As I near the last stretch of the build, much of the work concentrates on small on board details. I’d been waiting for some time to erect the ships masts. Once again, as this is an “Admiralty” model, it’s not fully rigged, but rather supports partial masts.
The fore and main masts are 13mm dowels, with the mizzen slightly smaller. Each mast is fitted with a set of either four or six cleats. I had a handful of cleats left over from another project, so it gave me a chance to use my snazzy new airbrush. Worked pretty well, except they all needed to be taped down – after my first attempt at ‘airbrushing’ blew them all off the counter and had me on my hands and knees picking cleats up off the floor. The color was a combination of Vallejo Airbrush colors light brown and yellow ochre.
In order to get the cleats properly spaced, I used a thin strip of masking tape to measure the exact diameter of the dowel (after I did a little smoothing/sanding). I laid that strip onto my ruler, then equally divided it by the number of cleats needed. I then reapplied the tape to the mast, drilled the holes appropriately, and mounted the cleats.
Each mast is also fitted with wooldings. Once again, the instructions call for heavy cardstock to simulate the wooldings, I decided to manufacture some using the extra laster cut mast bases.
Each mast base was split into two pieces down the middle – which required some very, very delicate cutting. They weren’t perfectly even, but close enough to sand down to get even with the wrapped heavy rigging.
I also took this as a random opportunity to remount the rudder and rudder chains.
The Lehman Shipyard 