Decks on. Boats in. Handrails up.

Aboard the Canberra I've finished gluing and clamping the decks into position. Apart from a little bit of touching up, we are there. Well, that and sorting out the alignment of the walkways at the stern.

The boats are fitted too. If you are building the same kit, pay attention here, they are handed. Rudders should face towards the back of the main vessel. Start in the middle too as one or two at one end of the row need to be trimmed a bit as the mounting holes you use want to force two bits of plastic to occupy the same place in the space/time continuum. A touch of the non-sonic scalpel (non-sonic unless you could the swearing when you discover the things don't fit) does the job without the results being visible to the viewer. I've left the front boats out for the moment as they have orange tops - presumably to aid mustering the fleet in an emergency and these need to be painted an satin varnished before fitting.

On the top deck, handrails have been fitted. Ideally I'd liked to have replaced these with something etched but no one appears to produce anything in this area. In lieu of this a bit of scraping has refined them a touch and opened up the holes flashed over in the mould.

Annoyingly the holes they should locate in aren't always in the right place. Usually the discrepancy is 1 couple of mm but enough that if they were used the handrails wouldn't fit properly. As it is there are one or two gaps to fill with microstrip but nothing major.