Hi,
Work has been a little hectic lately, and I've been having some trouble with my Tablet, so I've only been able to work on my model a little bit every couple days or so. Recently though I was able to start putting some of it together and make some real progress.
Overall I went ahead and sanded off most the surface detail from the decks and hull. Next I went ahead and used some Squadron Green Putty to fill in some gaps, and indentations and such in the hull and decks, especially where I may have been doing alot of mods. One thing in particular I used the putty for was to thicken up the bulwarks on the cargo deck. The way the model is cast, the existing bulwarks there are part of the hull pieces, but they are a little thinner than the rest of the structure around them. Since I modified my cargo decks to make them longer I either would need to try and thin up the hull edge along the main deck to make it the same thickness as the existing bulwarks, or thicken up the existing bulwarks to make them the same thickness as the rest of the hull. Overall it seemed like it would be easier to thicken stuff up with putty than to try and sand some stuff down. And since the bulwarks on a wooden ship might likely be thicker than on a steel ship I figured thick ones probably wouldn't look too unreasonable.
Next I gave both the hull sides and some of the deck pieces a coating of both Mr. Dissolved Putty and then Mr. Surface Primer, with some light sanding done in between to try and help smooth out the surfaces. After that I glued the two sides together and added the Poop Deck and some internal stiffening to the hull to help pull the two sides together and make everything a little stiffer, because there appeared to be a little warping in my hull pieces. After that I ended up having to do just a little additional filling and sanding on the bottom of the hull forward to help cover up a small amount of misalignment. At this time I also glued in the Focsle deck to help make the front end of the ship a little stiffer, since I intend to give it a couple more coats of primer and surface prep, with some light sanding in between.
I also added a couple small "angle" shape pieces of styrene in way of the cargo decks to help support those decks once I finish them up.
Anyway, below are a couple images showing the top and bottom of the hull with the focsle and poop decks installed with some of the other parts that I am currently working on alongside. In the overhead view you can see some fo the extra reinforcements that I added to help make the hull stiffer and to reinforce the glue joints, I also added another image showing the model from above with the partial cargo decks and superstructure decks in place, just to show how the "angles support the decks.
Pat