rvchima
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Everything posted by rvchima
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Nice work on the hangars Harry. The little staircase and railings are a difficult build but you got them done. -
Forward Superstructure Nearly Complete - 225 hours, 93 days I got all the major components and painted, and have assembled a few sub-assemblies. There are a few fiddly parts left that need to be added. I will leave the sub-assemblies unattached for now until I paint the dazzle camouflage. It might be easier that way.
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Mini lathe for mast making etc.
rvchima replied to Charlie pal's topic in Masting, rigging and sails
Charlie, Try using an electric hand drill/screwdriver at its highest speed for short masts and yards. You may want to clamp it to a bench and find a way to lock the trigger. Leave a little extra material on one or both ends for the chuck. Use coarse sandpaper for rough shaping and a sanding block for final. Experiment with some scrap and see what you think. I've made all my masts and yards for several models that way, except with a drill press. -
Brilliant! I'm glad that worked out so easily. Did you use the disk sander? This PE very easily with a heavy pail of scissors.
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Piet, I used Minwax Polycrylic satin spray. The parts came flat, curled a little when I sprayed them, and flattened in a few minutes when they dried. Can you flatten yours in a book or something?
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Hi Piet, Thank you for helping both Harry and me with some build errors. Now we're all curious as to how far along you are on this model. Have you posted anything?
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I'm going with 2 1" pedestals on 14" centers. Same as my Prinz Eugen. I already have them attached but with a temporary base.
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Yves, I just watched the Wellington Trust video presentation on models in the collection of the Royal Maritime Museum by Curator Simon Stephens. He showed two photos of their magnificent model of the Bellona. They might serve as an inspiration, or might make you want to give up. They have been posting previous lectures here: https://www.thewellingtontrust.org/whats-on/events-past-lectures-and-exhibitions/ Today's lecture was recorded and should be up soon.
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Harry, Don't know if this will help but it's worth a try. I set my hangars and funnel on my scanner and got a bottom view. The inner walls of my hangars are thinner than the other walls. They are NOT sloped. The PE hangar doors do have a triangular notch. I didn't know what it was at first, thought it was a fabric door or something but it matches the slope of the funnel. Here are your hangars (before funnel repair.) The slots in the hangar roofs all seem to be correct with respect to the funnel if everything is rotated 180 degrees. But you have extra flats on the inside edges of the roofs, marked with arrows. They must be due to the thick ply wall mentioned by Piet. If you remove those sides right up to the sloping roof and replace them with thin ply (or even card stock) everything should fit. But check the PE doors first.
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The mast is beautiful with the primer! Nice on those bridge wings too. Those little PE constructs can be challenging and yours look great. I didn't realize that you had your funnel backwards. It certainly seems like it should go the way you had it - did you have the top piece glued on? Anyway, glad that you caught it before adding PE.
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Handrails This morning I took a deep breath and drilled about 300 holes for the handrails. The manual calls for 0.7 mm diameter holes so I removed one stanchion and checked the fit. That was way too big but my smallest drill bit, 0.56 mm diameter, worked well. My deck planking was too close to the edge in many places and I ended up trimming little slivers off.
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Harry, My hangars are 26.3 mm wide x 58.7 mm long. It took me a while to realize that the triangular cutout in the brass ends of the hangars fits exactly against a triangular step on the funnel. If you're not against that edge the hangars might protrude a bit.
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Forward Superstructure The forward superstructure is done to the point where I have to start painting. So of course we're expecting a major blizzard tonight and my car is safely in the garage where I'd like to paint. Anyway, here's where things stand. Overview This conning deck had very weird construction. It is built with a U-shaped groove between the top pieces. A piece of curved PE is dropped into the groove, then the groove is filled in with what ever putty you have. I'm still not happy with the putty. It would be so much easier to just laminate two pieces. I'm not much of a plastic modeler and don't know what's considered good moulding and what's not, but I think the plastic parts with this kit are not great. There's not much flash, but many parts have dimples where the plastic shrunk while cooling. This range turret had severe dimples that required filler. Now it looks like a little robot head on top of the Bismarck. The funnel was relatively easy to build. My Prinz Eugen model came with 2 blocks of wood to carve. It didn't have any of the myraid auxiliary pipes shown here, but I bought a brass detail kit made by Pontos for some plastic 1/200 Bismarck. Every pipe was a tiny piece of turned brass, and I glued them all individually. This was a lot easier. I love the details on this model. If you were Ant Man you could walk all around the decks. Front view with the little robot head on top. Back view. I have also finished the aircraft cranes but forgot to attach them for the photo. Fairey Swordfish view of the Bismarck.
