10Recently, I decided to wrap up the Master Korabel 95mm ship’s boat kit. Last time I’d left off, the hull planking was done, and the hull interior needed detailing. As you might recall, I had removed the removable portion of the bulkheads, but had a bit of trouble with a bit too much of the bulkhead bottoms breaking out.
After cleaning up the bottom interior along the inner edge of the keel, strips were bent and glued into place for all the remaining ribs. I trimmed the top ends of these flush with the hull planking.
After that, the laser-cut floor went into place and pretty well hid anything that didn’t look good.
As you can see in the above photo that there are laser-cut parts for the interior of the stern as well. There is also a piece that glues down over the keel. This piece is cut for the mast steps, as well as the supports for the thwarts. I glued this piece into place and the parts that form the seats at the stern.
The addition of the thwarts was pretty easy. The holes in the floor for the support posts provides a good indication of the alignment. The thwarts themselves are well designed in two layers. The lower layer has the hole for the support, and the upper layer does not. Also, the lower layer is short, so that only the upper layer rides on the stringer that runs around the inside of the hull.
With all that stuff in place, there is one more inner plank or stringer that runs along the top edge of the ribs. It’s a laser-cut piece, but it had to be trimmed at the stern to fit against the inside of the transom. Once the stringer was glued into place. There are laser-cut pieces for the gunwales that cap off the hull planks and cover the rib ends on
The last parts to add were the thole pins, which comes as laser-cut pieces. These had a bit of char, but I didn’t see any good way to clean them.
At this point, there’s a little brass work, to fit the rudder. Also, there should be brass clamps that hold the masts. I’ll be doing these, but I want to finish up this short series of posts on building this Master Korabel kit.
Overall, this is a pretty interesting kit that makes for a very detailed ship’s boat. It’s heavily engineered, and I’m wondering if this much engineering is just kind of overkill. I suppose for someone who wants a very detailed ship’s boat that doesn’t have the skills to build one correctly from scratch, this is a good way to go. It does take time and effort, but the results are pretty nice.
My own model has some flaws, but using pre-cut parts I see no way to fix these. And, this kit is really about having everything pre-cut for you. I’ve built other kits where all the parts are pre-cut for you. This is a big time saver, and may also result in something that’s more accurate than I might make otherwise. However, if something is off, in construction, there’s no way to make it perfect, without fabricating one’s own replacement parts, as far as I can see. But, that’s just part of the challenge of model building. Ω
Ship Modeler 