I abandoned my first attempt at the life raft container after realising that the plastic waste pipe that I had used was far too large in diameter to be realistically ‘scale’ so I went about looking for some other tube of a more appropriate size.
Fortunately the answer was almost staring me in the face in the form of one of the cardboard tubes I use to store some of my styrene extrusions and brass collection.😀
This 30mm cardboard tube is perfect for my needs so I carved off a bit from my improvised storage tubes and ‘wrapped’ it with a thin veneer of .25mm Plasticard sheet to give it a better surface for further detailing and a good base for painting.

The tube was then cut to length and some balsa end pieces laminated together and glued into the ends which were then shaped with files and abrasive paper to a domed profile before being given several coats of epoxy finishing resin to smooth and seal the grain.
I added strips of half-round and flat Plasticard to simulate the opening edges of the container and the banding around the circumference and after a smoothing off with fine abrasive this piece was primed ready for painting.

The container is retained on a support structure and this was made from some 3mm Plasticard by drilling a 30mm diameter hole through a single sheet with a step cutter and then cutting that into two equal parts. These were then temporarily ‘pegged’ together with a bit of Plasticard rod so that I could work on the shaping of them knowing that they would both be identical.
These two supports were then fixed to some feet and bracing pieces fitted between both to add strength and rigidity and to provide a means of fixing the part to the cabin structure.
This was also primed and then sprayed, along with the container piece, with some Halfords ‘Appliance White’ gloss.

The ‘checkerplate’ front panel was made separately in two parts, the first is a backing piece 1.5mm thick cut to the correct size and shape onto which I laminated a piece of .5mm embossed ‘checkerplate’ styrene sheet.
This stuff is made by ‘Slaters’ and is usually used for architectural modelling and by locomotive model builders but is ideal for my purposes too.

This part was then sprayed silver and when all the painting was dry and hardened the checkerplate panel was fixed to the supports. The contained drops neatly into the support and is almost a perfect friction fit but I will join the two pieces with a couple of spots of CA glue.

A single screw will hold this Life Raft Container assembly to the cabin through the underside of the deck and will be fixed in place at final assembly.

The mast presents a particular challenge in that I can’t actually make it to the correct scale height. This is because I don’t want it to be a de-mountable item as it will have a LED navigation light at the top with the associated wires, some rigging with stays and flags but mostly because the large plastic storage box that I have bought for it doesn’t quite have sufficient internal height for a ‘scale height’ mast. 😠

After careful measurement of the boat in the box, supported by the minimum amount of foam supports underneath (and after reducing the length of the rudder slightly too), it is apparent that the mast must not exceed 95mm above the roof of the cabin.
Having reminded myself that this model is not to true scale anyway and only a representation of the actual craft I can justify using ‘modellers licence’, or ‘creative liberties’ as I’ve seen it described elsewhere, and the only person I have to justify it to is myself.
It also appears that the four pilot boats that operate in Southampton Water all have slightly differing mast and antenna configurations and the ‘Hamstead’ boat has a simplistic one which will be a bit easier for me to model.

So with this in mind I began by cutting some 6mm diameter brass tube to the required height plus enough to go through the roof and the ply reinforcing pieces that I installed earlier in the construction of the cabin.

At the very top of the mast is an antenna which would add another 60mm or so to the mast height so I decided to make it easily de-mountable by virtue of some tiny 2mm x 4mm neodymium rod magnets. Minute little things but incredibly powerful for their size!

The antenna base is formed from some brass sheet drilled out to 6mm for the mast and 4mm for the short brass tube that holds one of the magnets, these were silver soldered together for strength.
A cross piece was also fitted into holes drilled through the mast, this was also silver soldered and then bent to shape and trimmed and some fine brass wire loops soft soldered to the ends to which some rigging ropes will attach for the flags and pennants. Some Plasticard reinforcing fillets were shaped and glued to this cross piece too.

Also at the top of the mast is a white ‘dustbin’ thing (technical term 😆) I’ve no idea what it’s for but I made that from some white plastic rod with some thin strips of banding around it
The white ‘thing’ ,and all of the mast lights, are held in place with some 1mm brass rod bent to shape to form support brackets and all are soft soldered into holes drilled through the mast tube.

