I'm not sure how necessary this step is with a kit of this quality, but as I am waiting for further installments I am not losing any time anyway. Doing it is also in line with my ground rules in that I am not losing anything by doing it, but moving foward with mis cut pieces could prove disastrous.
On to business. The first step is to take a sharp pencil and trace around the bulkhead:
I then carefully measure the centre line of the bulkhead by taking two measurements across the width of the bulkheads, halving these measurements, marking 2 points and drawing a line through these two points.
The traced shape is then carefully cut out.
By folding the piece of paper in half along the centre line I can then check is the edges line up. If the piece was not symetrical (i.e. mis cut) the edges would not line up correctly and I would be able to mark on this tracing where material needed to be removed to even them up.
As you can see the first bulkhead I checked was pretty near to perfect so it got my mildy ironic seal of approval.
It is worth remembering that there is plenty of room for human error in this process, so a certain amount of error could be tolerated. For example, the thickness of the pencil leads to slightly incorrect tracing. My cutting skills are not up to much and certainly my method for marking the centre line has a lot of potential for error. However I think that it will be sufficient to highlight any major errors in the cut and so I won't be trying to make adjustments down to fractions of millimetres.I am also going to have a go at dry fitting the first few bulkheads that I have in case they need any adjusments to fit into the false keel. I will probably post again once I have checked and fitted the 5 bulkheads that I currently have.
Keep on trucking!
Jonny.
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