Day 645.

The only thing remaining is to permanently mount the ship to a display board.  Until now, the ship has been held in a keel vise, a specialized vise for model ship building.  That allowed me to spin and tilt the boat while I worked on it.  Now that work is complete, it needs to be moved to its final home.

The boat will be mounted to a 2′ long piece of hardwood.  It will be supported by brass pedestals.  The pedestals have screws that will screw into the bottom of the ship.  I drilled the holes for these screws about a year and half ago, just before painting the hull.

Now I just need to make the board and put everything together.

The board is 2′ long and 8″ wide.  It is hardwood, but I’m not sure what kind.  I cut it length and sanded it down with 220 and 400 grit sandpaper.

A 2′ long board will be used to mount the ship.

I also did a quick pass with a router to give it a nice edge around the top.

The edges are done with a router.

To mount the ship, I’ll be using brass pedestals.  These were purchased from Model Expo.  Note that there are two different heights.  When the ship is mounted, we want the water line to run parallel to the board.  This means that the keel won’t be parallel – the stern will sit lower than the bow.  So, we use two different heights to allow the hull to sit at the correct angle.

Brass pedestals from Model Expo.

Once the board was stained, I drilled holes at the proper locations and installed the pedestals.  The locations were taken from the holes on the bottom of the ship that I made last year.

The board is stained and the pedestals are installed.

The pedestals have slots in them that will hold the keel.  The ship is placed into these slots, and the screws are tightened from the bottom of the board.

The keel of the ship rests in the pedestals.

Next I’ll be installing the engraved name plates.  My wife has a computer controlled industrial engraver for her business, so I had her engrave these for me.

Engraved name plates.

A plate was mounted on the board, on either side of the ship.

Name plates installed.

And that finishes the mounting!  (And the build!)

The completed, mounted ship.