It took me a number of hours to get to this stage. I am not sure how many hours, but I worked on this model for a couple of hours most weekends since I posted the first images. It was very much a trial and error stage to get here.

The one complaint against the kit is that the instructions for 'planking' is not very clear. I think it is assumed that you have done this before. I ended up researching on the www and found some good tips and instructions on how to calculate the tapers and widths of the planks.

I was concerned at this stage because the model looked quite rough and ready - not what I envisioned initially... :)