As you could see in previous post, that practice bottle looked rather crisp on the bottom, unfortunately the real bottle didn't. During my first filling with sand, I had the idea that a more liquid mixture would create a very flat bottom. I therefore made my mixture way too liquid by adding too much water (which eventually floated above the settled sand. However during that first filling, I made some errors in moving the bottle, which meant the water swooshed around a bit. The water wasn't pure of course, it was mixed with acrylic, and this left some nasty smudges which I can't seem to be able to remove as easily as pure acryclic would be.
I therefore decided to add more sand, with a much heavier consistency (much like the small practice bottle), to cover those smudges.
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File comment: Smudges
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Here you see the fresh mixture, with a rather heavy consistency due to more acrylic, less water and more sand. You also see how I insert the T-shaped tool to shape the sand mixture, from the middle to the end of the bottle I can use it flat, more towards the neck, I need to turn it and flatten the surface with the small extension.
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Most of the smudges are covered now, so it's time to measure things up to see how high I can lift that crane. I estimated the height, then use a piece of scrap styrene at that length and insert it. The bottle has a rather conical shape on the inside, so near the neck it is wider than at the end. This was also visible on the sand layer of course. This way I approximately know how high I can make the crane.
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The plan is to sit the hull on the bottom with the legs still bent, then get the crane over the aft leg and afterwards raise the hull on the legs. Given my construction that also means the hull will have to go higher during the leg bending and then lower again a few mm over the legs to lock them. That means the crane can not be built to have the full height of the bottle, otherwise I'll get stuck, being unable to deploy the legs.
Doing it the other way around, first the legs and then the crane, is also not an option as the angle to topple that crane over the aft leg will be difficult to accomplish without hitting the bottle top.
On the model itself there are some very typical markings on top of the legs, the white and red stripes. In this scale they would be around 0.3mm to 0.5mm high with the red stripes being thinner than the white ones.
Since I would be unable to paint something straight and consistent like that, I decided to go for a mechanical solution, I would mount discs of 0.3mm (painted red on the outside) alternated with discs of 0.5mm (painted white on the outside) on top of each other. These discs having the same diameter as the legs. I then measured a stack of discs and reduced the length of the legs to compensate for the extra height. Somehow the discs edges weren't perfectly smooth, eventhough I scraped the with a scalpel. Some glue remains also damaged the paint, so I had to make some touch ups afterwards after all.
They aren't perfectly fitting, but from a small distance it came out quite convincing. The top plate of the legs will have to be painted light grey along with more platforms and decks later on.
As you can see I also started the base of the crane and some platforms and structures are starting to litter the deck (I was surprised to find out how many structures there actually are, I thought it was more "clean").
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SI19.jpg [ 201.27 KiB | Viewed 1478 times ]
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), but may completely fail when being bottled (glue dried before I can mount the pieces together, melting by the epoxy etc. 
