Cutty Sark by Kevin-the-lubber - Revell - 1:96 - PLASTIC

[Kevin-the-lubber]

 

13/12/21

I started looking at this kit  2 or 3 weeks ago, as an ‘in-between’ project while I take a break from the Victory. The kit is from 1976, it’s a bit brittle and there’s a lot of flash, some of it so heavy that I’ve needed to look at other logs in order to know what to trim off and what to leave. While I don’t want to get into 3D gymnastics on this kit, I’m re-making most of the deck furniture i.e. the windlass rotor, winch rotors, fife rails, sail lockers, cabins etc, as these are very quick and easy to model in F360 and equally easy to print. I wouldn’t say the end result is better than the kit part, detail-wise, just cleaner/crisper and I get to duck dealing with some joints.

 

 

 

 

[Kevin-the-lubber]

As many will know, in their wisdom Revell split the main deck into three parts, making for seams across the middle. This is typical of the kit in some ways, there’s no apparent logic to the splitting of some items. Thus we have separate fore and aft railing sections while built-in along the sides, with more ugly seams and flash to deal with rather than a continuous rail and a bunch of stanchions that need to be glued (the logical approach); likewise a series of pin rails when one long rail would give a better modelling outcome. This is a shame in my view, because the detail quality is generally very good and, if the kit was cut logically it would be a dream to build and yield a good result in most hands.

 

The deck joints bothered me, along with the positive plank lines. I don’t want to spend £70 on a laser cut wood top because this build is just for fun and learning. So I spent about a week experimenting with making a resin printed deck instead. Drafting the model in 3D was straightforward, probably only took 2 or 3 hours. Printing was more troublesome. The idea was to do ‘jigsaw’ joints, following the line of staggered plank ends and make it in 3 or 4 sections due to machine limitations. However, for reasons I don’t yet fully understand, I could not get the joint edges to print true to the design, they keep coming out with a gentle curve across the end such that the joint gets more and more gappy.  The photo shows what I mean. I know what’s happening – the curing of each layer is causing microscopic shrinkage that pulls the edges towards the centre – but not how to prevent it. I’ve tried various permutations both design-wise and printing-wise without success. Even looked at whether I could get the deck printed as one piece by a commercial outfit, but it’s too big for anything other than exotic industrial machinery. There are probably a few more different ways I could try to get this printing true; one of them is to at least give it a go on the filament printer, but I’m not too optimistic about this being accurate enough.

 

[Kevin-the-lubber]

I’m set on this not becoming another Victory stern, where I spend months and months solving a single problem rather than having fun with the kit, so I’ve more or less abandoned the idea of a DIY printed deck, in part because there would be other engineering problems to resolve even if I did get it printed – at 2mm thick an object of this size will curl post-printing and would need reinforcing on the back.

 

I switched to the kit deck and blending the joints by filing a chamfer on each part then filling and sanding. What I’ve ended up with is reasonable, hard to be sure if it makes much difference until the painting is finished but this is what they look like primed. (I've masked the deckhouse slots with blutak to stop paint building up in these and other key location holes).

 

[Kevin-the-lubber]

I’m trying the Vallejo ‘Old & New Wood’ paint set used by Bill as I really like that look. Air-brushing has still been a bit hit and miss with clogging mid-spray. Thinning solves it but I think I’ve been over-thinning the Vallejo model air paints and what works best is the plain paint plus a few drops of flow improver. 

 

5/1/22

Morning:  Inked in most of the plank lines. Really difficult to pick out the moulded lines to follow and if I’m honest, it looks like the shipwrights used whatever old planks were knocking around, some a bit wide, others a bit thin.

Evening: stripped the deck back to bare plastic with Isopropyl Alcohol and a tooth brush. Much easier than expected, not something I’d be fearful of next time. And strangely satisfying. What a pig’s ear I made of those lines. I don’t know why I thought I could just follow the near invisible moulding, why I didn’t make a little template.

 

6/1/22

Took advantage of needing to start again to sand off the lumps on the deck for locating the sail lockers and the two little strips under the fore winch which make no sense at all. Bracing rods on these kinds of machines are invariably a few inches up the legs. Neither bits are necessary and just make inking the plank lines more difficult.

 

Undercoating again, along with the fore deckhouse, hopefully better this time, now that I have a formula for avoiding the air-brush clogging.

