The 28 gun barrels have been blackened with blackening solution, with mixed results; on Piet's advice I leave them as they are.
The 28 gun carriages are glued up; the kit pins are ugly, Piet offers brass pins and knows what to do about the breeching ring.
The breeching turns out to be left-hand laid and much thinner than what I ordered, on Henk's advice I order a complete new set of blocks from Syren, and after two days of painting the carriages are red.
With Piet's pins the first gun gets bolts, linchpins, a handle on the quoin and a breeching ring; Peter de Vries knows how to make rings in batches.
Turning the quoin handle from a walnut strip often went wrong; a satay skewer in a small drill does the job.
Eight guns are finished; on the ones that will be out of sight I leave off the linchpins and use smaller pins, and the breeching rings become half circles.
For the tackles I choose 2.3 mm blocks and 0.3 mm rope; Hans works out that 2.3 mm at 1:64 is exactly the 15 cm of a real gun block.
The first breeching rope is on, the flintlocks turn out to be gunlocks that according to Herby63 were already on board in 1794, and all 28 guns are assembled.
All the breeching ropes are on, but the 5 mm Caldercraft hooks for the tackles are out of proportion; after tips from Piet, Stephan and Jan I order 20 sets of smaller hooks from Cornwall.
The Caldercraft hooks I ordered are slightly smaller than the ones from the kit but still too big; the seizing on the breeching rope I make according to Jan Zwart's method.
The smaller hooks make little difference but I am going ahead with them; the small block I close off with a seizing of 0.1 mm silk thread instead of a knot.
With masking tape, tweezers and diluted PVA glue I find a way of laying the tackle rope on the deck that is neither too neat nor too messy.
After a summer in which only the 84 tackle ropes were prepared, all the guns stand rigged and in line; the wrong blocks from Syren (2 mm) are too small.
All the guns are rigged apart from the deck ropes, and I learn that beeswax ruins the colour of the rope.
The pump assembly is glued in permanently, the capstan returns and the gun deck gets a messenger with eye splices, a lanyard and three home-turned rollers.
The self-assembly blocks from model-shipyard.com work out with my daughter's old craft glue, and from Germany come photo-etched hooks in four sizes, mainly for the upper deck.
All the guns are finally rigged, and after explanations from Jan, Piet and Herby63 about tacks and braces I fit the cleats from the kit in the waist.
