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Hi All, I started this in the Flying Boats and Float Planes II GB and didn't finish it, so I've brought it across here. The full story is here and there's a summary below. The S23 C-Class Empire Boat was designed in the 1930s in response to an Imperial Airways requirement for an aircraft to transport airmail and passengers across the far-flung British Empire. At the time a long flight consisted of a series of relatively short legs, and along the routes there were neither runways nor infrastructure to support land planes, so seaplanes were preferred because they could use existing facilities in harbours. Shorts decided to build a modern monoplane, it is said, after watching the DC-2 and DH-88 in the McRobertson Air Race to Australia. Shorts produced a number of related designs: the S30 (re-engined Empire Boat); the Maia (a design based on the Empire Boat to launch the Mercury sea plane); the S26 G-Class (a larger version of the Empire) and the S25 Sunderland military flying boat. The Sunderland had the similar wings and tail surfaces to the Empire, so in preparation for this build I hunted down a cheap "spares or repairs" kit on Ebay: The tail surfaces were cut down a tad to represent the S23 tail and the mounting structures were borrowed too: The engines from the Airfix Sunderland are of their time (1958) and took a lot of work (and a cast of a FROG Blenheim engine) to knock into shape. I wasn't fancying doing four of them! At SMW, Wonderland Models were selling scrapped Italeri sprue trees in a big rummage box - quite by chance I found and bought a couple of Sunderland sprues with modern engines and other details for £4. Still can't believe my luck! You can see the original and modified Airfix cowlings at the top: I briefly thought about modifying the Sunderland fuselage to make the S23 but, like the man said when asked for directions in Ireland, "I wouldn't start from here". So, out with the one set of trustworthy plans and start cutting plastic: Mark the bulkhead edges with a sharpie, stick them on the profile and fill with balsa: Then start filling it out to shape with two part car body filler: And get sanding! I really hadn't thought about what to do after that. So I decided to use the form as a male vacform mould, this being the simplest approach. My teeny weeny canopy vacform box (about 3" square) wasn't going to hack it, so I placed an order for some A3 1mm/40 thou card and built a vacform box to match - 280 1.5 mm holes and lots of internal struts to stop the box sucking in: I drilled some holes in the valleys and inside corners around the float surfaces on the mould to let the plastic suck into the hollows, and on the later attempts, oiling the mould with peanut oil really helped to reduce mould damage and ease separation. Staples and heatproof tape to hold the plastic in place and lots of attempts of varying levels of success (well 5 actually because that's how many sheets of A3 1mm plastic I bought): So, that's the work to date. Since then I've been doing bulkheads: I am making this build up as I go along - I might do windows and doors next, or wing spars, or cockpit, or something else... Thanks for looking, Adrian