 

 

 

[Ian_Grant]

Deck seam looks great! Well done Kevin.

 

Between you and Bill, you're going to make me want to restore my old CS in ordinary.

[Kevin-the-lubber]

Thanks Ian. Yes, I'll settle for that, the good thing about making cock-ups is that sometimes you do it better second time round.

 

Go on, join the club, put her back into the dry dock.

[Kevin-the-lubber]

nb. I should have mentioned, that deckhouse is a printed version, so you can see what I mean that the revell parts are actually pretty damn good. To be honest I only made this because it looked like fun to do and it's so much easier having it as a single piece. Plus the roof gets negative plank lines.

[Bill97]

Big smile Kevin 😃.  Going to watch your build with great interest and memories of my CS build. As Ian said I may find myself wanting to get mine out of the case and redo some things. Of course some things like redoing the shrouds may be impossible. I am confident you don’t need to see more but if you do I have many many pictures not in my build blog. 

[Richard Dunn]

Have you considered using Scaledecks wooden decks?

The rather long link is here.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/222876236317?_trkparms=amclksrc%3DITM%26aid%3D1110006%26algo%3DHOMESPLICE.SIM%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D20201210111314%26meid%3Df90b4265f33542f5882eb8def39447f5%26pid%3D101195%26rk%3D1%26rkt%3D12%26sd%3D123616690939%26itm%3D222876236317%26pmt%3D1%26noa%3D0%26pg%3D2047675%26algv%3DSimplAMLv9PairwiseWebMskuAspectsV202110NoVariantSeed%26brand%3DRevell&_trksid=p2047675.c101195.m1851&amdata=cksum%3A222876236317f90b4265f33542f5882eb8def39447f5|enc%3AAQAGAAACEHxeNwGvxhbG4i%2B6Yg0%2Fb6cIW5Q98PGCtfKeijU4yGRR35tmtW5t4PaQz3GngeWecUz64dj77wEWnYdMgXGg3Udvd0OpaxtTCiDDZAVftMbHQen499A5tlEnQEu9uNwZAhLlyPobY6BKeE%2BpYywXRUU9hhvdHFhyvsZOM9%2BaxG%2BmYia60esDoeTdL0TMN3Kt%2FedavXza16vtQinXvMzXzjY5e1rHmJbSynA0vWVNUVlmYH5cypViuclGSHQ%2BFxvBGHlKc8NvA%2Bz69ljiK490b8gRm%2BI96zFQlzEHPS2xq5Q6L7oh1BlGhfCFp4kw%2F4qaG2O7DsV12%2FTIT2%2BZbfLpsQPLMfbhxguHBXeYIU1rB05tbXi3bCuCjGaPDZFtn9%2BpFX3CQwJjKIVlAOLsoITRNH%2BDuE92n%2B8Qqd6uhxl1bk0QTB40WZOgMN4j4TU3DVCT144d61M6BGTrwZgVE4pL9WeXIxnJQYYr7U5mTD41YPDXxCRI7P58eVen%2BjSlX30hKCIdK8CkP6i0e%2BCnI2F3FTwLOqPNCV%2BITJ7ZHEUysOVMDi%2BNO5gMu%2Bt%2Ff3wU7aNh0Ej4lZWXFaMuZmZRU8d6BFsvruTbVZeqR4X8tIBYEnsAjpDUHmZyBpHyG%2Fu30mFzOmvtAiR0mb2VMQGbHJp53p9CBs4FCm06kse%2BmvxEUbw2TSpwByv%2FqrGR%2Ft4n19Bw9w%3D%3D|ampid%3APL_CLK|clp%3A2047675&epid=603166947

Just a word though. like the plastic ones the wood ones are not accurate to scale, and roughly only half the number of planks are shown as well as plugs for fixing which look terrible and would not be seen at 1/96.
The beam spacing for plank fixing is dictated by the main hatch and that should be exactly 2 spans long and 7 along forward deckhouse for example.
its possible the printing has limitations for resolution but I have bought his 1/200 Titanic set and its awesome so it might be old and in need of upgrade
I would ask for a custom deck, I can give you a proper deck plan of planking on deck if he is willing to do a new one and can laser print it for you.
He is hard to get hold of though I have read.

