Getting Busy

So all of my final boats besides a few which i will have to discard have now been fired so i need to glaze them and also make templates for the copper decks that are going in every boat (thats 22 boats). I started out by numbering all my boats on the inside using glaze so it wouldn't burn off and then making a paper template for each boat which i can then number so they'll match up at the end. ideally all my casts would be perfect and identical and id only have to make two templates but they're not so i need a 'custom' template for every single boat.

I numbered them off with roman numerals which seemed easier at first because the brush was a bit thick to make Arabic numbers legible, however in the end it was just a massively confusing waste of time because i have to convert the numbers in my head each time and It just got confusing when i was making my metal decks.

I dont know if ive mentioned it before either but i didnt have enough time to make a copper cabin for all 20ish boats, so I decided to cast them from clay and then ill epoxy glue them onto the copper decks. i had 3D printed some cabin blanks and I did use one of those in the end but i made wooden blanks for the other two that were slightly bigger. The wooden blanks were just pine which i sanded on the disk sander to get tapered edges. Below you can see that i had made 6 copper cabins and 14 ceramic ones, however I had more clay ones in the kiln to make up my numbers.

i then went and cut out as many copper decks as i could get done that day, im slightly worried about the clay shrinking even more when I glaze fire and then they wont fit however its an easy fix because if that happens I'll just have to sand round the perimeter of the deck with the dick sander again. I made the decks by gluing the templates to sheet copper and then roughly cutting around them with the sheet metal guillotine and then a pair of shears. I then aggressively sanded the edges down on the belt and disk sander, checking for fit as I went, until the decks fitted in place. Then i patinated them and soldered on the brass masts and cranes. Heres a boat so far, just imagine the blue glaze for now.