Hubac's Historian
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Here is a decent back-lit shot that shows how well the CA fog disappeared: I’ve modified the supporting pilasters for between the middle and upper balconies. Owing to all of the modifications and scratch-work, the height between balconies is a little different. This necessitated adding plastic, top and bottom, to make up the difference, but I also added a strip of .032 to the backs of these because I felt they were too spindly and slight looking to be doing the support work they represent: The other little side project was to create a glue lip to make it easier to mount the upper balcony bulwarks; I did this with a bit of the smallest quarter-round strip that I had: With that in place, it was much easier to make a cardboard template that followed the camber of the balcony, at the appropriate raking angle, fore and aft. This also enabled me to lay out the 3/32” pilasters. I should mention that my final attempt at heat-bending the stock balcony bulwark was a failure. I filled a large pasta pot with water and heated to a near boil. I rubbed some olive oil on the side of the pot, and attempted to gently induce a curve. Unfortunately, there’s no getting around the fact that the ornamental spindles of the railing are much thinner than the caprail. As such, they flash malleable much sooner and then become irreversibly distorted. Given that, I realized there was no way to get around making the balcony bulwarks from scratch. For whatever reason, this is a detail that was very difficult to draw. Irrespective of what exactly is happening with the pilasters below, the only way to draw a repeating element like this is to ensure that the panels for the spindles are all the same uniform size. After much re-drawing, I got the port half down to an acceptable draft, which could be improved upon with the making of the thing: For some reason, I just could not get the spacing right for the first panel, starboard of center. So, I made a mirror photocopy of the port side and this seemed to work perfectly. The guaranteed symmetry between sides also helps smooth over some of the hand-drawn imperfection of the thing: As I say, I’ve found that, if I can get the drawing layout reasonably close, then I can bring it home with the tools. My drawing is no worse than the stock rendering of this detail, so that’s a go for me.
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- heller
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She’s rounding into form beautifully, J.D.
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I will say that these kind of clamps are worth the small investment, as they have good clamping pressure and are non-marring. You will find many applications for their use. Without clamps, I would be inclined to use moderately quick-set CA glue and hold with finger pressure until they set. That would not be ideal, on the other hand, if you have already joined the fore and aft bulwarks together; not enough open time. The problem is that these parts have to flex a fair amount to fit into their rabbets. This is why I used additional glue tabs, both so that I had something more substantial to clamp to and a broader glue surface-area for a stronger bond.
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- Le Soleil Royal
- Heller
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Just incredible!
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I’m a firm believer that we’re just on the periphery of some of the most galvanizing and creative music that we’ve seen in decades. Unrest has a way of releasing those lions into the wild.
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This looks far better than most efforts, Vic! I think I hear Coltrane somewhere off in the middle distance..
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This is just an impeccably finished piece of work and a well-deserved victory lap!
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- winchelsea
- Syren Ship Model Company
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I’m sorry for the sad news, John. I’m hoping for better days ahead for you and your family.
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I’m not exactly sure, but given that gasoline will dissolve CA, and petroleum jelly is a petroleum product, I suppose that is sufficient to remove the fog/mist.
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Given that this balcony doesn’t wrap to the quarters the way the middle balcony does, I thought it would be easier to first attach the corbels. Fitting these is a little tricky because they toe-in toward the centerline, a little, and they have to match the raking angle of the quarter gallery, fore and aft, and they have to be beveled athwart-ships to match the camber of the balcony platform. I thought I had done a pretty good job of matching all the angles, however the outside corbels looked a little droopy: Especially the port side: The solution was to add a piece of .030 styrene to the tops of the outside corbels and re-fair until the angle of the balcony platform matched that of the quarters. The hardest part of this was paring away the glue squeeze-out and repairing the paint. The window plate is probably the thing that gave me the most problems. It is very fragile, and I broke both doors off at different times. Then, when I CA’d the acetate in-place, I developed a little bit of CA frost on several of the window panes: I probably could have avoided this problem if I had either used a quick-set CA, or used an accelerant. I like the medium-set CA glues because they give you a small window to make sure the part is correctly positioned. The frost blooms were not super noticeable, but they were nonetheless disappointing. I kind of wanted to scrap the piece and start over, but that would also necessitate casting new pilasters in resin, as I did not have another scrap stern plate to pull from. Well, fortunately there’s a simple solution to this problem, and it works like magic. One approach would be to dissolve the CA with gasoline and re-paint/re-built. Or, I could simply paint a little petroleum jelly over the blooms and let them sit for 5-10 minutes. Then, I cover the head of a q-tip with a t-shirt scrap and wipe the PJ off the surface. An un-covered Q-tip gets into the corners. This simple trick worked perfectly! The next hurdle of this window plate was that I had pretty radically underestimated how much needed to be trimmed from the window edges so that they would fit within the transom framing. The only way to trim these, after they had been glued to the plate, was to grind the edges with a diamond-coated bur and sanding sticks. This was tedious, and I managed to dislodge one pane, but I somehow avoided breaking the plate, so I kept going. The next thing that had to happen was cutting back the center pilaster so that the Arms of France would not intrude into the space for the big tafferal carving: Again this is difficult to achieve without breaking the window plate because the blue plastic of the kit window pilasters is, for lack of a better word, chewy. With all of that out of the way, I could finally glue-in the balcony platform, and plank-in the transom bulkhead: There remain a pair of supporting balusters that I have to fit between the middle balcony rail and the upper balcony platform. Now, I can paint the transom planking red and figure out whether I’ll be able to salvage the kit railing, or whether I will have to make one from scratch. I’ll get all of that together, and then I’ll go back to the head to complete the headrail installation and head grating. That may be all I manage to accomplish before the show, but that will be significant progress, since the last time I showed the model. Thank you for looking in!