 

 

 

 

[Kevin-the-lubber]

Glad you're here Bill, I'll be bound to have questions, and here's the first. Did you airbrush the wood washes or hand-brush? Base coat laid this evening, went on like a dream, think I'm starting to get the hang of this air-brushing business now.

 

I'm itching to paint the copper on the hull, I bought the vallejo metals set and messing around on scrap  with a mix of copper, gold and bronze gave some lovely colours, with an emerald green wash on top. It's all glued up and primed, but I must sort out the pin rails first and maybe also the fore and aft railings. It looks like you left these until after you'd painted, did it make any difference?

 

I've also bought the hismodel etch name plates and decor as the decals were damaged, waiting for those arrive. I needed to cut out the 'bump rail'(?) on the stern as there was a lot of misalignment, but fortunately found some half-round evergreen in my materials stash which, after a little sanding, blended in very nicely. 

 

 

  

[Richard Dunn]

I just checked and he has updated the older one.

see here
https://scaledecks.com/sailing-ships
Also not sure if you know this but She was sheathed in Muntz metal not copper, Muntz is about 60% copper and 40% zinc but colour is closer to brass, if you are trying to be accurate you would want to mix a bit of Copper paint into Brass.
The Sark as she is now is done in muntz but has a higher zinc content than older muntz so is a bit yellower than the old Muntz.

[Kevin-the-lubber]

8 minutes ago, Richard Dunn said:

Have you considered using Scaledecks wooden decks?

Hi Richard, I did and quite quickly decided against it. I bought this kit fairly cheaply off ebay and, if I bought all the goodies, I'd spend two or three times as much on those than the cost of the kit itself and probably still not get a result that warranted that much expenditure. This build is all about doing it fairly quickly, without trying too hard, getting a feel for the CS with a view to a more serious build down the line. For instance, my remakes of the deck furniture are just quick'n'dirty remakes of the kit parts, rather than researching what they should look like.

 

Can you explain this a bit more: "exactly 2 spans long and 7 along forward deckhouse"? I'd quite like that deck plan too, not so much for now but for further experimentation. Obviously I made one based on the revell kit, which looks the part, but if I do find a printing solution I might as well print it true to life.

[Kevin-the-lubber]

9 minutes ago, Richard Dunn said:

Muntz metal not copper

No, I didn't know that. I don't think I ever worked in muntz; plenty of copper, brass (beautiful material to work) and esoteric aerospace stuff but not that. So, while my reasons for blending a bit of gold, copper and brass are aesthetic, it'll be on the right track anyway.

[Richard Dunn]

Ok the deck beams are located at the web frames only, if you look at the photos I sent you of the hull with all the planking removed on the deck you will see how the main hatch is located between 2 deck beam spaces but the C Jordan plans show the web frame locations, its the same plan I used in the workshop.

[Richard Dunn]

Here you can see the main hatch is 2 spaces to get the location for the beams

the frames shown here are the webs and are the locations of beams.

If you take the distance from the break of the poop to the after side of main hatch and divide that into 15 sections, that's your frame spacing.
assuming model is accurate anyway.
I wont bug you if your not too worried... I cant help myself when I see Cutty Sark given my time working on her.
Just PM me if you need any info..

 

Edited January 7, 2022 by Richard Dunn

[Kevin-the-lubber]

Ah, now I understand. I thought you were talking about the width of the planks and that neither revell nor scaledecks were accurate in the number of boards across the deck. On my test deck I based the fixing distance on where I wanted to split the deck, which was as far as possible coincident with the fore or aft hatch edges, to minimise the number of joins. And then equidistant fake joints inbetween the splits. All of which was based on the limitations of my resin printer and not in the least connected to the real ship. One of my conclusions is that I would need to filament print supporting beams to go underneath a 2mm resin deck, in order to hold the cross-deck curve. In fact, it would probably end up looking quite similar to the real thing. The reason for filament printing these is that, using e.g. PLA or PETG, I'd get a pretty rigid object whereas anything this small would be too bendy or brittle in resin. It did occur to me that I could of course print a beams framework and individual planks and glue them up - a POF in fact, but out of plastic; but then thought, why would you do that rather than just use wood? Which is why I've parked this - there are all sorts of interesting directions for experimentation, but I want a ship on my windowsill goddammit, and soon 🤪.

