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Landlubber Mike
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Everything posted by Landlubber Mike
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Wow great job on both! Clever work on getting the white decals done - they look fantastic! -
Wow, £20?? That's a very good deal! If it's too intimidating, you can always start out with a less complicated model from AJM or Niko. With your skills, you'll be fine 👍 For resin attached to the blocks, I use a couple of different methods. Side cutters tend to work if the attachment is thin. For larger attachments, I'll use a fine razor saw to saw them off the block and then sand off the remainder. Be very careful if using side cutters as if you don't hold the small part while cutting, it can shoot off into God knows where (don't ask me how I know that). When I saw the dazzle camo from your picture, I had to pick one up. I didn't realize that the British warships had such cool dazzle schemes. AJM has kits of quite a few of them. I missed out on the Ark Royal, but along with the Vindictive, I bought the Jervis Bay and the Argus. Check out the dazzle scheme on the Argus! Will be a lot of fun building the interwar biplanes in 1/700! The good thing is that these 1/700 scale ships don't take as long to build as larger scales, even when you get a detailed PE set. Because I haven't been able to get to my airbrush setup the last week, I've been working on an IJN light cruiser and in a week, have it halfway built already.
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Thanks Rob! I tend to like the 1/700 scale due to the very wide range of subjects available and just having something smaller on the bench. Personally, I really enjoy the challenge of the PE work. The only tricky thing in this scale is that you have to have very steady hands to do the PE work, and you probably need decent eyesight. On the hands I'm very lucky, but the eyesight is certainly worse than it was five years ago but I've found that using a good light source and magnifiers that I can do a decent job. You're ten times the modeler that I am, so I'd say go for it if you are so inclined!
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Thanks Andrew! I still am learning but have slowly gotten better model by model. Did you start the HMS Vindictive yet? I bought it and a couple of other AJM Models 1:700 kits when Squadron had a big sale earlier this month. I’m not sure what to think. The hull is beautiful and the instructions didn’t seem too bad. The resin detail parts need some work though, and a lot of the parts all look the same at this scale. My Albatross kit from Niko was much the same, so hopefully it will similarly turn out well in the end. The Polish mixed media kits (AJM, Niko) are very detailed kits with crisp hulls but the resin detail pieces are some of the weaker parts of the kits in my opinion. The Five Star mixed media kits like the Akitsu Maru and Seishu Maru are opposite - very crisp parts (especially the smaller amount of resin details) but less comprehensive (they seem to take shortcuts and I feel like I’m supplementing the kits quite a bit) and instructions are mostly just pictures of the assembled model.
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Looking really good Alan. You're near the finish line! For the Vallejo water effects products, I was suggesting them mainly because they have colors for the various oceans and seas. I don't know if I'd use those products in a 1/700 diorama setting. I tried using it for my Hannah Ship-in-Bottle build, and I found it was taking forever to dry. That was likely exacerbated by being inside the bottle with little ventilation, but it seems for scale, etc., your approach makes more sense.
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Well Merry Christmas to you Alan Did you get anything else from Dspiae? I have a few of their items and am very impressed. Not cheap Chinese junk, but really well made, solid tools (at least the stuff I have - I've heard mixed reviews about their pen sander).
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Those small boats are fantastic - really well done!
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Thanks Alan! I forgot to add a ladder to the platform so just added that to the mast. The vise is fantastic. It's the Dspiae AT-MV. I saw someone on FB who is a master at 1/700 using it, and so I bought it. Much easier for sub-assemblies to hold them in place while adding pieces to it. I also have two of their other vises that are very good as well, though I haven't used them as much yet.
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I spent some time working on the bridge and mast assemblies the past few nights. For the main mast off the bridge, I wasn't a fan of the two-dimensional mast piece that attaches to the tripod mast. So, I used a tapered brass mast from Master barrels and added a new spar from an Ocean Spirit aftermarket set. I also worked on the rear mast assembly. This was a little tricky as it's hard to figure out what is going on from the few pictures out there. Aoshima's kit shows it as a boom that starts off the base, but I think Five Star is a little closer from the pictures showing the boom starting higher up. I added a pulley system from some of the PE parts included in the kit. For the small mast, again, the part is very two dimensional. So, I cut off the spar from the kit PE part, and then attached the spar to another tapered brass mast piece from Master barrels. It's a little hard to tell from the pictures, but the whole setup is probably about an inch/25mm high. Thanks for looking in!
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Hey Alan, glad you were able to add the structures to the hull without too much trouble. That's the problem with working in the scale - parts are so fragile. I'm working on an IJN light cruiser that has a mixture of wooden and steel decks and I think I'm going to build/paint separate assemblies as an easier way to avoid wasting $100 on Tamiya tape. Of course, that makes painting easier, but then the combining of the assemblies to the hull can be tricky. The seascape is looking really good. For the color, I think you're on point. As a base reference, Vallejo makes different Water Effects/Water Texture for different oceans and seas in the world. Here is the Atlantic one - it's definitely more green compared to the brighter blue of their Mediterranean and Pacific products. Under cloudy/rainy skies, I would expect the sea to look a lot more gray for sure.
