For those that have not been following my journey through life…. months ago, after completing The Diana, I took on the project to complete a kit model of The Golden Hind started and abandoned by my good friend Harry.  A good model kit, but far too detailed for someone just starting out.  When I brought the hull into my shop and studied it I realized that the instructions and drawings were terrible.  So I started to correct what I could including thinning down the upper hull because the frames were just 3 times too thick.

Still the kit came with some fine details such as the stern carvings (a casting)  you will see that in a later blog.

I am at the stage that I love which is where I work on all the details on the decks, gratings and pin rails etc.   Replacing casted parts with real wood where I could.

The drawings for the kit show the supports for the pin rails (the rails where belaying pins are used to tie off rigging) as spindles.  The drawing showed the shape but the only instruction was TURNINGS.  No wood supplied in the kit for these parts and an assumption that a starting model builder had to have access to a lathe.

Fortunately I do.  Blaine gave me a mini lathe many years ago that I use all the time for these details.

The other issue was the wood. The kit came with very thin planks of walnut (a horrible wood to work with at this scale) and bass wood.  Bass is a good wood but it is white like pine.  The other detailed parts are from Mahogany (again, a colourful red wood but horrible for scale)

So I have been finishing off the pin rails.  I have used some walnut on the hull top rails but to match the mahogany parts I determined I had to find a wood in my inventory that would fit the reddish components provided in the kit.

Normally I would use my lovely Swiss Pear or the Holly or the exotic Balkan boxwood for turnings… but the colour did not work.  Granted I could have just painted the parts after, but thought I could to try other choices.

If you look at picture one, that is the spindles for the pin rails.  The wood is a bit coarse, but matches the model.  The second picture is a frame that holds the ship bell (a detail the kit did not provide).  The third picture is the source of the wood I used.

In our home we have a great hardwood floor made up of Brazilian Cherry.  They left a bunch of scraps in the crawl space when we moved in.

While not a great wood for model building (the grain structure is way out of scale) it is a lovely wood and in this case, the colour matches the mahogany pieces from the kit (and is much stronger)

I turned the bell out of the cherry and painted it gold.  Looking at the picture I have to work on it.