Uh Pamir question again

If I were you I'd be inclined to leave these lines off for the time being.  The writers of Heller instruction sheets (who pretty clearly had virtually no understanding of how to rig a ship model) tended to recommend installing various lines like these early in the construction process.  When I'm building a model like that I don't like to install rigging that early.  It gets in the way of subsequent work, and the chances of it surviving for the several months I'll be working on the hull and deck structure are pretty slim.

If it turns out that these things are supposed to represent iron or steel railings, you can represent them with stiff brass wire (or even piano wire) later.  If they're rope and supposed to be slack, you can glue eyebolts into the holes and run the line between them.

Incidentally, reproducing slack rigging line on normal ship model scales is a big challenge.  Thread doesn't act like rope in that respect.  (Stretch a piece of thread out between your hands.  Then move your hands together a few inches and watch what happens.  The thread will not assume a catenary curve - that is, it won't sag like a piece of rope would. You can scale down the diameter of a piece of rope to 1/200, but you can't change the effect of gravity.)  The truth is that in the normal operation of a sailing vessel hundreds of lines hang fairly slack, but most modelers don't represent them that way.  It's a modelers' custom to rig them all taut.  A few people who work on very small scales - the aforementioned Donald McNarry comes to mind - rig their models entirely with wire, and shape it into realistic curves.  That's a technique that takes enormous knowledge and years of experience; I can't do it. 

Prof. Tilley,

Thanks for the attemp to help. I am still searching. No luck. It is hard to continue with the model when I am not sure if these threads should be loose or taut. Perhaps I may have to go with fishing line and keep them loose. If I find they are to be taut, I can warm them up a bit to shrink them. I do hope there is a better alternative than this however.

Robert

It sounds like they may be lifelines or handrails of some sort.  Not having either the kit or a photo of the ship's deck arrangement, I can't be sure.  I suspect when your books come they'll clear this one up.

Those Heller folks had a real gift for bewildering innocent modelers.  That wouldn't be so bad if they (the designers) were reliable.   The problem is that sometimes they figured out ingenious ways to represent things on small scales, whereas other times they incorporated downright irrational features into kits because they simply didn't understand what they were looking at in a drawing or photograph.  Which category this particular example falls into I'm not sure.