This is it !!

Yes!! I finished the build of my Smit Rotterdam, The "last" thing remaining is to find room for all the needed electronics and RC and have her out for sailing ...

Radar Mast

I Continued with the Radar mast and decided to scratch build the Work light Spots around an 5mm Hi-Bright LED, Additionally I used 3mm white & red LED's for all the other signal lamps and cabled everything.
I have my concerns about the "rotating radars" and hope they still work, no matter what, i don't have access anymore to the motors and  i can't even change/adjust the rubber bands after this stage..

and here is the mast with all lights turned on, "an x-mast tree :-)"

Top Deck

Finally !! also the Fire monitors & Compass are now installed, so the end is near... 

The "only thing" remaining is to finish the Radar mast and I still need to fit and install all the RC (and electronics) and make sure it all works.

Fire monitors

After searching the web for possible fire monitors/water cannons, I finally decided to reuse the supplied fire monitors provided by the fitting set, not because they are looking that great..., but at least they are not over dimensioned in any way.

I also have planned to have 2 of them "working" so for realising that I removed the top pipe and drilled a 2 mm hole through the body and refitted a 2mm brass pipe.

Progress on the upper structure

Still a long way to go, but I think it's starting to look impressive...

Creating ladders

Finally I found a way to create ladders..

Maybe not the easiest solution but at least they are reproduce able.

Underneath a sequence of the process, the pictures themselves are self-explaining if you want/need to see them in a higher resolution, you can download the ladder.rar file

     

Life raft and boat fenders

a close-up of the boat fenders and the life rafts.

The life fenders and storing racks are pretty much as suggested by the kit, the life rafts are made a bit more realistic from scrap wood and wire and by using an electrical drill as a lathe.

Bridge Progress

Not a lot of progress I must admit, I'm still working (slowly) on the bridge and all of it's details, I painted it more or less in it's base colours and will "weather it" when finally everything is in place. 

Note: The "Exhaust pipes" I scratch build from a plastic tube and are not included in the kit  

Bridge interior

I found several pictures of buttons and old meters on the internet and used these in Visio where I created the toplayout of the desks (1:1) download layout and glued them afterwards on the white desks and painted matt varnish on top.

Additionally I made some handles of wood (and wire) for creating the third dimension on the desks and I added handrails.

Dry Fit Preview of the Bridge

I continued with upper structure and the interior of the bridge.At this stage I’m still a bit uncertain about how detailed I want to go with the interior.As there are a lot of windows, my first guess is that you actually can see quite a lot of it when looking through them.So I will most likely end up with a nice detailed look but I need to find out first how to achieve it.

“common basic” tools

Here’s an picture of all the tools I have used during the build of the Smit Rotterdam so far.

What it doesn't show is the airbrush/compressor, my selection of paint brushes and the electrical drill which I use as an (primitive) lathe wherever needed...

Rotating Radars

As I’m about to build the upper structure lots of decisions had to be made to make sure that all "special effects” will become as invisible as possible. So I spend quite some time to find out how to build the (rotating) radars..

As I had an cheap, small and broken "3 channel" RC helicopter lying around, I decided to re-use the tiny dc-motors. As it turned out, these could actually be build inside the tower structure.

As this seemed like the brilliant solution, it also started to give me lots of problems as most of the parts I needed additionally had to be scratch build.

Like for example the rubber belts, these where impossible to find in the diameter I needed, “Cutting” them from a larger belt was not the difficult part, but find the glue which could glue the ends together was a real challenge..

Additionally, as I only used “common basic” tools for this build so far (besides my airbrush ), I realize now how valuable it is to have the right tools..

Even dough I managed without dedicated tools, it was not that easy to get this far..

What I additionally need is a “speed control” for these radar-motors as they currently rotate too quick..