DocRob

This project is starting to come together nicely, Alan. I can only raise my hat for doing it in 72 scale. Guns and towing vehicles are always a bit on the delicate side. White Stork has some 'relaxed' WWI tankers in their portfolio (#F72034). They might fit. Figures – White Stork Miniatures Cheers Rob

Thank you Chris and Allan, this part of the build is routine, only creating the canvas for the painting stage, but it's fun anyway, having such a great kit at hand. It's the first time, I build a similar kit twice, albeit there is more than a decade between the two. Cheers Rob

Thank you gentlemen, the detail is all there, provided by Tamiya, and it needs only a little care with a sable brush and toothpick to bring to live. The Corsair is one of these mojo restore kits, complex, but so well engineered, it's a pleasure to work on. The build is only secondary to me with this project, it's about painting and weathering. I want to learn new stuff through all my builds, some I start only for learning new techniques. With the Corsair, it's about achieving a blended in look with markings and stencils painted and to achieve a worn but not wrecked look. Cheers Rob

The cockpit is almost ready with only the leather headrest and messenger bag to add and of course the HGW seatbelts. Everything fits into the fuselage, where I had to do a lot of grinding with my last Corsair and the Brassin cockpit. With the supplied detail, there is no real need for resin substitutes. I'm actually considering, adding some lead wire, but I have to check how much can be seen afterwards. Cheers Rob

You have to hand it to Tamiya, the breakdown of the complicate cockpit is a masterpiece and I don't know, why I used the Brassin substitute on my last Corsair build. This incarnation is well detailed and broke down, that it's easy to paint. That's exactly what I did, painting. All the cockpit parts were sprayed in their base colors, mainly AK's interior green and Tamiya's LP semi gloss black and then detail painted, mostly by brush. There are tons of little knobs and switches, where my sable brushes worked very well. All black parts received a treatment with iron pigment, applied with a large dry brush and then rubbed with pigments on the fingers, followed be AK dark aluminum True wax, applied with a toothpick for a light chipping. The IP looks now like this and I will use my painted one, because it integrates better and I found no yellow bezels on my reference pics. Sanding and polishing the clear part, helped to reduce the magnifying effect to an acceptable level. Below is the Yahu IP for comparison. Parts airbrushed in interior green got a brown panel liner treatment, followed by highlighting with a brush and then some of Uschi van der Rosten's iron pigments. Again the last step was to apply some scratches and tear with True Metal wax, rubbed in by hand or cotton swab. On to the consoles with lots of masking and then detail painting, These multi part affairs are designed utterly genius by Tamiya. Cheers Rob

Like with most of the airplane builds, everything starts with cockpit and engine, so I cleaned all the cockpit and tail section parts, prepared them for painting and got the first interior colors on. I used interior green from AK's Real Color range and added Tamiya LP semi gloss black. Now it's about detail painting all the tiny bits, knobs and levers. I bought a Yahu IP, but will build up the kit version too and will compare, which one I will use. I thought the magnifying effect of the clear part is a bit to strong and therefore sanded down the bulged front side of the clear parts with 2000, 4000 and 8000 grid sand paper. And then used the Tamiya polishing pastes to get the glass nice and shiny. After painting the IP itself, I will show you the comparison between this and the Yahu IP. Cheers Rob

Buenos dias señhoras y señhores, At the moment my Duchess of Kingston build is halted temporally due to having not enough coherent time for starting the rigging, this will be a winter job. Much more, than I'm at home with building wooden ships, is plastic modelling to me, which I do a lot since re-entering the hobby maybe 15 years ago. This log was started at LSM too, where I'm at home for all purpose modelling since years, but wanted to share a log about a plastic kit here too. I will bore you with another build of Tamiya's well famed Corsair. You think easy peasy, but no, having maybe the closest to perfection plastic kit at hands, I'm not allowed to fail here. Subpar kits are where you can shine, but with this one, it's expected. Being like it is, I just felt the urge to build another Corsair, after having built the Birdcage one as my first plane kit, re-entering the hobby, when it came out. I had so much fun with the F4U-1 by the time, that I knew, there had to be another. The Birdcage was enhanced with Brassin cockpit engine and wheels, lots of PE, SAC undercarriage and Maketar masks for the markings. The F4U-1A will be mostly oob, with the exception of HGW belts, Brassin wheels and maybe a Yahu dashboard. I will use AK real colors and markings and stencils masked with 1ManArmy masks. Cheers Rob

Absolutely beautiful result Rusty, the Duchess looks amazing as you finished her showing all the beauty of the ship. BTW: Thanks for your competent and informative build log which, among others, helped me through my build, where I will reference often to for the pending rigging. Cheers Rob

Very nice rigging Rusty, it looks so easy when you show it, but I find more and more excuses, not to start with mine. Cheers Rob

I had the same feeling with my mizzen mast David. I thought, it had too much rake fitted into the bottom hole. I saw pictures of other builds, which have in common, that the mizzen mast just clears the binnacle housing and that's how mine looks. I pondered, how to correct it neatly, as it is definitely more rake than in the plans. Than I measured the distance between the first platform of the mainmast to the first platform of the mizzen and found it one centimeter too large compared to the plan. I decided temporarily to leave it as is, if the shrouds don't look silly with their angle. I haven't glued in my masts until now, as I will prepare them in the next steps with blocks and whatever. n my log, there are some suggestions by members here, how to correct the angle if you are interested. Cheers Rob

