king derelict

I returned to the base and added several layers of toilet paper soaked in diluted white glue. I pushed the resulting pulp around to form some waves with a bit of direction and a start of a bow wave and wake. This was allowed to dry overnight, This morning I started to add the basic colours. I used craft acrylics in light blue, peacock blue, navy blue and black. I put lines of teh light blue on the high points of the base and then laid the darker colours as stripes in between. With a wet brush I merged the colours together and stippled the light blue to reduce its presence. I'll let this dry before dry brushing white onto the wave caps, the wake and adding to the bow waves. Its a bit more boisterous than I originally planned but I quite like how its developing so I'll stick with it. The trick will be in deciding when enough is enough! Thanks for looking in Alan

Another great set of figures OC . The guy on the left reaching into his pouch is extra good. Alan

The masts look terrific. Good ideas with the toothpicks. I struggle to find good ways to secure parts for painting and I hate picking blue tack residue off the parts. Thanks Alan Alan

UPS brought a package from TAP Plastics. Several pieces of cut to order acrylic sheet to make a display case for Montrose and another case for general waterline models. As always great service and fast turn round. It worked out abouyt $30 for the Montrose case and $55 for the larger one. I put together the Montrose case And it fits the base! I built up the other case which will be empty for a while. I'm not sure its the most intelligent way to display the models but I can't find a spot for a dedicated cabinet so these cases stack and hold a reasonable number as long as I don't develop pretensions to 1/350 or 1/35 armour I added the wheels and decals to the Lynx. The safety netting was finished on the ship and decals were added after some touch up painting - although I now see I need to go round again. I now need to get serious with the sea base. The corvette is not going to intrude for a while. My FedEx package with the paints needed for the hull is wandering aimlessly around North Carolina at present with the FedEx website stating "Delivery Pending" as the status. Thanks for looking in Alan

Thanks Mike That looks really good Alan

That ship is just packed with detail. You did a beautiful job Alan

Slowly making progress in between reading up on corvettes. I built the Lynx helicopters. Two are provided in the kit and have the option of rotors folded or in flight mode. I built one with the rotors folded to go in the hanger. The models are not that impressive and I dislike the clear plastic that they are moulded in. The undercarriage and sponsons are two pieces and its almost impossible to work out how they are put together. Starting again I would look for some after market ones I think. For the second one i removed the moulded tail rotor and added the WE PE one along with the WE PE main rotor. The PE wheels will get added after the decals as its all getting a bit fragile. Primer and light grey coats were added. A dark grey wash has been added to the "show" Lynx and the timid one has been stuck in the hanger. My references suggests that the helos should really be Merlins but I'll stick with the Lynx. I found a lot of small details on the WE PE fret that could be added, antenna, approach light array for the hanger and other small items. I added the roll bars to the RIBs and put them on the side deck. I didn't like the plain black of the RIB tubes so I used a dark grey wash to add a bit of depth. I added the helo pad decals and the funnel and main gun decals because its going to be hard to reach those areas when the railings are in place. Then it was time to move onto the railings. More work today and the railings are in place. The WE PE fret provides plenty of railings and shaped ones for the foredeck. I chose to cut them into shorter runs and used Gators Grip glue which gave me a bit more time for adjustment and easier clean up. I had to add a short piece to the foredeck railings; Trumpeter and WE seem to have different ideas about hull length and width - or maybe Type 23s vary. The Dukes crown was added from the PE fret rather than the Trumpeter decal and a bit of weathering has been added to the helo pad The Lynx was poked into the hanger before adding the aft safely nets The aft safety nets are too wide for the Trumpeter hull but luckily the nets are made up of several sections of different widths so I was able to choose an appropriate piece to cut out. The remainder should hopefully fit. In the end I used more of the WE PE than I thought. The two frets are shown together at the end of teh build. The Trumpeter fret is on the left A few more decals and weathering; touch up and tidying and more time on teh sea scape. Thanks for looking in Alan