The 360 degree white navigation light at the top was made from a 3mm white LED inside a commercially made clear navigation light lens fitting, conveniently also 6mm in diameter to match the mast. Some miniature wires were soldered to the LED and sleeved with heat shrink tube.
At the base of the mast the 6mm brass tube goes into a short piece of 7mm tube and then through an 8mm brass porthole that acts as a mounting flange to seat the mast onto the cabin roof.
When all of the brass-work was completed I gave it a light coat of etch primer and then a couple of coats of matt black. I made the false navigation lights from some styrene rod and these are just painted to simulate the colours of the lights.
I did consider making these ‘active’ with some micro LED’s but there is actually a limit to my dexterity and patience!! 🤓

After testing the LED the wires of the top navigation light were passed down the inside of the mast and the lens unit glued in place with some canopy glue, which will hold it firmly but could be easily removed if required. The top of this light was given a ‘dot’ of black paint just to complete the effect.

The antenna is just made up from some 2mm styrene rod and tube and the magnets are a good fit inside the 3mm dia tube but glued anyway. The small magnetic base magnet was glued into the brass tube at the top of the mast and the antenna very neatly ‘snaps’ into place as the magnets meet as you can see in the video clip.

I’ll fit the mast in the final stages of completing the cabin.

Now…onto the Radar unit !😎

The radar unit is something that deserves to be made as a ‘dynamic’ feature rather than a static fixture and Simon (Skydive130) showed the way forward on this and set the bar quite high too!.
Determined to at least match his efforts I set about making my own. The first consideration was whether to build it around a micro servo modified for continuous rotation, or concoct my own motor and gearbox solution or buy something ready-made. I opted for the latter as it was readily available and quite well engineered (but not inexpensive!)
https://www.mr-rcworld.co.uk/shop/radar-motor-gearbox/

It consists of a small DC motor coupled to a gearbox and controlled by a small circuit board that enables it to be connected to and be powered from the receiver, which means it can be switched on and off using an auxiliary radio channel.
The small PCB also has a variable pot to allow adjustment of the rotational speed.

Fortunately the ‘Furuno’ radar units fitted to the pilot boats are quite common and some very useful specifications and dimensional drawings can be found on the manufacturer’s website which makes life a little bit easier.

The radar unit ‘scanner’ bar was made first by laminating some square styrene bar and some half-round profiles to form the basic shape which was then worked with files and abrasives to the right shape and then some end caps were fitted to this after cutting the bar to length.
I found a useful little splined brass collar on RB Models website which is perfect for the attachment of the scanner bar to the drive shaft with a grub screw fixing. This collar was set into the underside of the scanner on a rectangular fixing plate with a styrene collar to conceal it. Some styrene hex bar was used to simulate the fixing bolt heads.

The main supporting pillar ‘bearing’ was made up from a combination of brass tube, styrene tubes and brass rod with a brass porthole at the base to simulate the roof mounting flange. The 2mm brass rod at the centre of this piece was threaded at the bottom end to mate with a short piece of 3mm brass tube onto which I silver soldered a 2mm brass nut which I reduced down to the diameter of the tube.
This short tube fits over the motor/gearbox output drive shaft and it will allow me to separate the drive shaft from the motor and so very much simplify the final fitting and adjustment. This brass adaptor tube was epoxied over the drive shaft and after a quick test this shaft proved to be a very smooth and free running within the support pillar bearing.

The unit at the top of the pillar is the motor unit on the real thing, and this was made from some obeche square section wood laminated together and the drilled centrally to accept the supporting pillar.

This obeche wood was then formed to approximately the right shape by carving and filing and adding some very thin Plasticard overlays to finish it off.

When I was happy with the shape of this motor housing I sealed and primed the wood and finished it with a coat of white gloss, the scanner bar was also sealed and painted in the same way. This pillar and the motor unit were glued together and I then added a square mounting flange made from some Plasticard sheet and finished with some more simulated bolts. After a final overall coating of gloss white I painted the pillar below the square flange with some silver paint.
I had previously made some waterslide transfers of the Furuno logo and this was applied to the face of the scanner bar and really makes the part look authentic.

