Hello!
Blog post 69 this week. Nice!
I have started with Fram's sails. This is, once again, something I've never done before, and it takes a bit getting used to.
To start with, I made some black tea in a plastic box. I left the tea to cool off, then soaked the sails for 30-ish minutes.
The tea bag is just for the photo. I removed it immediately after taking it to prevent a big stain directly underneath it...
After some 30 minutes the sails were removed, wrung out and left to dry on a paper towel.
Compare with the pic I took of the unweathered sails from last week, and you can see a big difference:
Once the sails were dry, I could start adding them to the ship. There are two square-rigged sails on the foremast. The rest will be rigged fore-and-aft. For both of these rigging types, the sail needs to be woven with 0.15 thread around the yardarm, taking care not to snag any of the many many other ropes already present. I had to pull out and restart some weavings a few times after I'd noticed I went around footropes or running rigging. With a little care and attention it worked out in the end. The rigging behind the sails and around the mast is now very very busy indeed:
All these ropes are leading down to the deck, to be tied off to belaying pins, with a bit of leftover looped around it. Some of these are already difficult to access, so I'm now very much following the recommended order of rigging.
Both square sails are done:
It's now time to attach the staysails; these are fore-and-aft rigged sails hanging from standing rigging instead of yards. So instead of looping rope around a yard, these are attached with small rings to the rope:
I managed to attach the sail and run the running ropes through the shackle blocks, but haven't fixed the ropes to the pins yet. There are 4 of these bowsprit sails going on the 4 dark ropes (one is hidden behind the already installed sail), so they overlap quite a bit...
So that's the main task this week: rigging sails.
On the Bf108 front, I've fixed the wings: the gaps in the wing roots are filled, but the nose top popped open again, so I had to redo that one as well:
I managed to reduce the step on the bottom by bending the belly part a bit while the glue dried. Still needs some filling and sanding, and rescribing panel lines:
Finally, I stuck the paint masks on the canopy. They're a very tight fit without much tolerance, so they need to go on perfectly:
I dry-fitted it on the plane and it's not a very good fit. Will need some persuading to sit nice and level...
Thursday is Labor Day; Modelist will be closed on that day. Friday back to regular hours.
That's it.
See you next week!
