With the cabin handrails in place I can now make the ‘Pulpit’ which is an area at the bow of the boat enclosed by a handrail and safety rail.
I’m not certain of the actual use of this but I assume it’s a safe haven for observation or forward deck activity by a crew member and the height of the ‘pulpit’ is dictated by the continuation of a line from the cabin handrail and safety rail.

I started by sketching out the size and shape of the pulpit on some graph paper and then transferring the dimensions to a piece of scrap of ply with 2mm holes drilled for all of the uprights to form a jig. Some round styrene rod was used as formers for the bending of the corners.

Some 2mm brass rod was annealed and formed into one half of the top handrail and a rear upright and then a mirror image piece made as the other half making sure that I inserted some of my ‘Tee’ pieces in the correct places as the bending progressed.
The remaining uprights were cut to length and placed on the jig to join to the handrail tee pieces.
All the uprights were made 'over length' so that I could trim them once the correct height of the pulpit was set. The rod ends were not threaded as I have no access to the underside to retain them with nuts so they'll eventually be epoxied in place.

There are two bracing uprights that meet the frame at an angle and I made some joining pieces from some 3mm tube cut and joined at an acute angle and silver soldered together.

The safety rail is a piece if 3mm x 1.5mm brass bar annealed and bent around some slightly larger corner formers and temporarily fixed to the framework with some tinned copper wire through 1mm holes drilled through the safety rail.

This complete framework was then soft soldered together with the exception of the safety rail which will be soft soldered in place after the rope handgrip has been wound around the handrail.
The forward deck of the boat was then drilled using the assembly jig holes as a template and the pulpit framework temporarily pushed in place with a 2mm brass washer at the base of each of all the uprights.
The height of the pulpit was then adjusted to follow the visual line from the cabin handrails and the brass washers soldered in place using my foil barrier method to prevent to prevent the heat from the soldering iron affecting the deck paint finish.
Soldering these 'in situ' ensures that all the washers sit flush with the deck and conform to the deck curvature.

The etch primer and chrome paint I ordered has arrived today and if the ‘paint test’ proves successful I’ll be able to paint the pulpit 🤞😀

I would like the handrails on the boat to have a nice shiny chrome finish and having seen jbkiwi’s ladders for his Hartley Flareline with a chrome paint finish I thought I’d give some a try.
I couldn’t find any of the Duplicolor paint that he used and had to choose one of a number of alternatives that are available. I also ordered some etch primer which I’d used successfully before.

The paint test was to be certain that the primer and chrome finish didn’t react with each other and to see if the resulting chrome finish could be enhanced or at least protected by a gloss lacquer.
I used a piece of brass tube with a silver soldered brass piece on the end as my test piece and after cleaning it with emery paper and panel wipe I sprayed a base coat of etch primer and left that to dry overnight.
Then I sprayed the first coat of chrome and was relieved to see no reaction. A second coat was sprayed half an hour later and also left to dry and the resulting chrome finish looked excellent. It was left to harden over night.

I tried a coat of Halfords acrylic gloss lacquer and although there was no adverse reaction the lacquer actually dulled the bright chrome making it just look like silver paint. As an experiment I sprayed over the lacquer with another coat of chrome and the bright finish was restored with no adverse effects.

My conclusions are that this chrome paint works as well as I had hoped and I can now proceed to spray the handrails with some confidence.

I’m not certain how long the chrome finish will remain bright and shiny, only time will tell.

Before I could solder the safety rail to the pulpit I had to wind the rope handgrip around the handrail as doing it after the rail is in place would be very tedious and be a bit like a ‘needle and thread’ process.
I had previously done some tests with some rigging cord left over from a previous build and it looked very good indeed 😊.

While applying the ‘rope’ so I found that the chrome paint was very easily dulled and smudged even after leaving it for a couple of days to harden so I have abandoned the idea of a chrome finish on the exposed sections of the handrail and now I’ll just use some good silver paint that I know I can lacquer over to provide the required shine and give it some protection too.

After tacking one end with cyano I had to wind the ‘rope’ around the 2mm brass rod as tight as possible and then tack the end where it met the next joint. The process was repeated until all the handrail was covered and the effect is very realistic and all that I hoped for.

The rope was given three coats of matt acrylic lacquer applied by brush to fix and consolidate it. I did consider dyeing the rope to a darker colour but it doesn't really need it as in most of the reference photo's Im using it does appear quite light in colour.