I assembled all of these bits together to test and found that a .25mm PTFE ‘shim’ between the top of the drive shaft and scanner bar greatly improved the rotational smoothness. The next thing to do was drill the cabin roof to take the pillar, the lower part of which extends below the mounting flange and passes through the roof to be flush with the underside of the roof panel.
The motor and gearbox unit was slightly modified with a brass tube spacer between the mounting flanges to add strength for the screw fixing and some neoprene ‘pads’ applied to form a resilient interface between the gearbox and the cabin roof so that the unit has a bit of ‘give’ rather than be rigidly fixed.
The 2mm brass central drive shaft was then fitted by screwing this down through the bearing into the threaded gearbox adaptor and the scanner bar fixed to the top of the shaft with the grub screw (not forgetting to add the shim in between). Fortunately I got all of the measurement right so I didn’t need to adjust the length of the drive shaft.

The whole assembly was then given a final bench test using a 1.5v battery to run the motor and it works really well and is also fairly quiet in operation too. Satisfied that all was well the mounting pillar was temporarily set into the hole in the roof and the motor/gear box and output drive shaft centralised in the pillar bearing so that the fixing holes in the gearbox could be marked and drilled. With this in place the scanner bar was fitted and secured with the grub screw and the whole unit tested again to check that there was no additional friction that would affect the rotation.
Happily all was well, and satisfied that it worked as intended and also looked fairly authentic I then removed it all and set it aside ready to be fitted in the final assembly of the cabin.

The main deck area has already had two coats of Halfords textured green paint and the colour is very nearly the shade I was looking to reproduce. After a lot of fruitless research on the actual colour used on the real boat decks and some useful suggestions here I decided that ‘Emerald Green’ was the closest match to the colour I want.
After a lot of consideration and a small cash injection to my budget I ordered a can of custom mixed spray paint in RAL6001, Emerald Green, from a company I’d used several times previously.
The plan was to overspray the Halfords texture with a light finishing coat in the new colour, and the satin finish option was chosen so that I might not need to overcoat that with a lacquer.
The paint arrived a few days later and so I did a spray test on a piece of scrap and noted that the colour was quite a few shades lighter that I was expecting. Thinking that I just needed to mix it a bit more thoroughly in the rattle can I carried on a masked up just the fore deck and rear section of the inner deck which was just in grey primer coat and sprayed two coats of the Halfords paint to apply the texture and then after a few hours of drying time I sprayed a light coat of the ‘Emerald Green’ satin finish.

What a major disappointment 😡
The RAL 6001 is still not giving me the colour I was expecting so I decided that on balance I was better off just going with the Halfords green and lacquering that with a satin finish. Unfortunately there was insufficient Halfords green to re-spray the areas so I had to venture out and buy a new can of the Halfords green and a can of satin lacquer. ☹️

This new can was used to go over the fore and aft inner deck areas and to my dismay it turned out a completely different shade to the main deck area which was sprayed with the first can of Halfords green.
Time for another think and a new spray test.

The test piece can be seen in the picture with the paints identified by text.

I concluded that the Halfords paint was a completely different batch mix so It meant that I had to re-spray the main deck again from the new can. 😠

So…mask everything up all over again, hull and inner deck..…into the spray booth…two coats over everything….leave to dry…..two light coats of satin lacquer…. and cross my fingers.🤞
Amazingly the new Halfords colour with an overspray of satin lacquer rendered pretty much the exact shade of green I was after all along so my disappointment was tempered somewhat by this happy conclusion. The colour is very satisfactory and texture has been preserved by the light coats of lacquer 😀

The question remains whether the custom mixed RAL6001 ‘Emerald Green’ had been badly concocted in the pigment mixing or my colour perception is way off, and should I take the matter up with the supplier? 🤔

I’ll most likely put it down to experience but it has set me back by quite a few days and at the cost of quite a few beers.

