into the hold in the bow, one from the fwd deck onto the tween deck and the last one from the aft deck onto the officers day room.
There should be 2 x 4 different length of side parts of the steps. All the steps are the same and are in thin lasered sheet, you have to tailor fit these for every step.
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Thank you Maarten, very helpful. I have the AOS book but the kit has had it's share of differences. Plus, the parts are numbered, I just thought there would call outs. With your info, the steps will find a good home.
 
The first row of carlings in the stern were a little touchy, but easier than I thought.
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In cleaning up the mortises on the sides of the carlings, I figured out that all of the sheets with the pattern machined out of them with no part numbers are actually the ledges in raw form. At least I hope they are. It seems strips of cherry would. have been more convenient for all concerned, but maybe they were going the extra mile to make sure you got roughly the same range of coloring of cherry throughout. Who knew?
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This much made for a fun Sunday, mixed with some unavoidable chores. It fell into a rhythm: the beams needed another 1mm cleared on the mortises to fit the carlings. I cut them on the inside for the outer mortises and on the outside of the mortise for the inner joints, always double checking that back-to-back joints on a single beam always looked the same. Since the beams are mounted on the pre-made stringer, almost the carlings fit very nicely. The sternmost took a lot of fiddling and eventually I glued on a tiny piece of scrap to get the carlings to not fall through the mortise that was cut all the way through the beam above the transom. I had to put a small angle on the ends of the carlings here and there because the bottom was meeting the beam a little earlier that the top. Finally, after test fitting a bunch of ledges, I found the mortises on the side of the carlings just needs to be squared off, the ledges typically fit well and don't need to be iteratively tested like you would with the carlings.
Perhaps the best part of the kit for this section is a same scale diagram of the deck pieces, extremely helpful. It would have been helpful to have had that for other portions as well, especially a from above view of the frames. The kit maker made this part of the build fun and confidence building!
 
I cut mortises into the carlings for the ledges to come. Then I took all of the main deck piece out and laid them out the way they were mean to be installed.

I can't hold off on applying finish to the lower decks and the lower inboard portion of the frames. I did a little research in Fine Woodworking (leafed through a recent journal, I'm a cheapskate when it comes to magazine) and found an article on best wood finishes. The finish they recommended #1 that would be appropriate for what we do was polymerized boiled linseed and beeswax. So I bought the brand recommended.
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It looks kind of resinous at first and almost sticky to wipe away, but it didn't cause a problem pulling down llint or brush bristles. I had to get back in and wipe all the cracks and crevices a second time and let it sit 24 hours. Fine Woodworking was right, the finish looks really nice close up. It's not glossy and not dull. And what I've noticed over the last several days is that it's only become more beautiful. Finally, a Top 10 article that yielded something useful..
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After 24 hours
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Everyone has their favorite finish. I like this one a lot and it is available in the States.

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A word about the carlings for this kit. The plan and the parts numbering section of the instructions frequently disagree when you try to match the ledge placements to the scheme.. I was surprised by how frequently they disagreed. I re-labelled all of the parts on the bottom to match the plan and marked which end was foreword.
A number of them were matched to the scheme by lining them up according to the scheme and then correcting for ledge arrangement. Some of this was fixed by rotating a lined up set by 180°,
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You'll figure it out. I just wanted to call it out for those of less experienced builders that expect the instructions to be a single source of truth.. Once you glue the deck pieces in, they will be really hard to get back out in one piece.

This problem becomes pretty confusing when you get to installing the knees. It took me a while to figure out the parts listed as ELxx onthe schematic are actually labelled both DLxx and FLxx in the manual. The number portion seems right so far, but it took me a while to figure it out. Just a heads up. Again, for us with less modelling experience.
 
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