The brass safety rail was then fixed in place with tinned copper wire loop through the pairs of 1mm holes that I had pre-drilled and the loops tightened to hold them in place. The rail was adjusted in height using the cabin handrail and safety rail as a guide.

Some flux was applied to the joints and soldered. The fast heat from the 100w iron had little or no effect on the paint or the rope binding.
The twist of wire was cut back as close to the safety rail as possible and the remaining ‘stump’ filed flush to the rail. Any remaining flux was then cleaned off and the joint tidied up where required.
I will finish off by masking off the rope and handrail and spraying a coat of etch primer, silver gloss and gloss lacquer. The Pulpit joints will be brush painted and lacquered.

This will be the method I’ll use when finishing the handrails on the main cabin.
It’s disappointing that the chrome finish proved to be unsuitable ☹️ but I’d rather use conventional paints for the sake of durability.

While the paint is drying on the pulpit handrail and safety rail it’s a good opportunity to continue making up the glazing and frames for the roof windows.
I started making these a while ago and as the cabin now nears completion they will need to be fitted soon.

The roof windows on the real harbour pilot boats are heavily tinted so that the crew, and the helmsman in particular, are able to look skywards when alongside a vessel that the pilots are about to board without being blinded by strong sunlight. I’m sure that this is not the case during a night time boarding but perhaps that’s where the two small searchlights come into play?

I did search around for some dark tinted Perspex or similar for these windows and although it is available in Perspex in thicknesses of over 6mm it’s not generally available it seems.
Tinting spays for car windows and lighting clusters would be an alternative but better than that is the tinting film that can be applied to car windows.
This stuff is readily available in a range of translucency from just 5% light transmission to about 85% translucency.
Normally it is bought by the linear metre but I found an eBay seller that could sell ‘sample sizes’ and very little cost and as I’m only covering a tiny area this was a very economical way to do it.

I started by making a template of all three roof window apertures and transferred these to my chosen window plastic which is 1.5mm clear Lexan. Each window was initially roughly cut from the sheet with a craft knife and then shaped very carefully by cutting and filing. I kept the protective film on both sides of the Lexan while doing this to preserve the faces of the plastic.
All three windows were made to be a friction fit in the apertures and will be eventually glued in place with canopy glue. All of the edges were bevelled very slightly so that the window film, when applied, would not be lifted by a ragged edge.

The tinting film I bought for these roof windows is described as ‘Limo’ grade with a 5% light transmission so they will in effect look black from the outside 😎.
A piece of this was roughly cut to size for the centre square window and the protective film peeled away from the outside face of the plastic. Following the supplied instructions for applying the film, which I won’t go into detail here, I was able to get the film on without any ripples or bubbles.

I repeated this for the two smaller roof windows and set them aside for the film to fully bond and cure before trimming away the surplus with a very sharp knife.
I decided to make the window frames for these roof windows from strips of 1mm Plasticard sheet rather than cut them out of a sheet in one piece which is quite wasteful and one slip of the knife could easily ruin the piece.

Another template was made of the window apertures and these were re-drawn with a 1.5mm internal and external overlap to give an overall 3mm wide frame and I cut some 1mm Plasticard into 3mm wide strips and tacked these down on the drawing paper to form the basic frames. The internal corner gussets were cut and glued in place on the paper too. Styrene cement was used to bond all of the frame pieces together and when fully set the three window frames were released from their paper backing.
It was then a case of laboriously cutting, trimming and filing the internal and external corners to make the final frame shapes 😮
The corner joints needed very little filling to conceal any blemishes and the frames were gently flatted on some mild abrasive paper.

A light coat of primer followed by two coats of silver spray paint and finished with clear gloss lacquer saw the frames nicely finished and ready for fitting.

These, like the roof window panels will be fixed in place with canopy glue.

The cabin front and side windows will be made in a similar way but with a much milder tint which I’ll describe in a separate blog update.

Now that the ‘Pulpit’ is done and dusted I need to crack on with the main cabin handrails and safety rails.

The safety rail runs around the cabin just below the rope covered handrail, its purpose being for the crew to be able to attach a safety harness to a moving part that slides along the rail which is in effect a ‘track’. See Pictures 1 & 2.

I wanted to make this in brass to be strong enough to resist accidental knocks and also to act as a reinforcement for the handrail assembly which could still be vulnerable.