Still,….. onwards and upwards!! 😁
The next bit is electrics which I feel much more at home with than painting. 😎

I wasn’t going to paint the battery box, motor mount and servo mount but after remembering a previous comment (thanks Martin555 👍) I decided to spray them silver to match the hull interior so I can now install all of the electrics and running gear into the boat.

First I needed to make a switch and fuse panel as the foundation for the wiring harness but rather than using ply I thought I’d make it out of some 3mm Plasticard.
After making a rough sketch of the layout for sizing I began scoring and snapping the styrene to size and shape and very quickly produced a strong mounting bracket.

I think it would have taken considerably longer to make this out of ply so I’m quickly gaining an appreciation for the use of styrene as it’s so easy to cut, drill and form, the aperture for the fuse-holder was made by chain drilling and filing and took only minutes to form 👍😁

After a coat of primer and two of silver spray the bracket was ready to take the fittings.
I found a power switch of suitable rating with a built-in red LED on the toggle that looked useful but requires a –ve return to the battery to operate.
Now I wouldn’t ordinarily mix +ve and –ve on the same pole of a switch for safety reasons, if the internal switching contacts were to fail and short over, but it should be fine…and that’s what the fuse, an ordinary automotive type, is in circuit for anyway.

The wiring is the usual 14AWG silicone insulated type with either spade connectors or direct soldering to the components with heat shrink covering all the connections and forming the loom. The battery connectors are my preferred XT60 type and the ESC to motor connections are MT60 types.

I installed the motor and prop-shaft, initially with a rigid coupler, and when I was happy with the alignment I replaced it with a heavy duty rubber coupled type. The shaft lubrication is by a plastic clamp ‘oiler’ adaptor clamped to the shaft and drilled through. A short silicone tube extends from the oiler clamp up through the switch and fuse panel with a plastic rod ‘stopper’ in the end of the tube.

The ESC is fixed into the hull on a couple of large cable tie bases with some rigid foam between the tie bases and ESC to cushion it slightly and two cable ties hold it firmly in place. The silicone tubing for the ESC cooling circuit was ‘plumbed-in’ and the tubes supported and retained by some more cable ties and all the connections secured with some spring retaining clips.
The 500mAH 3S battery fits comfortably in the battery tray between two foam packing pieces and I’ll have a battery monitoring alarm connected to the balance connector while in use. I’ll select the correct fuse rating after some initial test runs with a watt-meter in circuit but for now I’ve fitted a 30A fuse.
The 6 channel receiver was then fixed in the hull with some double-sided foam tape and the dipole antennas set at 90 degrees to each other and held in some styrene tube, one on the hull side and one on a bulkhead.

I installed the rudder servo, a standard Futaba type, and made a short linkage with ball joints at each end and set it to give approximately 30 degrees throw either side.

That completes the main electrics for the boat but there will be some additional wiring and switching for the lighting circuits and the radar unit that I’ll describe in another update 😎

These pilot boats have to very fast and also need a strong hull to cope with heavy seas and in that respect are no different to a Lifeboat however they are also required to be able to ‘bump’ the sides of all vessels large and small and stay in physical contact while the pilots board and disembark on rope boarding ladders and the like.

Without some serious protection to the hull a pilot boat would not be to be able to withstand the heavy impacts and forces involved and thus are a conspicuous feature of pilot boats.

The rubber fenders on the Southampton pilot boats protect the hull all around at deck level and also on the hull sides and on the SLEC model they are represented by a 1.5mm plywood lattice that is just glued to the hull sides, however this can be considerably improved to look more realistic by the use of some readily available ‘D’ shaped neoprene rubber extrusions.

When I was adding the gunwale strakes around the hull much earlier in the construction I opted to use a much wider Obeche strip than the ones supplied so that I could use some 10mm wide neoprene extrusions as fenders. The supplied plywood lattice strips were all just over 6mm wide and thus suitable for use with a 6mm wide neoprene extrusion.

Bought as a model making accessory these extrusions are quite expensive however the very same extrusions are available from manufacturers who produce them for the automotive trade. Mine came from a company called ‘Seals Direct’ who produce these extrusions in a great variety of sizes and profiles and I ordered several metres of 10mm and 6mm ‘D’ profile for considerably less than the ‘model shop’ equivalent.

