Mr President We've lost Western Europe

It's been a busy few days. Thursday night I got an emergency service call at a plant in Kent. I did not get home until 1:30 in the AM. Long night. Below you will see where I got to on my Lego globe when the call came in.
The next day I went in and organized a pizza day for the office. After the food I went home because I was tired and had already put in a bunch of time this week. I took it easy for a while and tried to take a nap but it did not stick so I worked on the globe. Here is are two pictures of the midway point.

Here is where I stopped Friday Night.
Here is a view of the inside.
It was at this point that I realized this is going to be a lot tougher that I thought. The instructions that I found on line where just a starting point. They only show the bricks that are seen from the outside. So I had to design my own support for these bricks.

My 1st failed attempt involved making a solid base of the remained of the globe. That worked great until I tried to put the two pieces together.

My second attempt was to build the last nine layers as shown on the plans, but build a support structure at the same time. This worked out much better. The toughest part was building the base for the last two rows. I had to be very carefully because until it was it was complete, if i used to much force I would push the supporting bricks into the interior of the globe and I would have to make a hole and shake them out.

Here is the finished globe:


OK not quite finished. When I was looking over the finished product I noticed that one of the pieces was not aligned well. So I tried to fix and ended up destroying Western Europe.

Looks like I've got some work to do :)