Thanks Greg Its an interesting change building a contemporary ship and being able to find lots of colour photos out there Alan

Hi Mike Yes, there are periods where the log seems to be pacing the build! My plan with the sea scape is to add toilet paper soaked in dilute white glue to modify the sea and add some ordered swells as well as bow wave. I haven't done much of this so I'm not aiming for heroic seas but rather those quiet seas in the North Atlantic between the rough stuff Alan

More great figures. Well deserved 40k views. Alan

That's an awfully full box! I'm looking forward to a spectacular build. Alan

A quick update. Work continues but progress is a bit slow. I seem to spend a lot of time reading and researching more than progressing the model. I finished the white paint on the hull after three coats (two 34 ml bottles) and spent the afternoon grappling with masking for the lower hull paint and boot topping. I had immense difficulty trying to achieve what I wanted by scaling off the HMS Begonia plans. The model is a generic corvette and doesn't scale well in some respects and working off distance below the deck edge or the panel lines produced unsatisfactory results. I tried the hi-tech waterline tool With the hull pitched up or down I couldn't produce a sensible boot topping. The photos and the plans suggest it curves up at bows and stern which may be the reason using a waterline is not effective. In the end I looked at the photos and plans some more and marked the bow and stern points and then masked between the points by eye using the photos as a guide. It looks about right relative to the port holes and is about the right distance below the deck edge. The boot topping and lower hull paint will go below the blue masking tape Although the tape is burnished down the surface is still a bit rough and the tape crosses several panel lines so I painted a line of white paint along the edge of the tape to seal it and hopefully prevent the new paint from leeching under the tape. I suspect I don't have enough Hull Red so I ordered some more from Freetime Hobbies who were having a 20% off Flyhawk sale and this fell into the shopping basket Thanks for looking in Alan

Thanks Bruce That will complete the paint scheme layout for me. I have immense respect for the men who served on those convoy escorts in terrible conditions. Alan

And just in time to avoid falling off the front page a late update. I've been spending a lot of time reading up on details for the corvette and playing about with the decks for that model so I rather lost my place with Montrose. I had a couple of good days making some progress at last and also forgot to take photos at some points. The lower hull had the red paint added and the boot topping. Its the first time I have done one (usually do waterline kits) and it took a few goes to get it acceptable.. It did reestablish my confidence in Tamiya masking tape. The first time I used it it took all teh paint off when I removed it. Since then I have used 3M blue tape and not had a problem. The boot topping really needed something finer so I went back to teh Tamiya tape and this time it worked like a charm. I must have done something wrong the first time. I added the deck and then used the completed hull to start preparing the sea surface. I really liked Craig's (CDW) seascape using foil so I took a piece of 1 inch thick insulation board and carved out a groove for the hull , added crumpled foil and then covered the surface with a sheet of foil. I then gave it a coat of white primer I plan to use white glue and toilet paper to build up some wake and bow wave shapes. I'm aiming at a lazy Atlantic sea; nothing complex while I experiment with this. I built up the Harpoon exhaust deflectors from the Trumpeter fret. The WE set doesn't provide anything for the deflectors. I think there is a resin piece in their kit. The exhaust grating is tint but goes together well The superstructure elements have been installed on the deck and the first of the PE side decks that hold the life canisters have been made up and put in place. I added the main gun and the harpoon launchers and exhausts Quite a lot of detail still to do, RIBs, Lynx, railings. This is turning into a very nice kit to work on. The Trumpeter PE is great. If they had provided the railings then the WE set would be unnecessary. Thanks for looking in Alan

Thank you kindly OC. Yes the hanger door will be open. The kit provides two Lynx helos so I may have one in the hanger and one on the pad "visiting"

Very nice indeed OC. Another great face Alan

Would it be possible to experiment on a bit of sprue or unused part to see how hot water or boiling water affects the plastic Alan

