Getting very close to completing my Southampton Pilot Boat and time to do the final installation of the lighting system.

I designed, built and tested the lighting circuit board some time ago along with the navigation lights, searchlights and deck floodlights so now it’s time to fit it all into the cabin.

I started by sticking down four cable tie bases to the inside of the cabin and securing the circuit board to them with some cable ties. The first lights to be fitted were the port and starboard navigation lights and these are simply glued in place with some canopy glue with the wires passing through the cabin roof.

I’m using small dabs of canopy glue in preference to epoxy because any surplus glue can be easy cleaned off with a damp tissue, dries clear and doesn’t form an aggressive bond as it could be necessary to remove a light fitting at some later date…a good decision as I’ll explain later.

The mast was next, I made this a friction fit for now as I will need to remove it at a later stage to add some additional roof details.
The eight deck level floodlights were given a final bit of detailing and a coat of clear lacquer before being fixed in place with a light dab of canopy glue and by now I had quite a bundle of loose wires inside the cabin!

The two roof mounted searchlights were next, once again fixed with canopy glue and both angled outward by virtue of the angled bases I had built in.

The final light was a rear deck high level floodlight made in much the same way as the other floods but with a much shallower profile and with a fixing flange on the underside. Running the wires from this fitting was not particularly easy in order to conceal them but I managed it with the aid of some epoxy glue and paint.

There were quite a few wires to be tidied up and formed into ‘looms’ so they were labelled to identify them and tacked with dabs of hot glue and also fed through some cable clips. The cable looms were arranged so that they all arrived on the correct side of the circuit board according to their function and then some heat shrink sleeves used to consolidate them into two separate bundles.

Each of the cable pairs were terminated with a two pin socket and connected to the corresponding circuit board mounted plug according to its function and each light has a separate current limiting resistor. The wires from the radar motor also connect to this circuit board.

All of the lighting circuits are carried through a ribbon cable to a multi-pin plug and socket to make connection with the lighting battery supply, R/C switches and Radar control board.

Testing the system threw up a few problems, the first being a dry joint on the radar circuit that meant that the radar motor operated intermittently and a similar problem with the navigation light circuit too. The common denominator to these problems was the 9 pin connector 😠.

The solder connections of the very fine ribbon cable conductors to the pins of the 9 pin multi-plug were proving to be a little too fragile so I changed the ‘solder bucket’ type of plug to an IDC (Insulation Displacement Connector) which has a much more robust cable clamping system and this cured the problems.

The second issue was that two of the deck level floodlight were not working and after testing it was evident that the SMT LED’s had failed 😡 (despite being tested thoroughly during the making of) and the remedy for this meant removing the faulty lights and replacing them with the two spare units that I had the foresight to make for that very reason, but leaving me with no further spares!
Similarly the use of canopy glue fix the all the lights was a good decision as they were fairly easy to remove without much trauma 😅.

With all the lighting on the boat looks really good in the darkness of my study and the floodlights look to give deck a fairly well spread of light all around the cabin and the rear high-level flood illuminating the stern very nicely too 😊

A little more detailing as I get closer to finishing this epic build 😉

There’s a short handrail on the roof above the cabin door, very simply made from a short length of 2mm brass formed at each end and finished with a soldered brass washer. A couple of coats of silver and clear lacquer had the handrail finished in no time and it was glued into a couple of holes drilled in the roof panel.

The mast was finally glued into the cabin roof, this mast has been purposely made shorter than ‘scale’ for practical reasons so that the boat can be stored in a large plastic storage box with the mast and rigging in place but with the mast antenna removed from its magnetic holder as described in an earlier blog update.

For the rigging I obtained some turned brass ‘eyes’ from RB Model (Poland) which are perfect for a number of features on the cabin and engine room roofs, they were painted with an etch primer and then some VW Brilliant Orange.
Two were used on the rear of the roof for a couple of flag lines that run up to the mast, these were extended with a short piece of styrene tube so that the rigging cord does not foul on the edge of the roof and were simply ‘self-tapped’ into a couple of holes either side of the roof handrail.

After very careful measurement and marking using a paper template four more ‘eyes’ were fixed into the roof through some 1.5mm holes pin drilled through the roof panel.

In addition to the flag lines the mast has four lines of rigging ‘stays’ that extend down to the roof and these were made from some .8mm diameter black elasticated cord which was looped through holes in the mast reinforcing gussets and down to the brass eyes in the roof and finished at each end with some 1.4mm black heat shrink tubing.
A piece of paper was used to shield the roof from the heat of the soldering iron tip to protect the paint on the roof during the shrinking….damaging that now would be a disaster ☹️!!

All of the rigging cords were tensioned sufficiently before fixing to remain taught for, hopefully, some reasonable time (years I hope!) although I have plenty of the elasticated nylon cord to replace the rigging a few hundred times over!!

Four more of the brass eyes were used to simulate the lifting eyes of the removable roof section of the forward engine room, again simply self-tapped into holes drilled through the 1.5mm ply panel.

I may do some additional research to identify the correct flags that should go on this boat and get some made up in silk as a nice finishing detail.

All that remains are the roof ventilators, I dreaded making those and left them ‘till almost last 😨, and the anchor.😁

Following Skydive130’s tutorial on the making of the roof vents for his Pilot Boat I had several attempts to make the roof ventilators using his method, none of which I was entirely satisfied with and so I decided to adopt a slightly different approach.

I did some research into the actual size, shape and workings of these things and found sufficient information on the web about them 🤓.

Known as ‘Dorade Box Ventilators’ they are designed to admit air flow and funnel it through the device to the cabin interior and at the same time to block the ingress of water by using a clever valve mechanism with the water draining away through slots on the base.
Not that much of that was relevant to making them but identifying the type, and then the manufacturer, and finding drawings was a great deal more help than the grainy low resolution photographs that I was looking at previously.