[Kevin-the-lubber]

12 minutes ago, Richard Dunn said:

I wont bug you if your not too worried

No, please carry on, it's all useful info for later, so long as it doesn't bother you too much seeing me blithely do my own thing! That exposed deck would have been 7th heaven for me, I loved working on heavy steelwork. My party trick was creating accurately curved RSJ's of this size using heat and water, got taught it by an old boy when I was a young apprentice and never got tired of doing it.

[Richard Dunn]

The Scale decks planking on the new one is pretty close I must say, at 1/96 each plank is 1.3mm so hard to do.
Also no one really knows what the truth about the deck was when she was a working ship.
The decks after the 50's restoration were a sham deck and laid on ply (due to cost and ease of obtaining wood)..
The decks as restored are based on old photos and  what not but still... the way it is done now you have the margin planks around edge as well as 2 king planks that run alongside the deckhouses, and the sides and middle planking are separated by these king planks but there is little to say it was done like this when she was built.

Nepean Longridges book was written while she was still afloat as a training ship and in his observations makes no comment on these king planks other then they go around deckhouses and hatches.
I would suspect the 2 king planks are in the way they are is to make access to the longitudinal deck stringers which correspond to them easy to access.

Edited January 7, 2022 by Richard Dunn

[Bruma]

Great to see another glorious revell kit coming to life! 

I also really like your 3d printed details! 

[Old Collingwood]

Very interesting build  - just shows how plastic kits can be brought to life  and how they can even be interworked  with wood  -  planks (if you want to go down that route)  mast strengthening using wood dowels inside, spars,  deadeyes   etc   and deffo worth  doing rope/thread  shrouds and rigging.

 

OC.

[Bill97]

Kevin after I airbrush the undercoat and IDF sand base coat the next day I let it dry thoroughly. Then using a fine point (.01-.02 I think) and a straight edge, I draw in all the deck lines. Then using a fine tip brush I hand stroke the highlight colors included with the kit on random boards all over the deck. Basically painting  a thin brush coat of color on almost all of the boards individually. After the hat is finished I I use a light and a dark wash to highlight areas around the deck where there may have been heavier foot traffic. An additional step I take in the process you may like to do if not to late is to apply a coat of clear flat spray can varnish or lacquer over the vase coat before you draw in the ink lines. This seems to improve the lines appearance with the pen point not getting gummed up. Once complete I coat the finished deck with an additional couple coats of the spray varnish. Kevin I honestly pretty much follow the instructions that come with Vallejo pack to select the colors to hand paint the individual boards. 

[Kevin-the-lubber]

1 hour ago, Bruma said:

Great to see another glorious revell kit coming to life! 

I also really like your 3d printed details! 

Hi Bruma, yours beautiful example is another log that I’ll use as a major reference and, if it’s okay, I’d like to come back to you soon for more detail on the pin rails.

 

OC, yes, I have to have a go at doing my own shrouds. I fully expect to get bogged down a bit on the rigging as I’ve never done more than tie a few bits of cotton with granny knots back in my childhood. The resin work on this kit is really easy which makes it fun, and my impression is that the masts and yards are quite a bit stronger than hellers so probably don’t need beefing up so much.

[Ian_Grant]

Kevin......RSJ.....??

[Kevin-the-lubber]

Bill, I hadn’t realised you could varnish between coats, I’ll try that, but will give the sand coat a couple of days to fully dry first. I imagine it also gives you a slight chance to quickly wipe off any mistakes. On my first attempt I used a 0.2 pen and was quite disappointed at how ‘fuzzy’ the lines looked, which makes sense now and, hopefully, won’t happen with a coat of varnish. But I’ll also try a thinner pen this time.

[Kevin-the-lubber]

2 minutes ago, Ian_Grant said:

RSJ.....??

Rolled Steel Joist.

[Bill97]

Kevin there is a thread here on MSW back in 2018 titled: Weathering the tan deck any easy way of doing this

In it, comment #9 by Welfack, which I cut and pasted below, he explains how he did it. I adapted that to the Vallejo Old and New Wood kit. 
 

