Le Soleil Royal by Bill97 - FINISHED - Heller - 1/100

[Ian_Grant]

Bill, when you do start the cannons be aware that they're a little strange as supplied. The trucks (wheels) are too close together and the trunnions are too far forward on the barrels. Assemble the carriages with the trucks closer to the corners, and if you're up to it cut off the trunnions and drill new holes through the barrels using a jig on your drill press.

 

Dafi had good before and after shots of some cannons he modified.

[popeye2sea]

3 hours ago, Bill97 said:

Again doing long range study. Cutting little pieces of Evergreen to glue around the gunports get a little old (can’t wait to start working on the cannons 😕) so I take a break an study other stuff. I noticed most builders cut out the openings in the side galleries and fabricate a floor for each deck. Popeye2sea you show a good photo of adding the removed section s to the side of the bulwark. I want to do the same when I get that far. Would you care to tell me what you did? How you made it look as if it was designed that way?

 

Basically, I took the cut out inserts and thinned them from the back so they would not project out too much and then mounted them on a sheet of styrene stock that is shaped to fit between the wales.  The upper one is also shaped to fit around the gun port molding. I filled the gaps between the figures with additional strip styrene to make them all flush with each other. Then I shaped and fitted a floor between the bulwark and the quarter gallery. I cut a small rebate on the back of each forward pillar on the quarter gallery to fit over the new inserts, then puttied all the crevices and painted.

 

The slight difference in the apparent thickness of the bulkheads is barely noticeable because the transition is hidden behind the pillars and up against the rearmost 3rd battery gun port molding.

 

Regards,

[Bill97]

Did you just use an x-acto knife to cut out the sections?

[Bill97]

Thanks Popeye2sea. I think it looks so much better with those cut out and moved back. 

[Ian_Grant]

28 minutes ago, Bill97 said:

Did you just use an x-acto knife to cut out the sections?

I was wondering that too. 😄

[Bill97]

You ever have one of those days when you say to yourself “I have to get my self organized”?  I have model building materials equipment stuffed everywhere in my ship room. Paints are not easily identifiable. Storage cabinet is just disorganized. When ever I need something I know the general area it might be but I still have to look for it. Today is the day to get my self in order. Before I seriously get into my SR I have to improve my work area. 

[popeye2sea]

23 hours ago, Bill97 said:

Did you just use an x-acto knife to cut out the sections?

Yes, just a standard #11 blade.  I was very careful to start by lightly scoring along the cut line and then gradually deepen the cut with repeated passes.

 

Regards,

[Bill97]

Thanks my friend. 

[Bill97]

Opinion question here. Do you put your two hull halves together before priming and painting, after priming but before painting, or prime and paint both after gluing halves together?  

[Hubac's Historian]

As a broad rule of thumb, I think this comes down to whether you are going to airbrush or hand-paint.  For hand-painting, I have found the hull halves to be easier to handle, un-assembled.  I just putty and touch-up after assembly.

[Bill97]

I am going to airbrush so I plan to glue the halves together, putty and sand the joint along the keel, sand fc some of the wood grain, then prime and paint. Now that I have the gun ports framed on the inside I should be good to glue the halves together. 

[Hubac's Historian]

Are your hull halves warped along the keel?

[Ian_Grant]

Bill, do you want to add some small evergreen strips on the inside of the gunwales at the railings, to add some molding detail where Heller just made the molds flat?  Best done before you glue the hull halves. Or at least fill and sand those ejector markings which will be visible.

[Bill97]

No Marc. Mine is perfectly straight along the keel. 
Oh no Ian! I already have it glued together. Tell me again what you are talking about. Maybe I can still try to do it with halves together. 

[Hubac's Historian]

I may be wrong, Bill, but I think Ian is referring to the sheer railings on the upper bulwarks.  Maybe he was assuming you would be attaching the upper bulwarks early.

[Hubac's Historian]

 

I added evergreen to the caprails to give them better scale when you are looking down at the sheer rail from above.

[Bill97]

That is a nice touch Marc. Is that stick Evergreen?  How did you get the little curved section?

I am pretty much going to follow the building process per the Heller instructions and bash here and there as I go along. Heller does not have me add the upper bulwarks for a while yet. 
 

I have a long period of painting my hull and decks coming up now! Then the cannons! Oh those mutinous cannons. I may go back and forth between the cannons and doing the gold leaf on the upper bulwarks and stern.  I am thinking of bronze for all my cannons. I really like the color with the ship colors. Probably not authentic but still looks good.

Edited October 31, 2022 by Bill97

[Hubac's Historian]

 

It’s a combination of strip styrene and evergreen sheet of the same thickness.  First, I glued pie-wedge pieces of sheet plastic over the round port openings, so that the edges land where a natural joint should exist. I then ground away the excess plastic, and then I simply cut strip stock to meet the miters.  I am glad that I took the time to do this.  The caprails are of an un-convincing thickness, as they are.

[Ian_Grant]

2 hours ago, Hubac's Historian said:

I may be wrong, Bill, but I think Ian is referring to the sheer railings on the upper bulwarks.  Maybe he was assuming you would be attaching the upper bulwarks early.