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Wow, something different for sure! Very cool! Nice start!
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Arado Ar-196 by Ian B - PLASTIC - German seaplane
Landlubber Mike replied to Ian B's topic in Non-ship/categorised builds
Looks really good Ian! HpH did a resin one-piece canopy if you can find it. They just announced they were going to close up shop, but they may have some stock they are going to want to liquidate. They have some other replacement parts for this kit as well, but at this point I think you're past most of them. -
Well done Andy, I love it! Those newer Airfix kits seem to go together very nicely.
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This looks really good Alan, nice job! I like your approach and might try it out someday, especially for larger waves like you are showing. My approach is very similar, just uses crinkled aluminum foil to build the waves, with a final sheet on top to lessen the sharp angles from the crinkled foil underneath. I haven't seen the paper towel layer approach, but did see someone use art paper so comparable. You might find if you add another layer of paper towel that you will start to lose a lot of the definition in the sea. I found that with using a single layer of foil and even had to build a bit back with gesso. Looking forward to seeing how this comes out!
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Thanks Alan! Most of the pieces went on just fine, but the trickiest was the landing gear. Each side was a single piece of PE that was very fragile. The wheel was located in the middle of it, and you had to fold it over. Then you had to bend the upper half which consisted of two very skinny rods that fit into two locator holes in the fuselage. Then the bottom half had to be folded twice to fit up into the fuselage as well. Took a while to figure out the angles so that it looked fairly accurate, and a couple of them broke from too many folds. Thankfully the FS kit included extras.
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I've turned my attention back to this kit while waiting on some aftermarket for my Seishu Maru. This is a really nice kit, with more scale friendly details than the Aoshima kit on the market, but it's also lacking a bunch of the various details seen in the Aoshima kit, particularly under the deck (which really won't be easily seen). I've mostly completed rounding those details up and have them painted and waiting for inclusion in the kit at this point. The biggest accomplishment was finishing this pack of four Ki-76 (Stella) planes. You have to buy them separately from Five Star, which is a bit of a pain, but they are really nice. Each pack contains four planes. I built all four and will likely include the best ones the deck, with the remainder below deck. These planes are incredibly detailed with 15 separate photo etch parts per plane. Fairly difficult, but you end up with a really nice group of these Type 3 Communication planes in the end. Thanks for looking in!
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Hey Randolph, thanks for looking in. I'm a little stuck at the moment as the kit only provides two of the E1Y planes, and the ship carried up to eight. Pit Road won't sell the E1Y sprues separately, and there is no aftermarket E1Y out there. The closest I could find was a file on Cults3D that I could purchase and print, but without a 3D printer, that won't help me very much. So, while I'm waiting for a solution to appear, I'm trying to work on some of the other 1/700 kits like the Akitsu Maru.
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Hey Alan, looking really great! Lots of fine detail work. I know what you mean about knocking things off. I’m considering in upcoming builds attaching a block to the bottom of the hull (for waterline ships) and sticking the whole thing in a vise. I got two different vises from Dspiae that might help alleviate my problems of knocking things off, etc. I’ve set the hulls on things like old paint jars and plastic shot glasses, but the set up is not very stable. In a vise though, it should be a lot better. The Dspiae ones are a bit pricey, but the vise bases are weighted so they are quite stable. And, having the whole thing in a stable setup would make attaching parts much easier than laying the model on the bench, holding it in one hand, etc. For seascapes, what I do is before any work is outline on a piece of thin cardboard the waterline of the ship using the top half of the hull. Then when I’m ready to do the seascape, I can place the cutout on the base and figure out orientation and build up the sea around where the ship will be. Make it a touch bigger and then all you have to do after you glue the ship into the base is fill the minor gaps. I learned on my first couple that it is tricky to do this after the model is mostly completed because you have the risk with the fragile assemblies and it can be difficult to get a fairly accurate outline of the waterline if you’re trying to keep the model stable on a piece of cardboard while tracing it.
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Absolutely fantastic work Joelle! The small boats are works of art in and of themselves!
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Coming along really nicely. I've always like this subject. Very cool that you are building it with the enhanced plans.
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Great subject Alan! For the missing pieces, I wouldn't worry too much. I'd either look online for potential PE/resin replacements, or just scratch build something close. At 1/700 scale, we tend to be so focused on even the tiniest parts, but in the end, when the model is completed, painted, etc., nobody will be able to look that closely and see that the item isn't quite spot on. So don't torture yourself on this. Hope your father is feeling better.
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