Victory Model Disaster

I was spending the afternoon on the many steps for the middle deck guns. First you have to turn the gun barrels, then you have to make the carriages, then turn the wooden wheels and apply to the axles. Then start to assemble the gun carriages (the part that caused my left finger injury in an earlier blog). Turn and paint the tiny eye bolts that are part of the carriage. Yadda yadda you are probably bored with my details, but something happened yesterday.

The model is sitting on the bench before me as I work on these tiny details… when I notice that one of the guns on the lower deck was not sitting properly. I immediately dropped everything and looked carefully.

Someone, I do not who, but I suspect it was me, has hit the gun and broken the gun carriage in its position.

Now you could say, you made it so you can fix it, but this is on the lower deck. If you want to, you can go back until January and see the pictures of the guns at that time. The seventh gun from the stern. Meantime I have built a framework above it and planked in the next deck. It is closed in with roughly 2 cm of deck above and you can only see it through an 80 mm square gun port. A bit of a panic…..

This leads to the decision I used to make (which Pat will remember) where I jump up and down on the model and start again. Fortunately I am more mature so I spent the time to seek a solution.

Today I peeled back a few deck planks, and using my special tools I pulled out the pieces of the broken carriage, remounted the gun and repolaced the deck boards. I think I could be an arthroscopic surgeon (although I did not sterilize the instruments)

I do realize all my family is saying at this point that Bruce is verging on craziness, but I am pleased with my success today. I suspect most of the people in my peer group in Comox Valley thought that success today was planting some flowers. I successfully did arthroscopic surgery on my model replacing a gun carriage. I feel pretty good about it.

Now the deck does not look perfect anymore (see left pic) but the gun is sitting proper (see right pic) Given that there is another layer of guns and another deck above, I am pretty sure Andra and Sean will not notice the flaw or I could say that it was battle damage recovery.