Kevin-the-lubber

So, I tried oils on top of acrylics for the deck furniture and very much like that method. While I love the effects you can get with inks you have to work quickly (too much so for me) and to some extent the end result is a lottery. With oils I can see that you should eventually be able to get at least very close to what's in the mind's eye. I tried weathering the muntz with some blue-green acrylic I bought especially for the purpose, but just couldn't get it as I wanted so quickly washed off as much as I could. I'll go and buy some oils tomorrow and try again.

Thanks both; that decides it, I'll spend some time reading Underhill's 'Masting & Rigging' properly now, before I do the ship a mischief. I was just being lazy and looking for shortcuts. I have some 0.3mm jewellery wire which I suspect would be close enough to scale but affixing it could be a bit of a challenge.

A dry fit of all the masts and yards while I wait for paint to dry on various bits needed to finish the hull, and to start thinking about the masts and rigging. I have to dry fit everything like this first to be able to understand where I'm headed, what might need fiddling with and so on. Can any of you gents tell me what the small 'pins' are for, that are on the tops of all the yards? (in the second photo). I assume these are a revell device to help hang the sails? And am I right in thinking that the 'rings' on the mast sections for with/without sails (raised/lowered on the snip from the instructions) are also just a modelling device, not true to real ships. To be honest, I don't want to spend too much more time on modifying this kit, as I think the rigging alone is likely to take quite a long time to complete, with the risk of terminal boredom. The OOTB masts and yards aren't too bad, only a couple are warped and might come true with a bit of heat. As mentioned previously, at this stage I'm intending to try to have hanging, furled sails. I haven't even begun experimenting with this yet, the plan is to use blue ensigns' tissue+dilute PVA method, and if that doesn't go well, I'll just have standing rigging and no sails.

It's worth trying things out several times on scrap, Leo, to get a feel for how each coat and colour combo affects the whole. Though on a wood model I'd be more than a little tempted to just use teak varnish. I noticed today that I do actually have some on a shelf, I must try that out on plastic. It would be slightly gut-wrenching if it gave the perfect result straight out of the tin 🙂

Hello again Ian & Marc and thanks for your kind comments. Obviously it's quicker doing things second time round as there's less head scratching. In addition, I make slightly fewer beginners mistakes, especially on the paintwork side of things. The teak is a funny one - it works best on larger objects but even so, you need to get up close to really see it. From any distance it tends to look anything from orangey-brown to raw umber, depending on the light.

There, I knew the louvres would look better in brass. I also touched up the binnacle, having remembered that I got a much more smooth, shiny gold/brass effect if I used the paint pen rather than metallic paint. If you share that view, this is what I used.

