Thanks for the comments and good wishes. The adults had a nice party thanks and the birthday girl was, of course, oblivious
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And so we come to the rivets for the vertical ribs, and it is these bad boys. I have chosen pins because I can just poke them into the plastic and the foamboard behind without any unsightly glue marks.
The heads are 0.99mm diameter which by my rudimentary maths makes them the scale equivalent of an inch and a half, which I think is about right ,looking at the pics I have. They weren't cheap but I think they are the least painful method.
In the absence of any more considered research I have decided that they were probably spaced 6 inches apart, and that the ribs would probably be 3 feet apart,which would be 26mm at 1-35 scale.
So if I use strips of 25mm masking tape as my spacer that will be close enough for me
Continuing my laissez faire approach to accuracy I marked the vertical spacing at quarter-inch intervals,which is 6mm-ish. By my previous logic at 6 inches or 150mm it ought to be 4.2mm, but I didn’t care,and it would have upped the rivet count to at least another pack....
I then spent 4 hours drilling 1034 holes (OMG that makes me literally a rivet-counter!) with a 0.35mm drill bit (or five...). During this operation my minidrill (not a Dremel) decided to malfunction, requiring dismantling and re-soldering a loose connection to the switch. I have an alternative but the chuck doesn’t accept a 0.35mm drill!!
So that’s where the hull is at the moment- you will see that I have added a couple of dents, but not to the extreme state of the present-day ship. I assume they are caused by the action of tugs-these are near the bow.
As always, thanks for following along
Neil
you best lay down in a dark room 