With a much clearer idea of what they should look like from the info I found I started by laminating some square section styrene for the bases and cutting them into blocks of an approximate length.
There’s a raised circular section at each end of the ventilators and I simulated those with some 8mm and 6mm styrene rod and then trimmed the blocks to a rough tapered shape with a knife using the circular pieces as a guide.
Further shaping was done using a sanding plate, file and abrasive to shape the bases with a taper in length and in height. I also filed some bevels on the underside of these bases to simulate the water drainage slots.

The bases for the two ventilators on the forward engine room roof are circular in shape and were easily made from some 10mm diameter rod that I was able to ‘turn’ to a tapered shape in the chuck of my makeshift Black and Decker ‘lathe’.

A distinctive feature of these ventilators is the air intake funnel that has a particular shape which I wanted to look as realistic as possible and involved multiple experiments to get a repeatable method.
These parts were made from 8mm styrene tube and being a thermoplastic it can be readily heated and formed and to form the distinctive mouth shape of the intakes I made a wooden former suitably carved and shaped that could be pushed into the end of the styrene tube during the heating stage and using finger pressure mould the walls of the styrene tube around the wooden former.
The end of the former has a rounded end that will stretch and distort the plastic so that the tubing can be bent to 90 degrees while maintaining the curved shape.
The styrene cools and hardens very rapidly and so it took many attempts to form the desired shape successfully and I must have used almost a complete 300mm length of 8mm styrene tube perfecting a technique to form the piece in a repeatable way.
Probably a dozen or more such pieces went into the bin until I was happy with a repeatable process 😥.
As I need six of these ventilators I was very careful to perfect this without running out of material 😮.

Each piece needed to be trimmed at each side of the bend and the ‘mouth’ heated and refined on the wooden former. The base end of the piece was re-heated and reformed into a roughly circular shape so that it mounts neatly on the 8mm raised disc at the large end of the tapered base.
This was not a particularly easy process at all and a few ended up in the bin after the repeated heating and forming rendered them irretrievably miss-shaped as can be seen in one of the pictures ☹️.

I probably spent a whole day making eight usable pieces (six to use and two for spares) but I was determined to see it through despite aching and burnt fingers 😢.

After a final trim and clean-up with file and abrasives they were glued to the ventilator bases and left to set.

I used a ‘ScotchBrite’ type abrasive pad to clean the completed parts and to provide a key for the white gloss paint.
One good thing about styrene is that it’s not always necessary to spray a primer coat if the surfaces are well keyed.

The mouths of the vents were painted inside with satin matt black as a finishing touch and a 1.5mm brass rod superglued into the base as a fixing pin.
After careful measurement and positioning the roof was drilled to take the brass fixing pins and a dab of canopy glue used to secure them in place.
The forward vents on the engine room roof are fixed in the same way but I had to add a reinforcing piece of ply on the inside as the roof there is only a 1.5mm ply panel.

I had been putting off making these vents for a while and now that they are made and fitted they do look quite good and I’m very satisfied with the end results 😊.

The only fitting missing from the deck now is an anchor that is stowed within the front ‘pulpit’.

I’m guessing that as the Southampton Pilot Boats are always moored at their base in Gosport at the mouth of Portsmouth Harbour there’s very little need for an anchor unless they need to hold fast in open water. This also probably accounts for the absence of a permanent rope of chain attached to the anchor and I suppose that it is stored in a locker somewhere on the boat.

The Gosport base can be seen in Google Maps in this link.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/tGEnX6ACb498PZ838

I found some good drawings of the plough anchor on the web and started by sketching out the shape of the plough blade and transferring it to a piece of paper (Post-it-Note), folding it and placing it on the deck to see if the scale was about right by comparison to the ‘photos I had. The shank of the anchor was sketched and sized in the same way.

Once happy with the sizing I transferred the shapes to a piece of 1.5mm styrene sheet and cut them out roughly to shape with a knife and then refined them with files and abrasive paper.
The plough blade needed to be bent along the centre line and I found the best way to do this was to apply heat to a thin metal edge (short ruler) and using that to ‘hot bend’ the blade to the correct angle and then the wings of the blade were then gently heated and given a slight curvature too.

The shank was cut to form the hinge and further laminated with 1.5mm styrene to thicken the section and provide a means of attachment to the blade. The hinge was fitted with a brass pin as a pivot and then the shank refined with files and abrasives.
I made a shackle from a short piece of styrene sheet heated and bent over the ruler edge and then drilled and fitted with a brass hinge pin.

The finished shank was then glued to the blade and left to set firmly after which the whole piece was cleaned up with and abrasive pad and then painted with some Halfords metallic silver.

There’s no rope or chain permanently attached to the anchor and it is held down on the deck by some retaining straps within the confines of the front pulpit and so mine is fixed down with some brass wire ‘staples’ painted gunmetal grey with the anchor sitting on some thin rubber dots cut from a neoprene sealing ring and glued to the deck with some canopy glue.
The hinge of the anchor was also set into a fixed position with a dab of canopy glue just to immobilise the hinge to stop it moving on the deck.

One last small detail…the addition of some black self-adhesive vinyl to the front and side air vents and intakes improves the look and gives them the appearance of internal depth.

As soon as circumstances permit I’ll do some action photo’s and video of the boat on the water but in the meantime I’ll try to do some decent photos as a final reveal.

Hi All.
The Southampton Pilots Boat is finally finished and I'm eagerly awaiting the first opportunity to do some 'sea trials'.
Meanwhile here are some photographs of the finished article.

I have added a short video to show the functional features (lighting and radar).

I'm very grateful for your continued interest and I hope you have enjoyed my build blog.
Thank you 😀.
Rob.