This is part 2 of the story - see part 1 for the backstory of why I built this in the first place. The first step was to get everything out of the box and inspect. Then I did a thorough reading of the instructions and formulated my plan for proceeding. I wasn't building the Oriskany, I was using this as the base, and building the Bon Homme Richard as she appeared in the 60's, so I always had reference photos at hand to make sure I stuck as closely to that goal as possible. The lower part of the hull came in one large piece, but a lot of the upper portion needed to be put together and then attached (platforms, lifeboats, elevator guides, etc.). Nearly everything had some extra flashing (plastic overflow from the injection molding process) around them so each piece had to be carefully trimmed with an X-acto blade before gluing and attaching. That definitely made things a bit more time consuming.
Next I trimmed out the deck and set that aside. Then I built the control tower which had a lot of very delicate pieces so I set that aside until nearly the end of the build to avoid anything getting broken off or damaged.
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