Contrary to my last project this hull was a nice and most of all easy piece of work and as soon as the main deck was installed I could start the detail work. I started with the forecastle deck, the anchor winch and the hawse pipes. The forward 3”50 calibre deck gun station and some other small details were build and assembled pretty easy and fast. Most of these parts were made of plastic sheet and wood. I really like to work with wood and so I made all those chocks and bitts of solid wood and after some trial and error this work went pretty fast and those parts looked as good as the one you can buy! All these parts were already fixed to the entire hull and the next step was to start the work on the superstructure itself. For this I used the plans which I had got from Floating Drydock as well as other plans which I was able to find on the Internet. The first level of the superstructure was made entirely of plastic sheet, details like handrails were made of solder wire, doors were casted from a master and various pipes were made of solder wire again. Some self made PE parts were used for vent’s and other detail’s. Little storage rack’s, vegetable locker’s and ladder’s were added and several other details like fire hoses, cable reel’s and hatches were made of plastic sheet and some other material’s.

It is not unusual for me to “jump” from one part of a ship to another totally different part. So after finishing this level of the bridge, I made the prop guard’s and some final arrangement’s to some other details at the stern of the ship. But once again I had to go back to the superstructure so I started the work on the so called Navigational bridge which is 1 level beneath the open bridge on this kind of ship. Actually this is a pretty simple structure and was pretty easy to make. On top of this comes the perhaps most interesting but also most demanding part of the entire ship, the open bridge! I was able to find some good pictures of this part and it soon turned out that this would require a lot of attention to make the open bridge a real eye catcher. I started with the raised platform made of PE parts as well as some plastic sheet. In front of that is the “dash-board” with several instruments, phone boxes and other equipment. This is a separate part which was entirely build with the help of several photos and finally attached and fixed inside the bridge. Even without any colour it looked already pretty interesting. The number of details on this bridge level was simply overwhelming the target designator, a Pelorus, a capstan, 2 deck chair’s with foot rail’s and several other things like the sky-lookout’s on the wings at both sides were added and there were still a few more details to add. Finally the whole thing started to look exactly the way I wanted it!

Another thing which I got from WEM were the 3” 50 calibre deck gun’s as well as the 40mm Bofor’s. The Hedgehog came from Sirmar. The 20mm Oerlikon’s came from Sirmar as well, but I finally decided against them, because I thought (and I could) do them somewhat better. The 3” deck gun from WEM is a pretty good resin kit with some PE parts but it is the version which was used on submarines. The DE’s used a version which could be trained by electrical motors and looked somewhat different. So I had to add a few more details and once again it turned out that some of my self made PE parts are simply better than the already pretty good one from WEM so I used them too! The same is for the Bofor gun’s which were enhanced with a few more details and some of my PE parts.