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Everything posted by DocRob
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Thank you Ken, the downside is, 1/350 rigidity , I'm afraid about blowing parts away with my airbrush later. This build starts to test my patience seriously, but I'm still motivated. The problem with this kit, is most structural plastic parts are substituted by PE, which complicates alignment and lowers the stability. Cheers Rob
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What started a bit crazy, suddenly turns into madness. The flying bridge construction causes a lot of headache, because it is built up with lots of components to align correctly, but even more because it needs to be removable for painting and applying the wooden deck. I cut the brass tubes according to the measurements in the manual, drilled holes into the plastic and wooden deck and glued in short pieces of brass rod for alignment. A third rod was glued into place on the superstructures top deck for the front post. The three tubes are not glued, I only checked, if the mating distances on top were ok, to accept the flying bridge. To enhance the rigidity and add the possibility of wiggle the flying bridge in place, I glued some bent and cut Albion Connecto brass parts into place onto the underside of the flying bridge, that will later accept the brass tubes. Than, I glued the lower brass deck to the front post, added the upper brass deck and when the CA half dried added the back posts and glued them into place. While the CA settled, I bent the whole construction into it's correct shape and after drying, added some more CA from the undersides for rigidity. Needless to say, that during preparation, the construction disintegrated a lot of times, while adjusting . Now I have to finish the flying bridge assembly and then glue it on top of the posts. Cheers Rob
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Thank you Paul, you put the most difficult part about these kind of builds in one sentence. It's all about preparation and understanding the sequence of building and painting, which makes it a challenge. Cheers Rob
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Doesn't look like much, but I worked a lot on these subassemblies, put in the brass columns for the rangefinders, rectified the angle of the top deck (sweat) and am about to determine the location points of the brass columns for the flying bridge, which I pre-assembled and left it on the turret base. There are no location marks on the plastic deck, nor the wooden deck, but some measurements in the manual. I re-cut the places of the wooden deck, where the superstructure and the funnel will be placed, because I will not remove the un cut carrier film before the final assembly stage. The upper and the underside of this deck and the deck below, where cleaned of all casted structures, to accept their PE substitutes later. I used every tool able to cut plastic to do this, Dremel tool with different saws and grinders, cutter, chisel, scalpels, micro saws, you name it. My bench is powdered now with plastic scrap and needs to be cleaned before I continue. Cheers Rob
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Thank you Knocklouder, it's a complicated and tempting build and it's my firs ship build with these amounts of PE. I don't expect, everything to be perfect, but will try my best. This project is more about learning, than to have the perfect showcase in the end, which suits me, because I don't display my finished kits. Cheers Rob
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I continued with the funnel, another delicate construction. The casemate housings on the side where annealed for easier bending the radii. Luckily the PE parts are very well designed and the general fit is great. The Eduard manual lacks a bit especially with continuation. The exhaust hole on top was drilled out, using my relatively new Tamiya conical file for the first time. A great tool, which will also help a lot for my wooden ship builds. Cheers Rob
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Thank you OC, nightmare and day would fit even better , but I've not even started to feel comfortable with the build. I hope, I will settle in a bit with more practice. Cheers Rob
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I ran in some trouble again with the build up of the superstructure, as I realized, al compartments folded from PE have a 'roof'. I hadn't checked it and left a bit of the structure on the underside of the platforms as a guide line for the compartments. This was easy fixed for platforms one to three, but the top one was already finished with fragile PE and printed parts. On the pic you can see the underside before surgery. Somehow I managed to get rid of the plastic without destroying the assembled parts, using a bench full of tools. Dabbing the sweat from my forehead, I continued with building up the superstructure, which is only stacked on the above pic. Platform by platform, I continued, until this was done according to the manual. I hope all 'connections' to other component fit, which is very difficult to check beforehand. Now this is what I achieved, I'm not entirely satisfied, but I'm still completely out of my comfort zone with this build. Slightly strange angles only depict the state of the art of American engineering scale wise . After: Before: (Find the 1247 differences ) Cheers Rob
