Temp stand is a great idea, Carl (@clipper), especially with a ship that is this large. I imagine it gets hard to handle at times. Mine is only about 10 inches long, so much easier to deal with.

Another small set of tasks advancing the build.I am basically doing things to get the hull ready for painting. That means things like removing items that will be replaced eventually with PE parts, identifying and installing parts that I want on the hull before I do this first paint session, filling seams, and improving some details.

The first order of business was making a placement template for photoetch details which will replace items that need to be removed from the model. Since the locations of the molded details will no longer be visible after removal of those details (especially after painting), a template is a must. In this case, a simple pair of paper sheets taped together with a center line drawn on the paper and then marking locations on that centerline for the details (bow, stern, cleats, and deck edge stairs).

Some photoetch details will be added before painting. Others, such as railings and cleats, will be added later in the build to avoid having them break off during construction. The beginnings of the super structure have been added to the deck. In this case, adding this later would provide little benefit as long as it is added before the main superstructure, but adding it now, allows me to fill in seams and do some preliminary PE detailing before I apply paint. This is going to be my guiding principle throughout this build, namely delay putting things on unless they need to be in order to facilitate something later or if their placement later would be a problem. This structure has some hatches PE added and there are some smaller bits of PE I can add before painting.

At the bow, the opening where the anchor chain comes through the hull has a dome shaped pad (? - not sure what it is called). On the real ship, this is quite prominent, however on the kit, it is relatively flat. I decided to scratchbuild a replacement to improve on this. Using a small piece of styrene tubing and some milliput, I made the rough shapes of the domes.

After curing, this was sanded down to the diameter of the tubing and the dome made flatter. Then holes were gradually drilled through the milliput using progressively larger drill bits (to avoid chipping the milliput). Once that was completed, I cut off the pads from each end of the rough part, ensuring that a small amount of styrene tubing remained for gluing to the hull. I removed the original pads molded into the hull and smooth sanded the area and then glued the new pads in place using extra thin cement.

I still want to add propeller shafts and rudder to the hull as well. I will leave off the propellers for now.

Thanks George (@gblair).

For those interested, I have posted my other project that I will be doing concurrently with this one.
https://imodeler.com/groups/the-80th-anniversary-of-the-attack-on-pearl-harbor/forum/topic/shake-and-bake-pacific-jug/

Excellent progress on a certainly massive project, my friend @clipper! Using a template for the PEs sounds a great technique.

Thanks John (@johnb), Spiros (@fiveten), and Alfred (@alfred).

It might seem like a massive project and it may be later, but this first part hasn't been too bad, in fact it almost seems to be progressing faster than my airplane builds usually do. Of course, once I get to that PE work, it will be different. But the work so far has been encouraging to me. I was somewhat reluctant to start for a long time, thinking that it would be really hard to do.

I got the propeller shafts and rudder installed today and the gaps filled. The gaps around the prop shaft "V" stands were quite large. I have a bit of seam work to do on the prop shaft fairings, but otherwise, I am about ready to start painting the hull (I think). I'm waiting on some paint to arrive and I want to test it out on a scrap of the wood veneer before moving forward. I am not sure when the paint will be delivered, hopefully this week, but in the meantime, I'll start looking at other parts of the build as well as the Thunderbolt build.

Some nice progress, Carl @clipper

Thanks guys. I realized that I still have a bit more fitting work to accomplish on the hull decking before I start the painting process. This is fine since I do not have the paint yet anyway. The fitting mostly involves trimming the deck veneer to fit around the various parts that glue to the deck.

That means partially assembling these structures so I can see how they fit. And since most of these structures have PE parts, it involves at the very least, comparing that PE to the molded part so I can remove any molded detail that might be harder to remove after the part is assembled.

I am also finding a fair amount of ejector pin marks on the plastic pieces that need to be filled and sanded before I can assemble the parts.

IN order to compare the PE parts to the plastic parts, I needed to anneal and flatten them out since they had a pronounced curve in them. Breaking out the trusty new professional modeler's annealing tool (a.k.a. a hot plate), I quickly performed that function. It was necessary to perform the annealing a few times on each part with minor flattening between annealing sessions to make it lie flatter on the hot plate coils.

Here is the way these particular pieces will be used. I removed the covered detail from the pieces so that the PE will lie flat. In some cases, the PE detail is somewhat different from Trumpeter's molded detail. I am going to assume it is more correct.

The purpose of the previous PE and annealing work is to temporarily assemble the hangar structure so I can see how it fits with the wood deck veneer. The veneer needs a sliver of material removed so that it is not underneath the structure edge.

I need to double check other areas of the deck for this same requirement before gluing the veneer down and painting the hull.