Item 1.

Glue all boat halves together before doing any collective work.

Item 2 (canvas removed emergency boats).

All of the boats come with the canvas covers applied. We decided to have the two Emergency boats (E.B.s) `open' without their covers.

Once you have glued the two halves together and the glue has set, remove the `canvas' cover.

Do this by using a drill bit about 1/2 the width of the beam of the boat. Drill three holes down the center line.

Once the holes are drilled into the two E.B.s use the sharp tip of a hobby knife and start cutting out the plastic between the holes, working your way out towards the gunwales. Always cut away from yourself and take out little sections at a time rather than a big sliver all at once. This allows you much better control and safety. Eventually you will be able to remove this `canvas', then clean up the edges of the boat's inside gunwales with the hobby knife or small flat file.

Next make seats, cut small strips of sheet plastic at various lengths to span across the boat's interior. Refer to photographs or Ken Marschall's painting in Exploring The Titanic on page 44. You will need to measure these out yourself dependent on how well you cleaned up the edges between the gunwales. Glue to boat.

Paint the exterior of the E.B.s flat white. When the paint has dried paint the interior and gunwales a dark brown.

Item 3 (adding oars).

If you have the E.B.s' interiors open you will need to add the oars across the seating. Apparently there were 4 pair of oars for these two boats (5 pair for the large ones).

We used the lifeboat safety chains from the GMM Skylight kit to make the oars. This kit comes with dozens of safety chains. According to photo references the lifeboat chains were only used on the inboard sides, so this leaves plenty of leftovers.

Trim them off from the GMM `tree' as seen in the E.B. diagram above and lay them across the seats using a CA type adhesive. Once set paint them a wood brown color.

Dan Cherry offers a scratch built alternative. Use Evergreen .010 rod with a piece of K-1 strip glued to the end for the oar paddle. Paint brown. Use a piece of GMM scrap railing for the lashes to these oars

Item 4 (painting the boats' hulls).

Paint the rest of the lifeboats white using Testors flat white.

As seen elsewhere in this Tutorial, make a loop of masking tape with the sticky side out and apply this to a sheet of scrap newspaper (to protect against over spray).

Press the remaining eighteen lifeboats ( 4 collapsible & 14 full sized lifeboats) upside down onto the tape so their bottoms are facing up. The tape holds the boats in place so the paint propellant doesn't blow them around or flip them over. Take this outdoors and spray paint over the boats in a uniform fashion. This will give a more uniform appearance than brush painting them. \

Leave the boats stuck to the tape. This makes for a handy `3rd hand' in the next project.

Item 5 (adding the grab ropes).

There are two approaches to this, either using the GMM kit ropes (recommended) or making your own.

GMM Method:

Paint the grab ropes while they are still on the `tree'. Once done cut them off with a sharp hobby knife.

Remove the 4 collapsible and Emergency boats from the tape as the do not have grab ropes. Keep them safe somewhere.

To mount these to the boats we used a three step process to keep the mess down to a minimum.

Take each full sized life boat and pull them off of the tape. Flip each full sized boat on to one of its sides and stick it back onto the masking tape where its 'silhouette' can be seen. We found that having the bottom of the boat facing us to be the easiest position for applying the ropes.

Apply a small puddle of CA glue onto to your gluing block. Next grab a rope with tweezers by one of its ends and dip the CENTER of the rope into the glue.

Place the center with the glue on it in the center position under the gunwale and allow to set. Make sure the rope is sitting parallel to the gunwale before it dries.

Repeat this process for all 14 boats. Don't worry about the ends of the grab rope sticking up. Once all the centers are attached to one side freshen your CA `puddle' and move on to the next step.

Now with a piece of fine pulled sprue, dip the sprue's tip into the CA puddle and then coat one of the rope's tag ends near either the stern or bow (whichever you find easiest to work with). Then press this tag end down to the boat with a wooden toothpick. Hold until it sets.

Repeat the process for the opposite end. You should now have the grab rope glued to the side of the boat at three contact points and no glue marks showing at all!

Repeat this process for the other 13 boats doing all 26 tag ends. When complete flip the boats over and repeat the center `tacking' and then tag end `tacking' all over again. There may be other or easier methods, but this is what worked for us with the absolute minimum of glue damage.

Alternative Method:

Now if you do NOT use the GMM grabropes another method is to use a very dark sharp leaded pencil and draw the grab ropes on by hand which gives the same visual effect, however, the GMM ones provide for a more 3 dimensional appearance and is recommended.

Item 6 (painting the boats' gunwales).

Remove all the boats from the masking tape and place them right side up. Paint all the gunwales of the 14 remaining boats with a dark brown trim. DO NOT do the four collapsibles!

Item 7 (decals).

We highly recommend Duane Fowler's decals for adding the bow and stern ID plates and the inboard bow capacity plates to the lifeboats. They are hard to work with so here is what we did:

Use tiny scissors (we bought for fly fishing fly tying) and trim all decals as close as possible keeping decal `flash' to a minimum. These are easy to mix up if you cut them out all at once so do each boat separately.

Apply the decal to water and wait until it is ready.

Then slid the decal off on to your wet finger tip finished side up as it would appear on the model. This is important!

Then dab a wooden flat style toothpick into the water and touch the decal so the water on the toothpick lifts the decal from your finger.

Next dab water (or decal set) on to the bow or stern of the boat depending on which decal you are adding. Then place the toothpick with decal into this wet area on the boat. This should cause the decal to pull off the toothpick and adhere to the side of the boat.

The wet section on the boat allows you to shift the decal around if needed for a few seconds.

Item 8 (gluing the boats to the deck).

Make sure that you have all other deck details installed in and around the davits (i.e. belaying bitts, pulleys, hydrants, etc.) before you glue the boats down.

Glue the boats onto the deck BEFORE you paint the canvas covers. Decide for yourself when you wish to do this but be aware that adding the block and tackle could mar the finish.

Once the boats are secured add the safety railings and THEN paint the canvas as discussed below.

Item 9 (adding the safety rails).

On the inboard side of all Boat Deck lifeboats there were three sets of removable railings to stop curious passengers working their way past the boats and into the water below. You can use Tom's Modelworks Misc set or scratch build from spare photo etched railings.

• Note: There are two methods of applying the lines. Cut each length beforehand and then place on the boat's davits or use long lengths, tack them at one end and THEN trim to desired length and secure the other end. The second solution might be easier.

Method 2:

This method depends on you having bought either the GMM or Tom's Modelworks photoetched brass railing kits. Using spare 4 bar panels (you'll need one rail panel per boat) cut the divider post between the 2nd and 3rd rails (i.e. the middle) off. This should leave you with two rectangles made up of rails 1 and 2 plus the post "ends" and another with the 3rd and 4th rails plus post "ends".

Glue a small pulled sprue pulley to the canvas of each boat where the rigging hole is. Flip the rail rectangle up so it is longest in the vertical position. Now glue this to the inboard side of each pulley. When dry, secure the top to the davit arm with CA glue. Paint this rectangle flat military brown to simulate rope.

Repeat this process for each davit/pulley assembly.

Additional davit lines are covered under the RIGGING section.