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I've done crazier things than this, but this must have been long ago . Today I assembled one platform with PE and printed parts. This is something else than adding some PE parts here and there on a plane kit. I definitely have to burn my macro lens. The tiny stuff looks ok to my blurred eyes. Cheers Rob
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This peace of junk should transform into the superstructure . What have I done to be tormented with that kind of plastic. My sins must have been infinite, I hope I enjoyed them . After hacking and slaying, sawing and grinding, cursing and chiseling, I removed what is only partly shown on the pic. There was more debris than usable plastic left, but it took a while to get there, mainly because I pre bent some of the then to add PE-parts, to cut everything to shape. All red in the manual has to go and it's a lot. Cheers Rob
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Thank you Alan, this is only the overture to some heavy bending and gluing, possibly soldering as well. Cheers Rob
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Thank you Edward, I continued with the PE and as far as it works, it has a relaxing component, but I fear, there will be issues later. I hope, I do not blow away half of the detail away with the airbrush later. I finalized the first catapult today, where a ton of parts went in. This is mounted on turret #three and is luckily the more complicated of the two catapults, which sent the Kingfishers skywards. Cheers Rob
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Thank you for your generous offer, Paul. If I need photos, I will come back to you. I hope to use not so much reference, as I don't want to dig too deep into history and have a relatively fast build. The USS Arizona should look right, but I'm not a rivet counter. I rather build for an overall convincing looking result. Of course, I see problems arising with such a well researched subject and so many experts around here . Cheers Rob
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Thank you Alan, there is a lot more to follow, five huge sheets of PE, phew... Cheers Rob
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Progress is slow, even slower due to different issues. First, I discovered, there are only nine bollards included instead of sixteen. I mailed to the Eduard helpdesk and they reacted promptly and said they sent the rest, so i hope they will show up soon. I started with the turrets, where the manual is a it irritating, because there are three different types of turret assemblies out of four. There is some very delicate PE to add. For cutting PE, I use a sharp blade normally on a hard plastic tile, but with the superfine borders of the gun openings, I cut on a glass pane, because there is less deformation, but obviously it's not good for the service life of the blades. The second issue I ran in, were the plastic parts, which hold the barrels in the turret. They didn't fit well with the openings in the front shields and in one case adjustment wasn't enough and I had to make a new bed from drilled brass tube. The basic equipment on the turrets is finished, except some very delicate railings, which I will add later, along with PE ladders. I started to build up the catapult for turret #3, but it is only fitted loosely for the picture. The front turrets: Cheers Rob
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Making brass parts chrome
DocRob replied to John Ruy's topic in Painting, finishing and weathering products and techniques
Chroming, it's very difficult to achieve great results. I tried different products and type of application for years now and I found no solution covering all sorts of parts. Molotow pens had been great, when I painted car and motorcycle headlights with them, but looked horrible on protruding parts. They seem to settle with a nice and shiny chrome finish in crevices. There are tapes and foils, like Bare Metal Foil or AK adhesive chrome tape, but they work only under certain conditions, but do look good, when applied correctly. There are Alclad and AK Extreme Metal colors, which look good, when applied correctly. Don't use the AK black primer, specified for their Extreme Metal colors as a base, it never dries thoroughly. Tamiya gloss black, acrylic or even better lacquer are much better suited. You have to try onto dummies first, because you have to figure out, which results look best, layered efforts or flooding the part in one go. A solution, I very often come back to are Uschi van der Rosten's chrome pigments. They shine a little less, when applied, but do look right very often scale wise, because too much shine can look toyish on scale models. The extra benefit on pigments is, there is nearly no coat thickness and therefore no loss of detail, the downside is, you have to reach all nooks and crannies to polish out the effect. To me these pigments are among the best, because they are extremely fine grained and cover well, if the underlying surface is properly primed. Cheers Rob -
You are absolutely right Greg, on many builds, only the builder himself complains about the bits and pieces, where the onlookers only say wow, but aren't we all perfectionists more or less? There are so many details build, rarely visible after completion, like engine wiring with spark plugs or cockpit detailing with planes, but to me it feels good to be able to reproduce it, to apply knowledge, technique and skills as a self satisfactory aspect. This is my motor in modeling and I like to challenge myself with every build. Cheers Rob
