Starboard done, and a deck that sits too high
The starboard side is done. All the gunports are in. The spacing didn’t quite work out after all: the first three ports have 30 mm between them, the rest exactly 31 mm. Luckily I ended up just clear of the bulkheads, although those 2 mm extra wouldn’t have been unwelcome. By eye I can’t see the difference.
One more tip, mainly for myself: stick masking tape on the deck before you start sanding the ports. Every now and then my bit of sandpaper touched the deck, which left ugly marks. Hence the pink haze behind the ports in the photo.
The deck sits too high
Something I noticed: the deck isn’t the same distance from the gunports everywhere. Fore and aft the ports sit higher than in the middle, even though I measured the position everywhere at two strips down from the top. Pingu57 saw it in the photos too: the upper deck has a slightly different sheer from the gun deck below it. Piet confirmed that there’s a subtle height difference between the two decks somewhere; the sheer should be the same for both decks and I should have measured that before fitting the gun deck. It concerns the four aftermost ports, and the difference grows to 4 mm. Nothing to be done about it now. Piet reassured me: with the quoin you can adjust the gun barrels later so that they sit centrally in the ports everywhere.
On a tip from Johan Verschuren, who is building the Diana in parallel, I went ahead and assembled a gun after all. Then the problem turned out bigger than I’d hoped: only at the sternpost is the port at the right height. With the linings in the ports, the gun in the middle wouldn’t fit in at all any more. Unless they were planning to fire at submarines.
I was already considering making the ports on the port side higher, or the guns lower. Until Johan remarked that the holes through the gun aren’t in the middle: turn it round and the barrel sits just that bit lower. That was it. I had unwittingly put the gun in the wrong way round. Tried again and suddenly it fitted. I can carry on in peace.