I found some 3mm x 1.5mm brass bar from a supplier but it was only available in 300mm lengths so the first thing I had to do was silver solder three pieces end-to-end to form the continuous lengths I need.
It was a bit tricky aligning and butting the ends together but having done so the bar could then be annealed in the areas where I needed to make some bends.

With the handrail in place on the cabin I temporarily attached the brass bar to the rail uprights and marked on the rail where I would need to make the bends and with the bar removed and placed in a vice I very carefully made the bends in gradual degrees until the two bends were at the correct angles.
The piece was then temporarily reattached to the handrail and the centres of the uprights were marked on the rail for the attachment wires.

With the rail back on the bench I used a punch to mark the drilling positions for the fixing wires either side of the centre marks with a 2m space between the marks and then used a pin drill with a 1mm bit to drill each pair of the holes.
As a final check I attached the safety rail to the handrail assembly using tinned copper wire twists to check the alignment.

There is a small gap between two of the uprights on the engine room roof because of the varying angles and curvature of the rails I had to make some very small brass bar ‘spacers’ to fill the gap.
I thought it best not to soft solder these to the rail as it could be problematic when soft soldering the rails to the uprights and the soldering process melting the spacer joints.
To get around this I decided to silver solder the spacers to the rail, and to hold the spacers in place during the silver soldering I drilled down the length of the bar with a pin drill so that I could pass a piece of brass wire down through the bar and into a hole through the safety rail.

The drilling was a bit of a pain 🤕 but was successful, and I could silver solder the parts together without them moving out of place.
The joints were then cleaned up and both the spacers filed down to the correct length and angles for the safety rail to seat properly on the uprights and the two fixing holes either side of the spacers were re-drilled.

This process was repeated to make the safety rail for the rail on the other side and the two rails were cleaned thoroughly ready for a coat of etch primer with the areas of the rail that will be soft soldered to the uprights masked off.
Similarly the handrail parts were masked where necessary and they were etch primed too.

In the next part I’ll describe the painting sequence, winding on the rope handgrip, final painting and assembly.

Sorry if ‘The Handrails’ is turning into a bit of a saga….🤓

Before I can fix the safety rails to the handrail uprights I need to wind the ‘rope’ around the handrail because it would be next to impossible to do it afterwards.

Without the safety rail in the way I was able to wind the rope around the rail with one hand using a twisting motion on the rail and guiding the rope onto it just with fingers and thumb with the other.
The ends of the rope were tacked with a dot of cyano glue and trimmed with a sharp blade.

The process proved to be very quick and easy, the only tricky bits being where the rail had sharp bends where I had to firmly compress the rope on each winding so that there were no gaps.
With both rails completed I gave the rope bindings two coats of satin acrylic lacquer to protect them.

The safety rails were then temporarily fitted to the cabin so that I could attach the rail with tinned copper wire twists and adjust the rail to the correct height on all of the posts.
The forward ends of the safety rails were trimmed to meet neatly as a butt joint and a single through hole drilled through each to take a short brass wire link that will be soft soldered together in final assembly.

With the rails all in their correct positions the wires were given a last twist to tighten them fully and cut back to leave a short stub. The joints were given a light smear of flux and soldered in place using a 100w iron and fine cored solder. The instant local heat made a perfectly flowed joint without affecting the paint.

The rails were then removed from the cabin, the solder joints cleaned with a small brass wire brush and a solvent to remove all traces of flux and the handrails and handrail joints very carefully masked off so that I could spray a coat of etch primer over the exposed rails, followed by two coats of bright silver spray paint a two coats of gloss lacquer.

After leaving the paint to dry and harden for a day all the masking was removed to reveal the finished rails.

When finally fitted to the cabin the rails will be held in place by 2mm nuts and washers on all of the uprights so that if required the rails could be removed for repair.
The join in the handrail is just a short piece of 3mm tube soft soldered to one piece into which the other side will be soldered before the rail is finally covered with some ‘rope’ and clear lacquered.

The join in the safety rail will also be made after fitting, and the joint filed flush on the front face and then brush painted and lacquered.

The two safety rails for the rear deck remain to be made but these are a much simpler affair and don’t have a safety rail attached but will have a life ring on each as seen in the last picture on another of the Southampton fleet of pilot boats.

Firstly, my apologies for the long break between blog updates, sadly a lot of things have conspired to divert me from my model making activities, including a shortage of time and materials (bad planning !) and a family bereavement further resulting in a temporary loss of 'mojo'.