They also have an eBay shop but the prices there are much more than their own website prices, so I won’t post a link to that!😇

The next thing I had to consider was how to permanently fix them to the hull and for that I found some very thin double sided tape with very strong adhesive properties. 😁This was conveniently available in 6mm and 9mm widths from an eBay seller so I bought two 5 metre rolls of each, more than sufficient for some experimentation before actual use.

After conducting some tests I found that the double sided tape worked very well with the neoprene and importantly allowed a degree of adjustment by unsticking and reapplication to get the positioning absolutely right. The rubber can also be glued together with regular cyano and bonds really well so the joints between vertical and horizontal strips on the sides will be very strong.

I began by applying the tape to the side lattice pieces and sticking the 6mm wide rubber on the horizontal lengths and then filling in with the vertical pieces. Where the strips meet I cut the ends of the vertical pieces at an angle to follow the contour of the horizontal strip to form a gapless join and then used a light smear of cyano to fix the parts together. The cyano was also used to seal the open cut ends of the rubber after I had rounded them to form a neat end.

The 6mm rubber was also extended from the hull sides to the stern and I used cyano to fix these pieces as the 90 degree bend could potentially prove too much for double sided tape over time.
The 10mm rubber fender was fixed around the deck but I had to abrade the surface first to remove a small ridge left after the masking and spraying of the deck finishes and this left a nice flat surface for the double sided tape. This fender goes around the deck in a single piece and is joined together with cyano at the stern.
I fixed some extra 10mm rubber to the sides at the front over the yellow painted areas as can be seen on the real boats. I think these extra fenders are there as that part of the hull is probably the first point of contact between the pilot boat and a big ship like a super-tanker and so needs to be ‘beefed-up‘ a bit.

Finally I fitted some extra bits of wide rubber to the stern just to fill in an awkward looking gap just below the gunwale rubber.

That’s the hull completed, it just remains to finish off the cabin and engine room with all of the fixtures and fittings, including the windows and handrails which I’ve put off to almost last.

Had I not decided to abandon building the superstructure supplied with the SLEC kit and build my own version I would have probably only fitted just the regular port and starboard navigation lights with LED’s or perhaps not even bothered at all and made them as painted dummy lights.

However the new superstructure, modelled on the Southampton Pilots Boats fleet, is an ideal candidate for a far more adventurous lighting arrangement. One feature of which is the deck level floodlights which I described the ‘making of’ in an earlier blog update.
Then there are the mast lights and the roof nav lights and two roof mounted searchlights. A good feature is to have all of these lights remotely switched and that means using some R/C controlled switches and a distribution board to accommodate the switching circuits and the current limiting resistors.
I did this previously on my RAF Crash Rescue Tender project and the circuit design is very simple and was ‘hand drawn’ but for this Pilot Boat I decided to use some freely available CAD software specifically developed for prototyping circuits using industry standard ‘Veroboard’.

VeeCad is one of those programmes that are very intuitive to use and after installing it on my PC I was able to draw up the circuits required complete with component designations and values. I was also able to test and verify the circuit design within the software too.

When I was happy with the design I printed out the Veroboard layout and working from the drawing very quickly built the circuit board with all the wire links, track breaks, resistors and connectors.
The switch panel was made from 3mm Plasticard in the same fashion as the main power and fuse panel and incorporates a fuse holder, power switch and a multi-pin ‘D’ connector for the 10 way ribbon cable connection to the distribution board. The fuse will only need to be no more than 250mA at most and is incorporated more as a convenient connection for the +ve supply to the three RC switches.

The Turnigy switches for the three lighting circuits are located in the hull of the model and are connected to the receiver and only the switched +ve outputs of the switches connect through the ribbon cable to the distribution board so only 6 connections through the ribbon are actually needed although the three lighting circuits use some doubled up unused cores in the ribbon just to improve the current capability.
There is a 7th connection which joins the lighting circuit –ve battery supply to the receiver –ve battery supply for the electronic switches to work properly.
At the time of writing I’m still trying to obtain the third RC switch but I have included the wiring for this in the loom.

