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After being contacted by the customer this restoration arrived a couple of months ago having suffered severe damage in transit to the owner, as you can see from the photos both the ship and the case had suffered. Once I had spoken with the customer length the job to restore her to her former glory could begin, the first task was to work out what bits if any were beyond repair and would need to be replaced. I decided to carry out the work on the hull first which needed extensive repairs to the bow section this was done with very careful filling and sanding, this work also required the gold line around the ship to be removed and replaced with a new one from Becc supplies. Once the hull had been prepared the name plates etc and other hull markings were very carefully masked off prior to painting. After a bit of research, the correct paint colour was obtained so the repaint could be completed followed by very carefully removing the masked areas and left to dry thoroughly before applying the new gold hull line and a coat of varnish thus completing the re-paint.
The next stage would be to carry out all the repairs to the deck fittings and especially the hand rails which had suffered some pretty bad damage, after a lot of re-shaping they could be refitted into the correct places on the deck and carefully re-painted to match. Most of the remaining fittings were straight forward to refit and paint these included the ships boats and the rear sundeck area, these were then repainted. On the main upper deck due to the extensive damage I decided to replace all the whip aerials and repaint them thus completing 90% of the restoration.
The final task with the restoration at the customers request was to replace all the decking detail transfer, as you can imagine this would certainly prove a challenge which I was more than happy to take on. Firstly, I painted a colour sample on a piece of timber and sent it away to be matched and shortly after received the new deck transfer on water slide which I have to say was spot on. Now the new deck detail transfer had arrived I could set about cutting out some very fiddly templates for the areas to be done, as you can imagine this certainly was very fiddly. I then cut out the new deck detail against these templates checking the correct orientation as I progressed and then very carefully applied the new detail, the result was very pleasing and certainly enhanced the end result.
So, after a final check over the restoration of the Hebridean Princess she was ready to be collected by her proud owner.
One other little job with this restoration was to refurb the display case which had suffered as well, this included removing both ends and replacing them with some new shaped acrylic then followed by a lot of polishing to shine up the cut edges and remove 99% of the scratches.
Overall this restoration certainly had some challenges but the end result speaks for itself.
