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It's now time to turn to masting and rigging of the model. For Shipyard kits in particular, the model stops being a card model and becomes more like a wooden ship kit. The kit provides dowels for the mast and yardarm and I'm mostly using these materials.
For rigging, this boxed kit includes linen rigging line, which is very good, but it's plain white in color. I've been coloring the line to be used for the standing rigging (stays, shrouds, etc) using some old Floquil brand rigging stain. I've had this stuff in storage for 20 years and it took a little mixing, but it's still good. The color is called Dark Stockholm Tar.
For the running rigging, essentially the sail handling lines, I was hoping I had some Floquil Light Stockholm tar rigging stain, but I couldn't find any. Instead, I just used some wood dye, mixed to give just about the right color to the line.
As for shaping the masts, they have this kind of three-stepped appearance, with two "shoulders" for the stays to rest on. Rather than try to shape the single mast piece provided in the kit, I decided to use separate pieces of appropriate diameters inserted into holes drilled into the ends of the mast pieces.
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