DavidG

before the upper deck fittings were made, I worked on some hull details. here the curved rails are being built up by small sections. after sanding, they will look as one piece, especially painted black. making the galleries, I reverted to the kit casting pieces, but attached a lip on them to allow planking. the back side if the lower casting is awful, required a lot of filler, something I still have to deal with. the planked surface allows building up the window framing, I used a scraped moulding horizontally, and formed the columns by gluing 1x1mm walnut dowels side by side. the windows will be framed with very thin white styrene strips. I don't have a photo of it, but visible on the first picture in this log. Later I stained the wooden elements dark brown, which much improved their look. Similar to the stern, I saw very good results made with kit parts only, so at the end not sure, it was worth the effort. the plan show sweep ports across the wales, suggesting to interrupt the middle wale at regular intervals to form rectangular openings. I wanted these to be closed, and finally decided only to hint the outline of the port but add some hinges to them. The sweep port outlines were cut from regular paper -it barely sticks out - and added the hinges, which were Amati rigging hooks in their previous lives. and their (pretty subtle) final look, painted black, but no varnish yet.

I don't have many photos from the later stages, but here is one with the upper deck is on. Good bye, details below I made an attempt to have as many holes as possible - left the hatches open and made some false framing on the deck, cut out a section of the ply and glued strips to the opening, then covered the joints with deck planking.

some last shots of the gundeck, before it finally got covered by the upper deck:

Failures.. I spent a lot of time on customizing the kit and tried out several ideas, some of them worked and others not. In this post I show some of my failures, as they are a natural part of model building. at least for me.. deck beams. the kit provides a flat upper deck, I wanted to incorporate a proper curve. The idea was, the laminated planking strips (glued and dried in a template) will save me from sawing out them individually. While the strips kept their curve, they were simply weak for the purpose. It would have been better to bend the whole ply deck separately before gluing on. I put these beams to the model, but the deck remained more or less flat. I also had an idea, I can build a better gallery of wood instead of the cast metal pieces. I took measurements from the castings and made some supports, with the intention of planking it later. The flow between the sections wasn't smooth though, I took this apart and I reverted to the castings later. ships's wheel.. Can't recall what did I think.. used cast Amati wheels at the end. stern.. I decided against the cast/ PE kit pieces. The decorative pattern was copied to a boxwood sheet, and I cut it with a hand saw. It took several attempts to have one which didn't fall apart immediately, and fixed it to the model. I recognized my limitations as I can't make it any better and moved to other areas. After ten years it's still there and still not satisfied. The current plan is the radically reduce it's thickness, maybe a little dome shape in section, to look like more a painted decoration than carving. To be honest, I saw way better examples of this stern using the well prepared kit piece, and this might be a final option if everything fails.

Chris, nice to see another Diana being built. You did a very fine job. I especially like how the head turned out. And your stern looks very good as well. I have the same ship on my desk for 12 years now on and off, you made already much more progress than I did. Keep on the good work.

finally finished the gundeck, it was made a bit more interesting than the kit proposal. After being 2 years in the build so far, I pretty much liked it how it came out. Another question, how much remains visible of it when the upper deck installed (spoiler: almost nothing..).

after having done two upgrades for the kit (guns + copper), I started to dislike some of the kit features. The gun deck seemed dull besides the the row of guns, so decided to add some furniture. My first adventures to scratch building parts. First remade the grating (these are the Amati ones): then I figured out, I can make a pump and other deck fittings.

thank you for sharing these. Apart from the obvious quality of your work, I particularly like the use of the tools. You might have a very sophisticated workshop, but I see you work with tools any modeler might have. The skill makes the difference.

thank you Chuck for looking in. you made a very valid point on the gratings - actually the same applies to most of the kit fittings. I replaced most of them over time, including the gratings, but this made the work very slow and broke up the flow several times. I just wonder on 1) how much other modeling I could have done without continuously removing and updating parts and.. 2) with this kind of time investment I could have built a better/ more authentic ship model. but for next time...

great find, good luck with the build. It is interesting, how little these Corel kits changed. I built one not so long ago (different ship), and apart from the box, everything was the same like yours above. The ply frames, decks, down to the design of the plan folder.

great work so far coming late into the diluted glue question... but I use the cut bottom of an ordinary beer can. there is a recess around it's circumference (where I put water) and a bump in the middle (where i put glue). this way they can be mixed on demand by a brush. after work I wash it and put away.

after I finished the basic rigging of the guns, started the coppering. from one tedious job to another.. this was my first (and so far the only) attempt on coppering a hull, but it came out just fine. I used the Amati PE plates, they can be fit in longer strips which adds to the alignment and speed. There is a thin styrene strip on the upper edge, painted copper.

and here is the gun deck with cannons added

I recently had to move a model in a short, 15 minutes driving distance, and creating a proper crate was not considered as an option. Not being the safest method, I'm not recommending this to anyone, but here goes my solution. I used cable ties to fix the base of the model to a large cardboard sheet. This prevented the model from being capsized, and any movement was absorbed by the space around it. I drove pretty careful, and the mission was succesfully accomplished. The ship shows some damage, but this comes from being abandoned 12 years on a shelf, not the transport operation.

Very nice build. Congratulations!