Just realised that I forgot to show the gunport lid topping lifts. A blackened 0,3 mm copper wire wound around a 1 mm needle and cut into rings.
For the next steps I skipped the tweezers and used fine pliers from the electro department, thus reducing the free flights of the parts enormously !
After some tests I did like follow: As the thread was to thin to do a real splice, I held the ring with the pliers ...
... some CA in the U-turn of the tread and twisted counter clockwise ...
.. to get a well enough splice imitation.
Then positiond the ring, hooked in ...
... closed with the pliers ...
... and the lift is in place :-)
There are still the small leather tubes that protect the lifts entering the hull.
The original idea was to imitate those with diluted PVA but now I wanted to try something more tricky.
Some time ago I saw a trick in the WW1 biplane section, heating up a Q-Tips tube and pulling it, resulting in ultra thin tubes as the ratio in between the hole and the outer wall stays the same during the process.
As I wanted the tube to be black, I took a black sprue, so I prepared a 4 mm sprue by drilling a center hole of 2 mm, fixed toothpicks on its ends ...
... and slowly heated it up and pulled to the wanted diameter ...
... then cut 3 mm pieces and fiddeld them on a 0,1 mm copper wire to avoid unwanted escapes. In the front the test topping lift.
Then drilled 0,7 mm holes for the tubes pointing 45° upwards, inserted the tubes, glued them in and cut them to the necessary length ...
... used a needle to reopen the squeezed holes, put the lift in and glued it by fixing with the needle.
And it looks like this:
With a little more practice it will for shure look even tidier macro wise, but for the naked eye it already works :-)
And for the next projects I will do the real splice, i promise ;-)
Cheers, Daniel