The ribbon cable also carries the supply from the radar controller PCB to the radar motor in the cabin roof and this breaks out from the distribution board on a separate connector.

The cable is anchored to the circuit board using a brass link on a redundant circuit strip and so doesn’t rely on the soldered connections of the ribbon for security and it's long enough for the cabin to be detached from the hull and laid alongside without needing to be unplugged.

All of the lighting circuits are supplied from a separate 6V NiMh battery pack with XT60 connectors although in the photos I’m using some regular dry cells for testing while I await the required battery pack to arrive on the slow boat from China!☹️

I also need to replace the 6ch Turnigy i6 receiver with a Turnigy 10 channel one so that I am able to assign the four transmitter switches to aux channels for the three lighting circuits and the radar circuit too.

The distribution board was fixed into the roof of the cabin using cable tie bases as mounting points and the board secured in place with long cable ties. The board was positioned to allow easy access to the edge connectors to which all the wiring to the LED’s are connected.

The installation of the lighting will be completed in the final assembly of the cabin.

Along with the radar unit the cabin roof is adorned with a number of other antennas which are presumably for communications, global positioning or other such purposes.

I chose to make the three vertical antennas removable in the same way as the antenna on top of the mast by the use of some very small magnets.

The antennas are made from some styrene rod and short pieces of tube at the base that has the 2mm neodymium magnet inside. The matching antenna base is made from various sizes of styrene tube to produce a socket with a mounting flange which houses the other magnet.

All three antennas have the magnets in the same polarisation so can be fitted into any socket while the antenna on top of the mast, which is a different length, has an opposite polarisation so it can’t be fitted to the roof. These antennas were primed and painted with white gloss with the bases all in silver.

There are a pair of very short antennas on the back of the roof which, I think, are for GPS functions and these were also made from various pieces of styrene rod and tube with the ends ‘turned’ in my makeshift drill chuck ‘lathe’. These are also painted white and silver.

The cabin roof navigation lights are simply some 7mm styrene tubing capped at one end and ‘turned’ in a drill chuck to apply a bevel and a slot filed into it for a 5mm LED that has had the top filed flat and the body ‘frosted’ with abrasive paper. The light fitting was painted matt black before the LED was epoxied inside and the wires soldered and insulated. The recesses in the cabin roof were drilled to accept the wires and then painted satin black so that the lights can be simply epoxied in place during final assembly of the cabin. 😁

The two roof mounted searchlights form part of the lighting system and I although I had considered buying some ready-made ones the effort involved in converting them to LED operation I didn’t think was worthwhile.

After some success scratch-building some other detailing in styrene I chose to make my own 😊.

The basic construction is some 10mm diameter styrene tube capped with some 3mm sheet which I ‘turned’ in a drill chuck to produce the domed end of the searchlight.
I had to temporarily fit a short piece of 8mm styrene rod to the inside first to act as a mandrel. I also put a short styrene strip on the top of the light and blended this into the domed rear.

The support for the searchlight was made from various diameters of styrene tube and had to incorporate a bevelled base so that the light could be fitted into the sloping roof to be vertical.
I mounted a 3mm ‘flat top’ white LED onto an 8mm disc, snipped the leads as short as possible and soldered the wires to them. The back of this disc was then painted black along with the back portion of the light fitting interior. After testing the LED I fed the wires through the mounting tube and glued the LED disc into the fitting.
I masked off the LED with a short length of styrene tube and then sprayed the searchlight with a couple of coats of silver paint and one gloss lacquer to try to simulate a chrome finish.
Just for a little more realism and optical efficiency I found some silver metallised polyester film from some packaging material and made an 8mm diameter ‘reflector’ and used a hole punch to make a 3mm hole to fit around the LED and glued it in place with some canopy glue.

The front lens of the searchlight is actually an 8mm acrylic ‘window’ from a brass porthole fitting that I had left over from another project and these were glued into the front with canopy glue too.