I am now more or less back to where I was before the mini-catastrophe, which led to me remaking virtually everything apart from the winches and pump. Along the way I managed to get hospitalised with pneumonia and pleurisy, which I'd mistaken for COVID, and then get COVID itself just when I thought I had pretty much recovered! Fortunately work has been very good, giving me plenty of time off to recover. Anyway - I learned that, if I printed the deck much thicker i.e. about 5mm, I could make the joints all but invisible, plus the deck itself became pretty rigid, with just enough fore to aft flex for the job at hand. So, that's what I've done and this is still a 6 or 7 piece deck (I forget which now) with negative plank lines, printed on a filament printer, then glued and sanded to the desired finish before painting. Not dead smooth, the very slight roughness from sanding gives an impression of grain. Glue-ing the main deck into the hull, and pulling the hull tight. I used slow-setting epoxy for the deck to hull as I couldn't afford any errors here. As the new deck is 5mm thick it is quite robust and better allows cinching the hull up tight. For newbies like me, note the anchor chain in situ, needs to be done before glue-ing the deck. Here, you can see the 3D printed pin rails with lozenges, and the bulwark stanchions, which are just some 0.8mm evergreen. I've also gone for a much more grey deck colour scheme this time and used that throughout the quarterdeck and cabin roofs. I have to be honest, there's a good side to the model and a not so good side, where some of the lozenges are slightly warped. That will get completely hidden by draped ropes etc down the line! Another major milestone (for me) - glue-ing on Radek's (HisModel) very beautiful PE nameplate. I had no dramas with this, used thick CA as the tube of CA gel I'd bought especially two or three weeks back had set solid in the tube! As the weather here has been boiling hot for weeks, all glue seems to set in a nano-second, consequently the nameplate is ever so slightly off centre but not enough to matter. Although affixing the nameplate went fine, it took me forever to finish painting the hull, especially the white rail. Along the way I re-made the stern railing, added a pair of fairleads into the stern bulwark and the same into the railing. Difficult to see in these pictures is that I reduced the height of all three cabins by about 2 or 3mm. This goes some way to countering that the deck is about 4 or 5mm too high. I also did away with the open doors in the main cabins. I felt they didn't really add much and made things more complicated. Part of the reason for the major remake was that I wasn't happy with my colour scheme. This is a reminder of what it basically looked like; more oak than teak. I found a very good tutorial for painting a teak effect on a model railway site https://www.lner.info/forums/viewtopic.php?t=13594. This method uses a scarily orangey-brown base, as shown in the first two pictures below, then a burnt umber oil-paint wash to get the tint, with gloss varnish in between and on top. Base coat: a mixture of Vallejo Bright Orange 70.851 and Orange Brown 70.981, with a very light wash/highlighting using Golden Brown 71.032. I learned to go very easy on applying all of these, less is more. And also to go super easy on the varnishing, I just gave the objects a single light coat of no-brand gloss enamel spray. Topped off with burnt umber oil paint, mixed with Liquin Original. It took me two attempts to get the effect I wanted. I was too heavy handed first time round, especially with the in-between varnishing and objects had a dark, clumpy look that lost too much detail. I liked this method, you have all the time in the world to play with the oil coat but I'll want to practice more with the base coat tint in future. The trouble with glossy teak is that it can look pretty orange and garish in certain lights. And the trouble with going to all this trouble in the first place is that it can all still just look like a streaky brown paint job and not hugely different to the effect I used to get with enamel paints when I was 13 or 14 yrs old 😞 Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and all that ..... Along the way I finished off a few other significant 'design' changes. I re-modelled the foredeck on Campbell, means it comes down the main deck a bit more and, to my eye, accentuates the sharpness of the fore section. I beefed up the winch, as the kit part was underwhelming and, once I've put the hatch covers back, this is probably how I'll have the chains i.e. suspended above the hatch. What I've ended up with is not particularly true to the ship, it's more of an impression of things. I still have a bit of work to do in this area, need to make the rails, stanchions, pin rail etc. Another area of change was the quarterdeck. There didn't seem to be enough room between the wheel and cabin so I made the cabin a bit smaller. I also tilted and re-profiled the wheelhouse, and made the skylight much lower, with the louvres rather than glazing. Another view of the quarterdeck cabin roof area. I should probably colour the louvres brass or gold, will leave that for a day when I'm feeling brave. This time round I've made the binnacle even smaller as it previously still looked disproportionately large. I'm not going to include the storage barrels, I didn't like these and, as they were not part of the 'built-in' hardware I feel it's fine to leave them off. I have other ideas for this space if the mizzen doesn't fill it up. I still need to make brass portholes for the cabins and railings etc. One of the plank ends 'lines' here is a joint between two deck sections, the other line is false, just printed into the section. The central hold will be partially open like this, showing wool bales. The loose plan is to have another bale being lowered into the hold via the rigging, or something like that. This is a complete fiction and a nonsensical one, as I doubt they would have ever only partially opened the hold nor stacked the covers like so, but for me it adds interest and, as I've said before, I'm not at all pursuing verisimilitude. Last but not least, a random photo which might be of benefit to others; my bowsprit was slightly warped and I found a bit of 3.2mm square evergreen fit perfectly in the hollow, allowing me to clamp the two halves true when glue-ing.

Thanks Steve. I may pick up on the Victory again in a few months time, once I've reached a natural break point on the Cutty Sark. I just hope I haven't forgotten too much!

You’re very welcome, they don’t look too bad either. I wondered afterwards if it might have been better to just have small pilot holes in the drum, and drill them out later.

This is impressive stuff Kurtis. I’ve never been able to get to grips with Blender for some reason, possibly because it seems to be more art than engineering.

Yep, slippery slope. It's worth the first month of pain if you foresee yourself using it a lot, otherwise stick with TinkerCAD, which is quite under-rated in my view.

Ian, have you thought about sticking a notice up in your local hobby shops, for someone willing to resin print bits for you? There must be plenty of people with printers who’d be happy to do it for a nominal charge. I don’t know how big those bits are, they look quite small, and the cost to make 100 should be little different to making one. Most of the ‘cost’ in 3D printing is in developing the object and setting it up to print correctly. While resin is not cheap, if these are as small as I think, it’s only a few dollars worth. Looks like you’re using my old friend Tinkercad? That’s what got me going, 2 or 3 years back…….😀

After the earlier discussion about the anchors I was wondering how they got brought inboard; there’s the answer.

You guys are creating the must read, fully illustrated guide to building this kit to a high standard. I know that when I go back to it, this will be the key reference. In fact I’ll most likely be using this for rigging the Cutty too, at least as a sense check.

Pausing on one model was one thing (Victory), if I paused on this one I doubt I'd ever finish either. As I'm doing a fairly major remake I'll save posting until I'm back where I'd got to.