But...onwards and upwards 😁

The stern handrails on the Southampton Pilot Boats don’t incorporate a safety line attachment rail so that makes them slightly easier to make but the construction is the same as the cabin handrails.

The stern on the real Pilot boats is not as curved as the hull of the SLEC model that mine is built from so a bit of modelling licence is required to simulate these rear handrails. Neither will it have the rear ladder seen in the first ‘photo which I have no intention to replicate as that would have required a major construction change in the early stages of making the hull.

I started by making a paper template of the stern area and marking the positions of the three supporting uprights making sure that the line of the cabin handrails will be visually extended to the stern handrails and they will also follow the curvature of the stern rather than be square as on the real boat.

When I was happy with the layout I taped the template onto a piece of scrap ply and drilled the three hole positions of each upright and fitted some short pieces of styrene rod to act as bending radius formers, allowing for the thickness of the brass rod in the process.

A 300mm length of 2mm brass rod was then annealed along its whole length and then placed in the bending jig to form the top handrail. Before the second bend was made I inserted a tubular brass ‘tee piece’ that I had made previously when making up the cabin handrails as it would not be possible to do that after the bending process.
The remaining bends in this piece had to be done very cautiously after measuring multiple times to form the correct angles and geometry of the two outer legs. Fortunately the calculations and bending all worked out OK and the basic frame was made. The centre upright is just a single piece of 2mm rod that locates into the ‘tee piece’ and this was soft soldered in place.

With the framework temporarily removed from the ply jig two additional tee pieces were loosely fitted to each of the outer legs.
The two horizontal bars of the framework were bent to shape on the jig and the ends ground flat and to the correct length to fit neatly onto the tee pieces when the framework was placed back into the jig with the centre of the rail neatly resting on the centre leg.

Further measuring and adjustment was needed to set the correct overall height of the rail assembly to follow the height of the cabin handrails and the two lower rails adjusted to the desired height and spacing and then the parts were temporarily held in place with some tinned copper wire twists.

All the joints were then soft soldered together, the joints of the tee pieces being unaffected because they were previously silver soldered together. All traces of flux were then removed and the whole piece cleaned up with files and emery cloth.

As the first piece came out so well repeating the process to make the other rail proved very straightforward and very soon both assemblies were made and ready for finishing. I was quite relieved as my supply of 2mm brass rod was all used up so re-making any parts would have been a further delay 😠

In the next update I’ll drill the rear deck to take the rail assemblies, solder the base washers to the uprights and apply the paint and wind on the rope handgrips.

The remaining parts to go onto the handrails are the washers that form the mounting flanges at the base of each upright and these can only be soldered in place with the handrails on the deck to ensure that they are at the correct angles to sit properly on the curvature of the rear deck.

I marked the three mounting holes for each assembly using my paper template and drilled a 2mm hole through the deck for each and then fitted the railings to check for fit and set the correct height for each ensuring that the top of the handrail was properly lined up with the cabin handrails.

The height of each leg was marked relative to the deck and then removed so that I could put the washers on the legs and also a thin ply spacer that will act as a sacrificial heat shield during the soldering process. The handrails were then put back into their mounting holes and the height of each adjusted to the correct alignment but with an additional allowance for the thickness of the ply spacer and then the washers were soldered in place.

After shaping the handrail bases with files and emery paper the handrails were thoroughly cleaned and de-greased, given a spray coat of etch primer and then two coats of silver spray and finally a coat of clear gloss lacquer.

When the paint and lacquer was full dried I wound the cotton cord ‘rope’ handgrip onto the top rails, this took a bit longer than the cabin handrails because the cord had to passed through the rails for each turn but it was a fairly quick process for the short lengths of rail to be covered.
The ends of the rope were tacked with some cyano glue to fix them at each end and then the rope handgrips were given two coats of satin acrylic lacquer to consolidate and protect the windings.

Because the deck into which the railing will be fitted is only a skin of 1.5mm ply I will have to fit some supporting pieces underneath the deck into which the uprights can be securely glued, fortunately there is some limited access to the underside of four of the six uprights and this should be sufficient for a firm fixings of each assembly.

These railings along with all the other fitting that I’ve made will be fixed to deck in the final assembly.

There are a couple of life rings attached to the stern of the Pilot Boats which will be a nice finishing detail for the handrails.

