Identification of HMV Albatross LC Parts

Hello Dave,

yes indeed they are templates for building ladders. You are supposed to glue these 5 parts together first.

Then you place (very carefully) the individual steps in the tiny slots.

The you take one of the side parts of the ladder (sorry missing the proper technical term here).

As it is next to impossible to put glue on the individual steps without connecting them to the template or getting them out of the template again you place glue (I strongly suggest white glue) into the tiny grooves at the side of the ladder and the you connect the side to the steps in the template by pressing the sidy very, very slightly on the steps (if you press too strong, the steps will move in the template and thats it)

This sounds tricky and actually I believe it is almost impossible.

There are 2 possibilities to improve the use of the template:

1) Close the side of one of the parts you circled "1" without putting any glue into one of the tiny grooves. Thus the steps can´t retract when you glue the side-part to them.

Of course now you can use the template only for the first of the two side parts but I believe that once you´ve gotten a clean connection between steps and one side part the second side part is much easier to fix - you can do it without the template.

2) This is hard to describe

Once you´ve put the template together you glue a flap made of a strip of paper on the template so that it covers the the slanted section of the parts you circled "1" -the strip must be more narrow than the template itself. Do not use glue on the slanted part -you will will up the grooves and the template will be spoiled.

If you do the there will be only on (instead of three) sides left, where you can insert the individual steps thus placing them accurate and in a reasonably firm position to have a chance to attacht the side part without muddling the steps beyond recognition.

It still remains a very tricky operation.

For No 2 I have some pictures:

The flap

Flap closed and steps inserted:

You can see this is not an ideal solution because the steps can still move left/right and it is very difficult to align them and nearly impossible to keep them aligned when the sides are glued to the steps.

The rather underwhelming result:

Opening the flap before removing the complete ladder:

Kind regards

Zaphod

Hi Dave,

these parts are ment as an assembly help for the ladders. You can allign the steps with it, but as far as i recall, it didn't work very well. Just have a try.

Another hint: Do not use the yellow funnel. This does not match with the position of the lifeboats. The 'Albatros' was delivered in 1912 with the boats near the wheelhouse, as shown by the model. But shortly after that, they were moved astern to increase the deckspace for the passengers. The funnel changed in the mid 1930's well after the move of the boats.

Cheers

ToKro