Really tidy work Roger. I agree about limiting handling of the PE. I find its necessary to be careful of the long and relatively unsupported pieces like railings even while they are in the fret Alan

Still moving slowly forward with Campanula. I had planned to paint the port holes black and then cover with gloss carnish to give a glass effect. In the event I didn't like how it looked. It just looked like black paint. So I drilled out the 44 port holes and the PLA is tough to drill. One ended up a little ovalised but was repaired with a ring of thin plastic strip and CA glue. I put the first coat of white on the hull. I added a little light grey to take the pure white down a bit. After air brushing 1/700 scale destroyers this was like painting the house with a tooth brush. It took the first bottle of paint to get the base coat down. I have a couple of cheap air brushes and my usual one with a 0.2 mm nozzle seemed to be doing better than the other with a 0.4 mm nozzle. It may be time to go up market and get an early Christmas present from the Spraygunner people. I plan to leave the white looking a bit tired. I want to try to get the Atlantic Convoy look if I can. The white has shown up a few imperfections in the hull which will work as weathering I think. The printer has been behaving and knocking out prints consistently during the last few days. I started working out the plan for the deck pieces and the necessary shimming to bring all the pieces flush and level. Thanks for looking Happy Weekend Alan

Beautiful job on the PE guns Craig. They look great. Alan

Seriously spectacular. The figures and all the activity make it really stand out Alan

The hull painting didn't happen. Instead the day was spent going down a series of rabbit holes researching likely deck configurations for HMS Campanula in particular the wooden decking. My reference book has a plan view of Begonia which was one of the same batch as Campanula. This shows the short aft wooden decks and the asymmetric wooden fore deck. The plan is from her time with the short forecastle so I don't know if the decking survived the refit unchanged. They aren't in an area that changed so I plan to go with the early deck configuration. At some point I think I have to accept that this is a generic Flower and some inaccuracies must be accepted. I think the number of port holes is wrong for Campanula (and most other Flowers I checked) and I am not going to mess with that. I think I can use a piece of a scrapped deck print to sit behind the wooden section (behind the pencil line) and compensate for the extra thickness of the wooden deck In the course of my roaming online I did find this nice cut away illustration of a Flower class corvette and it shows why the meals for the ratings rarely arrived hot or without a shot of seawater. inside the navy flower corvette - Bing Thanks for looking. Slow progress but a lot of learning going on. The voodoo for the printer seems to have been restored. Alan

After successfully printing over twenty prints without an issue today the voodoo ran out. The prints started to fail to adhere to the bed and then the nozzle just pushes a ball of filament around. I ran the alignment print and closed up the nozzle to bed gap by an eighth of a turn on all four screws and the current print seems to be working out okay. Ace hardware seem to be out of black cockerels as well as automotive primer so hopefully the fix is good. Tomorrow the care parcel from Sprue Brothers should arrive. I put my biggest nozzle on the air brush in anticipation. Alan

Based on the Geisenau build, my first big project. I found a couple of points to watch for in future big ship builds. 1 - Watch out for any complicated PE railings on the superstructure that might be difficult to bend and test fit at a later date. Solutions could be to fit it early before the superstructure gets crowded (that has its own problems), Or pre-bend the railings and set aside for later (in a very safe place). Make a cardboard template early before assembling the deck in question and use that to bend and test fit the railings. 2 - The fit of the wooden decks around the base of the superstructure can be very tight. If you have a fully detailed assembly to fit then you can't afford to get fierce with it to make it sit down on the plastic deck. I had one of the Geisenau structures pop off because it wasn't really sitting on the deck, just wedged in the wooden deck. Its a pain trying to trim the installed deck so anything you can do to confirm its going to allow the structures to drop in place is a good thing. You probably know all this so apologies for clogging the thread if uneccessary Alan

Hi Mike Yes there are twelve of the canister life rafts provided. There are a series of PE side decks to install and the life rafts get added to them. I need to add the deck to the hull and then the superstructure to get to that bit. Alan