Sophie's Revenge - The rebuild begins - Quarterdeck & Poop Deck

Okay, there is nothing like a dull conference call to get you motivated to do something else...anything else.

I decided that I would start closer to the top of the ship and work my way down to the gundeck. There is a lot of detail that I would like to include in the captain's cabin and I need to figure out how things might go or might not go together. I also want to add the navigation cabin, which sits above the captain's cabin. Its floor will form the ceiling of the captain's cabin and because of that it will also need to be removable.

So I kind of stuck the whole section back together and got out a couple of steel rulers to see what I was really looking at needing to do. I think the pictures can probably explain it better.

I'm using the rulers to extend the quarterdeck all the way to the back of the ship. This will create a ceiling for the Captain's Cabin and the floor for the Navigation Room.

One problem becomes immediately apparent. The new floor is going to cut off the top portions of the rear windows as well for the back side windows on either side.

Here I'm trying to elevate the blue ruler to the correct height. It looks good initially but its a very rough look.

To get an idea of how high the back deck needs to go to incorporate a door, I used popsicle sticks (jumbos) to raise the whole thing up the necessary height. This would match the height of the deck below (where there is a door). That's just over a 1/2".

Stairs would need to be added to and extended a door would be added and the trim would have to be redone. Its almost a complete rebuild. That's okay, I was expecting that.

Here is the poop deck. I needed to make a template and since everything will be moved I cut off the edges that would slot into the ship's sides.

The template, traced off the deck with the edges removed

A successful cutting attempt. It rarely goes this well the first time through. This piece is just a tad bit thinner than the deck and will work fine as a guide. Eventually it will be replaced so I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.

Here its temporarily glue to the quarterdeck. Its to long, but I expected that, so I trimmed it down to fit the length.

This is what I will be dealing with. I built a little piece to go under the template to make sure it stays the same height as the rest of the deck. Here you can clearly see where the deck will intersect the windows.

My initial thought is to create benches that would go over the window areas (maybe cabinetry since its the navigation room) and create skylights (if you are a car buff check out the old 4 door Land Rover Defender, the one in Death in Paradise is the model I'm thinking of,  and you will get an idea of what I'm thinking about doing).

Raising the back deck up again this time with the floor template in place. I'm really going to need to increase the height of the ship sides and stern.

Its hard to see but there is a blue line marking out where I need to cut the deck off to make it removable. The stairs and the bulkhead will help keep the whole thing together and mostly in the right shape. There needs to be quite a bit of detail added under this deck, its going to represent the "officer" cabins. Although calling them cabins is pretty generous.

14 pictures, that's like 14,000 words that I didn't have to type. I need to work out the interior details and how all that will go together. There are three main things that need to be taken into account here. There are two cannons housed in this section, along with the mizzen mast and the ropes for the steering.