Hello all,
I have been able to start the work on the cargo deck. At first I thought to leave the deck floor flat with just the engraving but then I thought to give a bit more volume and add all the several rails.
I would like to mention that all these are not placed randomly, they follow the same structure as the B747-8F deck. I was able to gather lots of reference photos so I am trying to reproduce everything I see.
It has been quite difficult to make a joining structure on the inside of the fuselage in order to place the entire deck, but currently it fits well. I had to fine tune and sand down the width to make sure both fuselage halves close properly. In the photos you may see a small gap between both fuselage halves and that is because they are not glued yet, both halves can be closed properly without the deck causing any issue.
The structure under the deck in the nose area will be very important as it will help the deck to be placed properly and will be an area with several details. This area can be seen in the last photo as a darkened area.
The rails have a thickness of 0,6mm which would be translated into approximately 84,6mm in the real aircraft. I think that 8cm would be a close match with the actual railing heights.
Since the engravings and details of the deck/rails are quite small, I was at first thinking to create decals for the anti skid sections only (refer to the black rectangles on the previous project entry), however, I may also be making decals for the rails to highlight their details. It would be a challenge to decal though, due the dimension of these small rails, but I may give it a try.
However, I also keep in mind the 100+ small sections going across the deck, so perhaps a painting technique such as the dry brush would also give a good result instead of adding 100+ tiny decals.
During this week I will be working on new stock and I will start to prepare the next step of the B737 cockpit which I hope to continue and update on the next week.
Best wishes,
Guillem