I think you can attach any kind of file you want. After months of failing to achieve dead straight edges on, for instance, large box-like shapes, I think I’ve finally worked out the (obvious) solution. I tilt the object on two axes, Z And X or Y. This means there is never a straight edge parallel to the build plane. It means more waste as the supports are longer, but it works.

Ah, oils - I'm glad you said that, another thing I'd have learned the hard way. I have a set of black artist pens of various widths, also some india ink; I have a sample sprayed with gloss, drying as I write, so will see how that goes.

Wefalck, I think you've highlighted some of the small errors I'm making that gradually add up to an almost but not quite right end result. Because I used maybe 5 or 6 colours, ranging from light sand to very brown, the differentiation is a bit too much. I'm glad you've pointed towards using lighter shades, that confirms that I'm starting to logic it out as that's what I'd decided for the next try. One thing I hadn't yet worked out was blackening the lines, but you may have handed me a solution via the gloss varnish. That wouldn't have occurred to me, I've just used matt all the way. Mine is a 3D printed deck and the lines are 1mm deep x 0.2mm wide grooves. I'm thinking a black-grey straight-from-the-tube acrylic or oil paint might fill them nicely and allow me to wipe off the excess to get crisp lines. I experimented with brushing graphite powder into them but that didn't work that well. I'll experiment some more. The Cutty's deck is/was teak, but very bleached and silvered. While I very much like the teak colour that I've been getting on the cabins with inking, I might skip this on the deck now as it does darken everything. I don't mind spending time on painting - for me it's the most enjoyable part of modelling, so long as it goes well.

DocRob, Wefalck, you've both given me something to chew on. Here's the paradox - as this is 1:96 I don't really want grain texture, only the effect. Wefalck, I'd looked at yours previously and did something very similar on mine. The result was quite good but quite a bit too dark. I've realised that was me using too many different colours from the vallejo old/new wood kit and when I re-do this, I'll just use 2 or 3 of the lighter colours, mixing to get slight variations in shade. I also finished mine off with some brown ink, partly to accentuate the plank lines but also because it does weird and wonderful things on the surface that hint at grain. Subsequently, this week in fact, I played around with washes to lighten and weather the result. This is where I'm still lacking confidence (aka don't really know what I'm doing). The wash itself 'flattens' the surface and negates the inking. I think it's probably the case that I just need to keep experimenting, including applying different wash shades selectively rather than across the whole deck.

I sometimes get the email notification but can’t find the post itself, and just assume the poster deleted it. Regarding the natural light photos, it makes it look even more like timber, though I still love the riot of colour in the lit shots.

That makes a lot more sense. The chain in question is a skinny little thing and I couldn’t see that lasting long in a rough sea. Nor the ship for that matter, with the anchors able to move. I hear you Rob and know that’s good advice. For me, it’s finding the balance between, at the end, feeling this was a decent effort or feeling a bit disappointed and not even worth putting it on the windowsill in my workshop. In a perverse way, finding this site is the worst of blessings: once you see what people achieve here it’s all but impossible to just build from the box.

I have thought about it, quite a lot lately to be honest, but haven't really got the hang of it. If you're reflecting on my build log and the lack of texture on the deck, this is because I start with a dead smooth surface, and that's a problem. If I had a little texture the variations in tone would be working better, especially washes. At the very least the light would pick out highlights and shadows. My washes tend to come out flat i.e. I can get the silvered wood colouring, but once you stop believing your own projection, it really just looks like a flat, thin coat of greyish paint. What would be a good way to add texture right at the start, that will then be used to bring out highlights etc? I almost bought some oils today as I know these sit on the surface more, but I've never used them. I should have mentioned, I currently only use acrylics and some inks, though I did find some watercolour pencils in a drawer today, which might come in handy. But I only want the tiniest bit of texture in terms of thickness. Any suggestions? I was also going to try the opposite, roughing up the surface with some coarse emery cloth or suchlike. Re' stripping, I thought as much.

That's true enough. For that matter, you'll find thousands of back street blacksmiths dotted all over Asia & Africa. And the skill level and ingenuity can be mind-blowing. I once had a labourer (we were constructing a training centre) present me with the most beautiful pair of handmade shoes.... not for wearing as they were wireframes, without a sketch or last in sight... and they fitted extremely well.

Apologies if this has been covered ad nauseum elsewhere but can I ask a newbie question - is there a way for me to remove just the wash layer on a large, flat painted plastic object (cutty sark deck), all of which has been painted using vallejo acrylics? Or is it all or nothing? The wash is on top of humbrol matt acrylic varnish.

I feel another trip to Greenwich coming up. Despite taking a lot of photos, few of them cover the parts that currently puzzle me, including that chain. I've added rear bulwark fairleads on mine, just underneath the rail fairleads.