Disaster and Recovery
Posted By Russ Emerson on February 17, 2010 at 11:01 am
It was bound to happen.
While working on the ship model a few days ago, I had to make an urgent run off to the little engineers’ room for an urgent call of nature. Being in something of a rush, I left the model unprotected.
Kismet took advantage of my hurried departure, and in the two or three minutes I was away, managed to chew off the jibboom.
It was bound to happen.
After I was finished decrementing Kismet’s remaining lives from nine to eight, I set about repairing the damage. If I were trying to make a perfect scale replica, I’d trash the part and rebuild it from scratch. However, as this is my first model, and a learning exercise, I opted to graft on a passable replacement.
From squinting distance, no one will ever know. Except me.
I’ve begun the rigging, too. The books all say that a builder ought to work from bow to stern and from the centerline out, so I began with the patched jibboom and bowsprit.
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This is tiny work, particularly for one with hands and fingers as large as mine, so most of the time I handle the rigging, I use tweezers. To give you an idea how small we’re talking about here, the round deadeyes seen below are just 5mm, or 1/5″ across.
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(Yes, they’re meant to be unevenly spaced. The front three are for the shrouds, the back two are for the backstays.)
Patience, good light, magnification, and a steady hand are all really useful, as is a lack of interruption, particularly of the four-footed furry variety.
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