“ I would paint the whole deck in a suitable wood colour, e.g. Vallejo Wood. I then would line out the seams with a very thin (0.1 mm) pigmented ink pen and seal this with light coat of flat clear varnish. In the next step you mix the primary wood colour with a minute drop of white and paint individual planks at random with this mixture; then you make another mixture with two drops of white etc., in the next round you mix the primary colour with a tiny drop of burnt umber and paint a random selection of other planks; then the same with two drops of burnt umber, etc. Once everything is dry and you are happy with the effect, you can seal everything with a light coat of flat varnish. In the next step you can blend in everything with a very dilute wash of white. This also has the effect of making the deck look a bit 'weathered'. Further weathering, accumulation of grime etc., can be applied with light washes of black in areas where water would accumulate. On a normal working ship, the decks would be scrubbed regularly, so do not overdo the weathering. This procedures sounds a bit complex, but really is fast and simple - you will literally see the deck coming to 'life' as you are working on it.”

 

You should be able to search for the topic to find the discussion for additional ideas. 

[Kevin-the-lubber]

19 hours ago, Richard Dunn said:

The Scale decks planking on the new one is pretty close I must say, at 1/96 each plank is 1.3mm so hard to do.
Also no one really knows what the truth about the deck was when she was a working ship.
The decks after the 50's restoration were a sham deck and laid on ply (due to cost and ease of obtaining wood)..
The decks as restored are based on old photos and  what not but still... the way it is done now you have the margin planks around edge as well as 2 king planks that run alongside the deckhouses, and the sides and middle planking are separated by these king planks but there is little to say it was done like this when she was built.

Nepean Longridges book was written while she was still afloat as a training ship and in his observations makes no comment on these king planks other then they go around deckhouses and hatches.
I would suspect the 2 king planks are in the way they are is to make access to the longitudinal deck stringers which correspond to them easy to access.

 

Richard, any knowledge on the dimensional accuracy of Campbell's plans? I've loaded & calibrated them as close as poss' to a measured revell plan (which seems closer to 1:100 than 1:96) but noticed quite a lot of variance on much of the deck furniture, both in size and position. The deckhouses are much, smaller on Campbell and the foredeck extends about 3 feet further aft. While what I know about seafaring wouldn't even fill the proverbial postage stamp, I've once or twice thought that the deck looked a bit tight for space for moving around and Campbell makes far more sense.

[Kevin-the-lubber]

This is why I was reluctant to start a build log; like a little jack russell I find it very difficult to walk past rabbit holes.

 

A quick, small experiment this morning, printing a section of deck joint using a filament printer;

 

Pretty acceptable, don't you think? Much much better than I was expecting. Scale-wise, the planks are 2mm wide, the seams are 0.3mm. The join is exactly what I was aiming for, nice and snug. I haven't even glued these two parts together, that's how nicely they sit. This is with a standard 0.4mm nozzle, I could get a finer top finish if I dropped down to a 0.2mm, though I quite like the grain; it's not really wood-like but nevertheless gives some texture. The black is another experiment. I found a little tub of graphite powder in our gigantic 'making' drawer a few days back, tried brushing that into the grooves and grain. The thicker line is inked. I think I almost prefer the graphite. Now, since filament printing solves other resin problems - e.g. the rigidity of the deck, in this instance needing no further support other than perhaps a lap strip under the joint; and no post printing shrinkage or curling - I have two full sections printing away. They'll take around 12 hours, but if they come out as hoped, I may yet swerve towards my own deck and positioning/sizing the furniture closer to Campbell's plan. The only down side is that this material is hard to sand, tends to go furry, but I guess I could also look at a very thin coat of filler or, for that matter, prime heavily and sand smooth.

 

 

[Richard Dunn]

A bit of history about the campbell plans, assuming these are the official ones from the Cutty Sark shop.
They were drawn in the 50's for the restoration, now in saying that during that restoration they did not survey or measure the hull so in regard to the "big" details like lines, sheer, stem rake etc it is out, but in regards to fittings and things like that it is pretty good but I have noticed some errors in things locations in the past.
have you got Photoshop? or can you open PSD files?
if you do I will superimpose Campbells over the file I used in the workshop and shoot it to you so you can make your own conclusions

Edited January 8, 2022 by Richard Dunn

[Kevin-the-lubber]

I have high quality campbell plans and loads of graphics software so I’m sure at least one of them can handle .psd’s. I’ve noticed more and more variances today, the Campbell pin rails are much slimmer in the fat part than revell and as I’m going to remake these entirely it would be good to have a reliable source.