Sorry to put you on the spot there unbuiltnautilus, but you are aware of the finished item and I respect your judgement above all else.
Getting back to the RENOWN conversion, the first thing that struck us was the stempost shape. BARHAM (the model) had a straight stempost, whereas RENOWN had, noticeably, a hybrid bow, sort of a mix between 19th century and 20th century truncated ramming bow.
So this had to be sorted. Imagine the look on Robbie's face when I took a hacksaw and hacked three inches vertically off his bow.
(No great shakes as he, bless him, is renowned for flattening his bow against the lakeside concrete).
I had an aluminium plate, 1/8th inch thick, which just fitted the bill. First thing was to cut out the stem post profile and pick a point some 3 inches away from where we wanted the bow to be. Then a line was drawn vertically down the bow and the hacksaw was produced. Yep, you read it correctly, a hacksaw. Neither of us is a 'chippy' but we can, as ex stokers, both claim to be 'hackers'. The plate was offered-up to where the bow used to be (image 1). It squeezed nicely into the recess lower down the hull, but tended naturally to swing to the left on the cable deck level, where the gap was much wider.
Two locating stops were cut out, both top (cable deck) and bottom of the hull (keel) to stop the plate moving any further aft as a result of a collision.
At this point Robbie correctly decided that the new plate needed some longitudinal strengthening otherwise the bow might shear off.
Four alumimium battens were then screwed securely to the plate at upper and lower levels and then passed into the hull. This would give further strength to the newly fashioned bow and could be back-filled with resin to solidify the new assembly. (image 2).
In both images, the hull is upside down.
Yarpie and Robbie.
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Topic: 1:72 SCALE HMS BARHAM conversion to HMS RENOWN after 20 years (Read 12370 times)