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Thank you for your confidence Ken. I hope to turn that build into a decent result and at least learn a lot through the construction, I could have chosen a better base kit though. Cheers Rob
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I feel with you Yves, the plastic of this kit is a joke. It doesn't look like that kit was designed in 2001. I built very obscure kits in the past, like a Fokker D.VIII from MikroMir, where the plastic was also bad, but this was different. It was like a challenge to get the most out of it, where the Arizona kit only leads to head shaking. I would have immidietely stopped the build, if there would have been only the base kit. It would have been a waste of time and effort, but with all the goodies, let's see. Cheers Rob
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Thanks for your wishes Chris, I will need them and hopefully some expertise through the members here. I also have lots of fond memories about Arizona, which I visited multiple times and still have friends there. Until your post, I never thought about a connection between the ship and the state. Thanks for this trip down memory lane. Cheers Rob
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I will search for your Arizona gallery Johnny and take a look. I built only one plastic warship in my modelling career and it was the Admiral Hipper, when I was a teen. I was proud about the result, which would cause some laughs today, I guess. The USS Arizona build is a challenge for myself, as I like to test myself constantly modelling wise. I get easily bored with repetitions, so the best for my wandering mind is to push myself out of my comfort zone into the cold water. Cheers Rob
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Inspecting the plastic, I have to say, I'm very disappointed with what's supplied. The sprues are sourced from Hobby Boss, which date back to a Banner Models kit from 2001. I never heard about Banner and don't know about their reputation, but this kit is partly very badly designed. The hull is a two part affair which is parted at or close to the waterline and on first sight, here the fit seemed to be good. There is a battery compartment casted into , but that doesn't matter. All plastic parts have all kind of irritations, bad casting, strange design, irregular shapes, burr and flash. Many details are casted on, but there is some light there too. The deck planking isn't too shabby, but will be covered with a wooden deck on my build. One example for head scratching design. The halved sidewalls will luckily be substituted by PE later. Another example are the portholes, where I don't want to comment what is there . I drilled out all of the 200-300 portholes with a 0,8mm drill bit and removed burr and other imperfections as a first step. I will not correct all the shortcomings of the kit, but will do my best to build a decent model in the end. The manual suggests continuing with the gun turrets, which I did. First steps were to remove the casted ladders and the other casting oddities with chisels and round bladed scalpels. I think, these tools along everything which cuts and sands in my arsenal will be used heavily through this build. Next, I prepared the main artillery barrels. I cut the plastic barrels from their foundation, drilled a guiding hole and glued the barrels in with CA and got them aligned properly, hopefully. Then it was cutting, chiseling and sanding again, removing winches, anchor chain and pollards from the fore deck which is halfway done on the picture. It looks now perfectly clean, but I wanted to show the casted detail to these of you, who were curious. Cheers Rob
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A belated happy new year to you all and I finally decided about the build I will contribute to the 'Let's get wet-GB' over on LargeScaleModeler. My year started a bit rough with house issues AND modelling issues to solve. Some were connected and affecting my initial choice to build the Fore Schnellboot S-38 in 1/72. One reason, I choose the Schnellboot was, that during a heavy rain in December water entered my cave and soaked the box of the S-38 to pulp. I took the manual, decals and PE away from the sprues to a safe and dry place and when I started the build the PE and decals were gone. I know, where I stored them, know that I took them to check some reference and then the tracks went blurry. So now to something completely different. I chose the Eduard limited edition boxing from USS Arizona as a substitute, after I cooled off my hot temper about the loss. This will be my first plastic ship build, since I was maybe 12, building an Admiral Hipper, possibly a Revell boxing. First, let's have a look into the box and onto the AM goodies, I plan to use. Dramatic box art: The two piece hull with the decks loosely fitted on: Not that much plastic on the sprues and a lot of what is there will be substituted by PE and printed parts: 3D printed parts and Master barrels: Lots of PE, and I forgot to take photos of another sheet: The goodies, I bought on top of what's in the box, an Artwox wooden deck and Ion Models US Navy figure set: Cheers Rob
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