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So true! I don’t understand what is happening with maritime museums and their collections of ship models. What the public is able to view, these days, is comparatively spare.
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Thank you for posting that link, Shipman. It is fascinating how the model maker did not attempt to fill-in the blanks in the decor. I can only imagine that the plan was to make carvings for the model as they made their way onto the actual ship. Somewhere, I have pictures from my own Science Museum trip, back in 1993. It would be interesting to see whether the model had changed in that span. I’ll keep you in mind, if I think to look for them in the near future.
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The leafing is coming along beautifully, Bill!
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Shipman, is this the Vasa model at the Science Museum with a telescope to the interior?
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I have to say - I really like the Airfix St. Louis. It’s a fantastic basis for a really good scale model.
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John, if you post a build log I will happily follow along. I am always interested to see what people do with this kit. I really like that you filled-in the butt joints of the wales. This is a simple upgrade and it makes a tremendous difference.
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Thank you, Mark. My mother was a great lover of puzzles and I suppose I have that gene too because that is exactly what Soleil Royal represents for me - a fragmentary puzzle. I’ll never find all of the pieces that fell off the table and are now hiding in the interstices of the furniture and flooring. I do enjoy looking, though.
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Sounds like it would be a good idea, Shipman, and another part of clearing away all of the interior bulkheads.
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Yes, John, I have been very lucky that this project has attracted the attention of such a diversely talented group. I guess, at the end of the day, we all like our painted ladies 😏 I’m intrigued by your choice of avatar, John. Le Fleuron by Jean Berain: Are you planning a scratch-project of this ship? As for the question of removable panels that conceal gun ports, you are spot-on. The lowest tier of 3 lights, where the functional toilet resides, are all false lights. The forward panel likely conceals an additional gun port. The middle two lights, in the amortisement, are also false lights - the forward, of which, could also be an armed port. As a side note, I kinda wished that I had done all of the stern lights in this stylized black. The upper tier of balcony lights is giving me fits, at the moment, but I’ll address that more fully in the next post. The only real light in the quarter gallery is that of the Captain’s cabin on the quarter deck. Interesting side note: I had always assumed that this was the Admiral’s cabin, and that Tanneron had perhaps incorrectly placed the crenelated bulkhead on the wrong deck, when it should reside on the main deck below. Well, as with so many of my early assumptions, that proved to be wrong. The insight comes from the survey drawings of the cabins. These drawings, which include pre-refit drawings of the three cabins, as well as post-refit drawings with the new 6-window layout, illustrate dimensionally that the Captain’s cabin must always have resided on the quarter deck. I discovered these, dare I say, facts through a closer reading of Guy Maher’s research document. I wish I could take credit for it, but that is all Guy Maher. And, so, this is why Guy posits that Tanneron perhaps intended to build a model of SR as she first appeared upon launching; the framing of the stern that his model shows reflects the rather severe tumblehome that the pre-refit cabin drawings dictate. Tanneron chose a 5-window layout, as opposed to the five window + 2 half-light layout of the pre-refit great cabin. As discussed in earlier posts, Tanneron was not a stranger to simplifying window layouts on his other Musee models - see L’Agreable. Another assumption of mine has been that Tanneron adapted Berain’s design to fit within the reduced area of this taller, more narrow stern. Perhaps, though, at the time he made this model he had access to the mythical Puget drawing which was, itself, a reworking of the LeBrun conceptual drawing. Guy suspects that this drawing may still exist somewhere in the archives, but he has not yet located it. I have long believed the Tanneron model is a composite of the ship from 1670 and the second ship of 1693, as it shares distinct construction characteristics of both epochs. The quarter galleries share the overall shape of the 1690’s and beyond (see Louis Quinze model), however, their fully open, terraced design is an artifact of the 1670’s. That Guy is one sharp guy! I can’t post a link to it directly, but if one were curious to see his particular vision of the ship, just Google: “Guy Maher, Soleil Royal 1671” In my next post, I will detail my travails with my stern. Oh, and my liquid bitumen finally completed it’s epic pilgrimage from the shores of England! I’ll be able to resume work on the head soon.
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He must be doing okay because he continued to work on the St. Louis, which is nearing completion.
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Really cool card model! I will happily follow along.
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