Subject:
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Splitting Hulls & Decks
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.pirates
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Date:
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Sun, 24 Feb 2002 23:47:51 GMT
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Highlighted:
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(details)
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Viewed:
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1766 times
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I finally had a go at separating the hulls and decks of two of my narrow
ships. In case anyone wants to know, here's how I did it:
Tools: Small Phillips head screwdriver, round ended knife (ideally the width
of the blade is slightly less than two studs).
Ships: One dark grey hull/black deck bow and stern (Flybo), one white
hull/blue deck bow and stern (Armada Flagship). (My hulls were not glued or
welded, but YMMV)
Method: Pick a bow. Undo the two screws. They're tight, and you don't want
to damage the heads, so press hard as you unscrew.
Then the tricky bit: turn the hull over and you see what looks like a 2x2
brick of the deck colour set into the hull. VERY CAREFULLY insert your round
ended knife between the brick-like part and the hull toward a side (I used a
butter knife). Push it in as far as it will go (or until it comes out the
slot on the other side). Then take the knife out, and again, VERY CAREFULLY
insert the knife on the other side, and push.
This process should remove a small portion of the tab which holds the deck
to the hull. Now begin to pry the deck from the hull. There should be no
need to use any tools to do this.
If the deck and the hull don't seperate, repeat the knife insertion to
remove slighly more of the tabs.
Once the deck and the hull are seperate, repeat the procedure for the other
bow and the sterns (remember, 4 screws in a stern).
Even trimmed, the remnant tab, together with the 2 or 4 screws holds well
enough to be indistiguishable from unmodified hulls (except for the colour
of course....).
It took me about 40 minutes to seperate and rejoin the four hull pieces, but
that included a lot of experimentation (eg knife vs flat bladed
screwdriver). The bows seemed a bit tricker than the stern (possibly because
of less leverage). I put one scratch of the base of the white hull, ABS is A
LOT softer than steel.
Now that I've worked out how to do the hull/deck switch, I'm less inclined
to try vertically splitting hull parts, simply because the inboard join
between the hull and the deck will be significantly weakened (relying on
friction joins on either side of a 2x2 equivalent). Of course, glue could be
used... but I'm not quite willing to try that yet.
And the colour combinations? White hull/black deck is great. Dark grey
hull/blue deck takes a bit of getting used to (but is not bad once you do
get used to it).
Hope this helps someone.
Cheers
Richie Dulin
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