8. Rigging

I used fine steel wire for the rigging, since the kit-supplied cotton thread was out of scale, the wrong colour, and much too fuzzy. I cut apart the molded insulators, drilled holes, and connected them together with metal wire. Brass PE tensioners were put on the wires on either side of groups of insulators.

Attaching the wires to the tower required a bit of ingenuity and scratchbuilding: narrow styrene strips with metal rings were attached to the mounting brackets on the tower, and then tiny scratchbuilt turnbuckles were added. After the cables were installed and strung together, I added antenna jumper wires to span the insulator groups, connected the antenna lead at the front of the tower to the cable, and connected the two rear antenna leads from the rear antenna conduit pipes (rear of verandah) to the rear cables. After that, I used Gütermann Dekor thread to add a tensioner rope between the rear cables, looped through the verandah railing.

For the rope cables between the hull side railings, I used Gütermann Dekor thread (#9585) which is a steel-like colour. This thread is very fine, has a slight metallic sheen, and most importantly is not ‘fuzzy.’ Gütermann Thread (from Germany, no less) has a wide range of threads that are well suited to modeling.

For the cables spanning between the forward diving plane braces and the hull, I used Gütermann black nylon thread (#000).