These life belts had previously been modelled extremely well by Sy (Skydive130) on his Pilot Boat and using his build blog as a guide I decided to try to make some for my boat.

I looked for some wooden rings of the right size from various sources including eBay without success and so I asked Sy where he got his and he very generously said that he would send me a selection of sizes from his own ‘stock’.
They arrived a couple of days later and I selected 45mm diameter rings which was the perfect size and scale.

The wooden rings were given a rub down with some abrasive paper and then given several coats of sanding sealer to get a nice smooth finish and then sprayed with two coats of VW Brilliant Orange.

Initially I put the white bands on the rings using the same white vinyl coach-lining tape that I used for the water line, but after my success with making my own waterslide transfers I decided to add some graphics to the rings and the vinyl tape I had used was not really suitable for the graphics to lay over because of the thickness of the tape.

The new graphics were generated in Adobe Illustrator and printed out at ‘photo resolution onto some clear waterslide decal paper and over-sprayed with some Halfords clear gloss lacquer to seal the black ink onto the clear film.
The old vinyl tape was removed from the rings and any adhesive residue removed with some panel wipe and then I painted on the new rings with some white Humbrol acrylic paint, which needed a keen eye and a very steady hand 🤓

After carefully cutting out the graphics from the sheet with a scalpel I applied the decals using some Micro Sol and Micro Fix solution, the latter is formulated to soften decals to make it ‘set’ down onto the surface and conform to any irregularities and curvatures.

After the solutions had done their jobs and fully set and dried I filled and painted the ‘pin holes’ that I used for handling the rings before spraying the rings with some satin lacquer to seal the graphics onto the rings.

The finished rings were fixed onto the stern railings with some thin .7mm brass wire ‘staples’ with a dab of epoxy resin to secure and strengthen the fixing.

Finally a big Thank You to Sy for his generosity in supplying me with the wooden rings, it’s very comforting to know that on this forum we can not only share tips, techniques and ideas but on occasions materials too 😁

The cabin rear door is very simply made from 1.5mm styrene sheet, a larger piece forming the base and frame and a slightly smaller piece forming the door and a further piece as a window frame.
All of the corners are radiused as per the real door and frame and before fixing the door to the frame I simulated the fixing bolts around the frame by using thin slivers of hexagonal styrene rod around the perimeter ‘frame’.
These were all reduced to a uniform height by flatting them on my fine sanding plate.
The two parts were then glued together using poly cement and then the aperture for the window was cut through both pieces.

The window frame was made from a small piece of 1mm Styrene in one piece which involved a bit of cutting, filing and scraping, it’s made slightly oversized so that the window glazing can be fitted into the window aperture with the frame acting as a rebate.
This was glued to the door front ensuring an even overlap all round.

Two 2mm holes were drilled through the door, one for a door handle and a second to simulate a lock boss and some short pieces of 2mm styrene rod used to simulate the door hinges.

The door handle was made from a piece of 2mm brass rod, bent and flattened slightly to form a handle, a couple of short pieces of styrene tube were formed into a handle base and glued to the door over the frame and a piece of 2mm rod glued into the ‘lock’ hole and trimmed to be just proud of the door surface.

The brass door handle was etch primed, sprayed silver and then clear lacquered.
The whole piece was cleaned and de-greased with panel wipe and then painted with two coats of white gloss.

The frames for the two rear windows were made from styrene strips with a fillet in each corner that was rounded with a file and the outer corners rounded as well, some Humbrol filler was used to fill the joints and after drying the frames were flatted on both sides on a fine sanding plate. The frames were also painted with two coats of gloss white.

The ‘glazing’ for the door and windows was cut and shaped from 1.5mm clear Lexan to fit into their respective apertures and all three were covered with a 20% tinting film, the film allows only a 20% light transmission and thus is 80% opaque. Applied to the outer surface of the windows they look very effective and reflective 😎

The door glazing was glued in place using canopy glue applied with a fine brush to avoid any glue getting onto the surface of the ‘glass’ and left to set.

The door was finally positioned on the rear wall of the cabin and a 2mm hole drilled through for the door handle and the door assembly then glued to the cabin using dots of epoxy to ensure that no excess squeezed out when the door was pressed into place and the door handle fixed through the handle boss with a dab of epoxy.

The two window glazing pieces either side of the door were also glued in place with canopy glue to be completely flush with the outer surface of the walls and when fully set they were cleaned before the two window frames were fixed over them with canopy glue as well.