Titanic Part 6

The experience keeps growing; when last I wrote in part 5, I was about to tackle the decks and the sides.  In studying the instructions it became apparent the four funnels needed to be assembled and rigging put in place before attempting to attach the decks.  Not to be out smarted by the instructions, I would glue the fore and aft decks to "A" deck then attached the decks to each other.  Well that was not the smartest thing to do.  Pay attention to the instructions, they sometimes know the proper sequence that should be followed. I soon realized the were correct.
So I backed off and proceeded to finish the boat deck attaching the funnels before rigging.  This also proved not to be the best way to apply rigging to the funnels.
there was so much flexing of the deck assembly that it became impossible to rig the funnels in this way.
As an end result, I glued the decks to the sides and managed with a lot of struggling to get the entire assembly attached to the hull.  It took a lot of pressing, snapping and cuss words before I was able to get this assembly to fit as it should for the most part.  There are still a few areas which will require some additional fitting and I assume more cuss words before I am satisfied with the final fit.

The ship as she sits on my work bench

Now came the problem of how to complete the rigging of the funnels as they are designed to have the rigging attached to the boat deck run up into the funnel laced around and back down through the boat deck and up again into the funnel until the funnel is fully rigged and ending at the bottom of the boat deck where it is to glued to the underside of the deck.
Instead of this being a simple thing to do, I now must rig each funnel by single lines glued first into a hole on the boat deck then run up into the funnel glued and trimmed.  This has slowed the entire process down by a considerable amount.

Two of the funnels are done, two more to go.

In short it sometimes behooves one to follow the kit instructions to a tee.  I say this as an experience modeler.  Many times in the past, due to painting or some special detail it is not always best to follow the instructions. Changing the assembly sequence only makes the modification more difficult to do.  In this case the instructions are correct.