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Admiral's Bridge & Hangars I've been very busy building forward superstructure, funnel, and hangars. Here's the start of the Admiral's bridge. Yesterday I started on the hangars. They were bigger than I expected, but also much harder than I expected. The framework is a mix of thick ply, thin ply, and particle board. I thought that I could just CA the pieces together while holding them against a square block of wood, but the joints are all loose because of the laser cut. My first hangar came out square but didn't sit flat. I had to break it apart and start over. The tops and one side of the hangars are thin ply with tiny cuts for brass inserts that must all be aligned. I got the first one reversed and had to break it apart and start over. Then I started to add the PE, but the thin ply sucks up the CA before you can get the brass in place. Last night I went to bed very disappointed with my first hangar. Today I remembered an old trick and wiped hangar number 2 with shellac. I just used a paper towel and it was dry in a few minutes. The shellac seals the ply and makes the CA stick much better. After that everything went together easily.
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Harry, I love the in-progress photos of the mast with all the microscopic PE pieces laying around. It always make me wonder if I really need to attach all that stuff, but in the end I'm always glad that I do. By the way, what's the tug in the background in some of your photos?
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One of those foam sanding pads around 220 grit will remove the razor blade scratches and leave the brass nice and shiny. Another thought: A top view of the Bismarck shows that the tops of many components were painted dark gray -- turrets, range finders, gun barrels, etc. You might consider painting just those things for some contrast.
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Gentlemen, Thank you for all the tips on plastic cement. I tried to glue my funnel halves together with Tamiya liquid cement but the glue evaporated before I could paint the entire perimeter. I switched to Testors liquid, which worked better due mostly to the bigger applicator brush. I had to clamp the halves together for a couple of hours to get a solid joint but hated to wait. I am too used to the instant gratification of CA. I did find a workaround for using CA on the plastic. Now I swab one of the pieces with CA accelerator using one of those disposable micro paint brushes, then paint the second piece with CA from a toothpick and apply quickly. Seems to work well.
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Plastic Glue Questions I am currently building the funnel, which is all plastic with PE details. I don't have much experience with plastic modeling and could use some advice from Old Collingwood or another plastic modeling expert. I am finding that my usual CA glue doesn't work very well with the plastic supplied with this kit. On the plastic the CA takes much longer to harden than it does for brass or wood. Plastic-to-brass is very slow - 20 seconds after application the parts are still sliding around, although they do set up eventually. I hate to spritz these tiny parts with a big blast of CA accelerator. Should I be using a different kind of glue for PE on plastic? What about large plastic-to-plastic joints like the sides of the funnel?
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OC., A bit late but I just discovered your photos with the coins and your glasses for scale. Now I am more impressed than ever. Beautiful work sir!
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I was looking at your model and wondering "How is he going to paint that?" Then I remembered your earlier post. I can see why you'd want to leave the model au naturale. The raw brass is attractive, and the contrast with the gray plastic and the wood really shows how much work you've done. My brass is already heavily tarnished, so you might want to get that matte coat on it soon. My brass also has a "few" spots of CA on it, that I hope I can hide with paint.
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Harry, My instructions say that "The shapes of the planks must be slightly smaller than the decks leaving a border all around it which will later be used for the assembly of the handrail stanchions." It does not say how big the gap should be. Here's a photo of the Bismarck fore deck from "Anatomy of the Ship The Battleship Bismarck" by Stefan Draminski. It pretty clearly shows a gap between the planks and the edge of the deck, with handrails in the gap. My guess that the gap is 9 inches wide, or about 1.1 mm at our scale. So I'd say to shave a tad off your decks. That said, my gap varies from 1-3 mm around the edge. I haven't looked at the stanchions yet and don't know how deep I'll have to drill, so I hope that they don't poke through if they're too close to the edge.
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I hate it when that happens! It's usually not as bad as you expect. Take a deep breath, and an hour or two later it's almost as good as new.
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