The sloping cabin roof was carefully drilled with a vertical hole and the lights tried for fit and I have arranged the bevelled bases so that the two searchlights are aimed slightly to port and starboard rather than both dead ahead. The wires will routed down from the roof interior along with all the others and terminate on the lighting distribution board that I described earlier.

The finished searchlights don’t produce a narrow focussed beam but they are very bright 😎 and they do look quite like searchlights. Along with all the other fittings this will be added to the cabin in a final assembly stage.😁

I've been putting off making handrails for some time but ....time to get MOTIVATED 😀.

I started experimenting with making the hand rails some time ago when considering what detailing was practical to add to the new version of the cabin.
The handrails and the safety line attachment rail are an essential and prominent safety feature on these Pilot Boats and although it concerned me that they could be a bit tricky to make for a novice metal worker like me they are definitely worth the effort of detailing properly.

Now I’ve not made railings before but surely all it needs is some brass rod and a bit of soldering so how hard can it be? 🤔

After examining the reference ‘photos I’ve collected it became clear that the handrails will need to be carefully positioned and fixed to the cabin correctly to get the correct ‘run’ and alignment so a means of adjusting the height and angles of all of the uprights would be necessary, so clearly not so straightforward as I had first thought.☹️

My early experiments involved making some brass tube ‘Tee’ pieces so that I could join the handrails to the uprights and thus allow me to make all of the required pieces and assemble them on the cabin ‘dry’ so to speak.

This I decided would be the best way to make the railings as I would be able to make adjustments, and correct mistakes, very easily. I also made some plain uprights using 2mm rod and 3mm tube.

The technique for making the ‘tee pieces’ involved filing the end of a tube with a 3mm round needle file to create a concave end that could be set down on another piece of 3mm tube at 90 degrees and silver soldering the two together. The piece was then cut from the end of the tube and the process repeated until I had sufficient for all the tee joints to be made. All of these pieces were dunked in a ‘pickling’ solution to remove the flux residue and then they were all filed down to be equal in height and width.

The plain uprights were made in a similar way by drilling a hole into one wall of the 3mm tube then a 2mm rod was slightly chamfered on a grinder so that it sat neatly on the hole in the tube and then silver soldered.

I chose to silver solder all of these bits so that when assembling the rails I could soft solder all the other joints together without worrying that the tee pieces would be affected by the heat.

After very carefully measuring and marking the fixing points for the handrails I used a 2mm bit in a pin vice to drill horizontal holes in the cabin sides and then I made the supporting uprights for the rails from short pieces of brass rod, annealed and bent to approximately the correct angle. With the uprights in place I was then able to put the tee pieces on the uprights and adjust the height of each by filing so that the handrail could be passed through them and made to follow the correct line and angles. Just to complicate matters the handrails rise in a curvature and slightly inwards towards the bow.😠

The engine room roof was then drilled using the handrail position to get the correct angle for the holes. After dry fitting all the pieces and checking all the parts were properly aligned, the handrail, tee pieces and uprights were soft soldered together.

After setting the correct height and angles of the engine room roof uprights I used some 3mm diameter brass washers to make the base of all of the uprights but I had to solder all of them ‘in-place’ to ensure that they all sat flush with the roof.
The danger here was that the heat of the soldering would damage the paint and lacquer finish so after a quick experiment on a test piece I found that some aluminium foil folded to 18 layers was sufficient to protect the paint from the short but instant heat from the 100w iron to solder the washers.
The washers for the cabin side supports were done on a jig as the position and angles were all the same.
I also tapped a 2mm thread on the end of all the upright pieces so that they can be secured to the cabin and superstructure with brass nuts should I ever need to remove any to make repairs or modifications.

The handrails are one continuous length down from the rear cabin roof, along the length of the whole cabin to the front which I don’t think I could have achieved without jointing the brass rod as I have and overall I'm quite pleased with the way they have turned out (so far) !!

Next I will need to make and fit the safety line rails, paint everything with a chrome finish and then fit the rope binding 'hand-grip' along the length of the handrails. The binding can be seen on the real boats in the last ‘photo.

The forward ‘pulpit’ also needs to be made up as well as some stern guard rails.