Looking very good David. I had to fit in a 1 mm thick plank residue under the bowsprit, to correct the angle. Otherwise, the galion would not have fitted. For some reason, your mizzen mast seems to be parallel to the main mast, with only minimal rake, are you sure, the mizzen mast is pushed into the hole in the lower deck? Cheers Rob

A very enjoyable log to read, both, because you so well documented your build and the shown craftsmanship is impressive. Congratulations to your beautiful machine and thanks for the detour. Cheers Rob

Great work on that tiny bugger B.E. . Like you, I used CA and glued the prepared plank to the bow with it. After drying, I bent the plank around the spars, applying small amounts of PVA onto the spars and more important, as the spars will be removed, between the planks and hold them in place until my finger clamps were hurting. for the last two stern spars, I used CA again for a faster bond. I like the idea with the pegs as clamps, I will store that on my brain HD. Cheers Rob

Thank you for showing this interesting project with all the added explanations. It's great fun to follow and to me a bit like a fountain of youth. When I got my education as an engineer in my very late teens, I had to build a steam engine from scratch, only using existing plans. At the end the machines of all the apprentices where compared in quality for a verdict and for the lowest possible pressure the machine keep running with. I may will build steam engines again in the future with teasing threads like yours. Cheers Rob

Hello Alan, thank you for your kind words. One subcategory in plastic modelling is driving me mostly, it's replicating materials in different states of use and tear or in other words, how to let plastic look like metal, wood, cloth or whatever. Airbrushing is not that hard to learn, especially not for gifted craftsmen, building wooden ships with great patience. It's a learning curve, but be prepared, it's about 80% masking, cleaning, preparing, mixing, testing, ... and only twenty percent of actual spraying maximum. It has a lot of advantages, even with wooden ships as I found out lately with my first build and spares you of garish rattle cans, which are smelling bad and mostly flooding the object way too much. If an airbrush is not an option for you, the metal waxes might be one. You can apply them with cotton swabs and cloth without leaving brush marks. You find some videos on YouTube were they are presented with their pros and cons. The waxes are called True Metal Wax and are produced by AK. Cheers Rob

I just stumbled over this very interesting project of yours, the print looks great Alan If you are looking for extremely good metallic colors, my weapon of choice since years is always AK's Extreme Metal range, at least if you consider airbrushing. They have all the important non ferrous metals in their range, like copper, brass and bronze. They have an extremely fine grain and airbrush un thinned perfectly. They are not suitable for brush painting though. AK has also a range of metallic waxes, (True Metal) which can be brushed, applied with cotton swabs or cloth and they do look good and 'metallic' too Here are some non ferrous examples of my Nautilus build with Extreme colors applied (bronze, brass and copper mainly, but also stainless steel and gun metal). It's hard to show the shininess and metal likehood in the pics, but at least, I tried . I hope that helps a bit Later in the build, I patinaed the whole sub with pastels and pigments, which came out satisfactory to my eye. Cheers Rob

Thank you B.E., I will look into your approach on the boats, to hopefully gain new ideas to lighten the burden for me with HMS Sphinx. Cheers Rob

You seem to start on the boats pretty relaxed B.E. I built my first one from Chris some weeks ago as an add on for my Duchess of Kingston. It's a great little kit, but as a beginner, I have to say its quite fiddly. Having the HMS Sphinx in my shelf and seeing that she sports three of them gives me the creeps and I will not add an extra one. The most time consuming and unnerving part on the boats build was to get rid of the wood glue on the inside of the hull, after removing the temporary spars. I will try to use less glue on future boat builds and wish you luck with yours. Cheers Rob

I do a lot to distract myself from starting with rigging on the Duchess lately, but I'm not sure, if painting 64 scale figures is a good substitute. For now, I will leave the Gentleman Hornblower and Pellew (the names just in case, I rendered them unrecognizable) as they are and when I'm in the mood, I will do some more touchups and detailing. All blame on the figures are on me, Chris from Vanguard did a marvelous job, designing them. I used acrylic colors from the Fantasy range of Scale75, which are reasonably good to work with on a wet palette. When ready, I will cut away the standing plates and substitute them with clear acetate. My next 64 scale figure will be only if there is a decent rendition of the Duchess of Kingston herself. Cheers Rob

Fixing the transom the way you did, give Alert much more convincing lines, great idea to insert the wedges. I just jumped into your thread for the very first time and I really like what i see. It gives me a little push, to finish my 'Le Renard' build a cutter as well, which I started about twenty years ago. Cheers Rob

First planking looks very well done on that racehorse like hull. Still can't really believe, it's a fishing vessel. Cheers Rob

Impressive work and I can feel your pain, as such amounts of time has to be spent, because of suboptimal designed parts. I hope you pull through and finish this beauty which will be satisfactory all over. Cheers Rob

Wonderful work on a beautiful ship all over. I really like larger schale vessels, as there are better possibilities to show fine details, like you do in your build. Cheers Rob

I only just stumbled into your thread and I have to praise your fantastic work. In a quite minute, I will digest it completely as I really like the feeling for the sea in your pictures. Cheers Rob

38 degrees Celsius and the world is turning very sloooowwwww , but anyway, I glued on the lower mast platforms and varnished the whole mast parts with Wipe on Poly. Then I masked the mast platform areas and airbrushed them with Tamiya's lacquer paint flat black. Then I started with the wooldings, I guess, they are for the enforcement of the lower mast parts. Luckily the plans showed a way, how to tie them correctly. I used masking tape as an indicator for the right positions and made six turns for each, which I secured then with water thinned PVA and cut off the ends. Does this count as the beginning of rigging ? Cheers Rob