Yes, I forgot that's all on the upper parts. Carry on ....

[Bill97]

Now this morning when I took the clamps off I did notice a small mold issue I think hunk I can correct. At the bow, even though everything is lined up pretty good, the deck support is a little lower on the starboard side. The top and the openings are lined up correctly. I just think the mold is off. I can probably just add a small piece of Evergreen to get it level. 

[Hubac's Historian]

Take a look at the hawser inserts before you do anything.  I forget exactly how they fit in there, but you might want to check to make sure whatever you do doesn’t complicate their installation later.

[Bill97]

Great catch Marc. Dry fitting a scrap piece of thin Evergreen shows me I will definitely need to add it after I put in the hawser inserts. 

[Hubac's Historian]

It has always annoyed me that Heller made these hawser pieces separate from the hull halves.  If you glue them-in, as is, you are left with a step on the outside of the hull, where the aft edge of the insert joins the hull.  I decided to create a half-lap joint on this aft edge and a tapering lap on the top and bottom edges of the hull opening, in order to eliminate this step.  It was very fiddly, but it enabled me to scribe the “hunting” port on the lower battery.

[Hubac's Historian]

It’s hard to explain without pictures.  Here’s an excerpt from my log:

 

With the continuous bolting of the wales complete, I turned my attention to the hawser insert pieces, and I think I've done a fairly Doogie Hawser job of surgically in-letting the port side hawser piece.

 

The issue at hand is the dark ridge that you see, here, on the starboard side.  The planking is moulded and intended to be a smooth continuum, but the piece does not fit flush, and this is unnatural.

 

However, after using my fabulous Dremmel Micro to cut a diminishing rebate into the mounting edge of the piece, the aft edge sits flush with the rest of the planking.

This is not at all difficult to do, it is simply a matter of holding the piece in place, as you scribe the lower edge of the upper wale into the plastic, and the upper edge of the lower wale, with a single edge razor blade.  An emmory board cleans up the transition and the piece fits perfectly.  A little work on the aft joint, where it meets the hull, is required in order to minimize the need for putty - a touch of Squadron, though, and a little judicious leveling should make that transition line completely disappear.

 

I will have to do the same on the starboard side, obviously, and I will also have to fill and re-drill the hawse-holes, back closer to the stem, after I have performed my magically surgical widening of the hull, at the stem.

Just as the prior example illustrates my desire to make this model look less like the plastic kit that it is, the next example strives for a greater verisimilitude with real practice.

 

Here, I am showing the transom profile, which previously, I had trimmed back a generous 1/16", to the mounting ledge for the transom piece.  That's why the hull thickness seems so exaggerated, below the main wale, because it includes the mounting ledge.  The reason for doing this was so that I can model-in the round-up of the square-tuck stern.

 

However, even after grinding away the existing mounting ledge, the side planking still is way out of scale.  Ordinarily, with plastic models of this type, one would glue in the transom piece, and then fill-in any gaps - and then maybe, maybe scribe back in the partially filled plank lines.  As I will be building up the transom and stern from scratch, on the other hand, I saw this as an opportunity to thin the hull wall at the transom edge to a more scale-realistic plank thickness.

 

Into which, I then engraved the plank butt-ends

 

This process also creates, on the inboard hull a new mounting ledge for the transom planking that will be installed later.  Rinse, and then repeat on the starboard side!

 

Following that, I will glue in the hawser pieces, and then scribe-in and detail the 15th "hunting port," at the bow of the lower battery.  As this is already a fairly long build-log, and I've only just gotten started, I will periodically mention "the truth," or what "should be."  What the first battery should consist of is 16 piercings (to be consistent with what is known of SR1), with 15 armed at all times;  the 16th "hunting" port at the bow would only be armed by shifting the next gun, forward, into position when SR (and La Reyne, for that matter) were appropriately in pursuit of the enemy.  For my purposes, even a vestigial scribed 15th port - while it's not 16 - is still closer than 14.  Comme-ci, Comme-ca; a compromise of sorts.

Edited October 31, 2022 by Hubac's Historian

[Bill97]

Thanks Marc. I will certainly read over this several times to make sure I understand. Appreciate it. 

[Bill97]

Finally got my ship yard in order!  I use Vallejo acrylics and have tried putting a drop of paint on the top of the cap to identify the color. That has not worked and the whole time I was building the Victory I would spend countless minutes picking up and putting down paint bottles looking for my desired color. I found that frustrating as you can imagine. Once I decided enough is enough I found these Great wall hanging Vallejo paint racks. I organized my paints by airbrush paints and brush paints, and my color groups. I was surprised to see the number of duplicates I have. Apparently when I got different sets as gifts, are whatever, there were frequently colors included I already had. All the duplicates went into my storage cabinet for possible later use. Pictures below are after and before. 

[Baker]

14 hours ago, Hubac's Historian said:

It has always annoyed me that Heller made these hawser pieces separate from the hull halves.  If you glue them-in, as is, you are left with a step on the outside of the hull, where the aft edge of the insert joins the hull.  I decided to create a half-lap joint on this aft edge and a tapering lap on the top and bottom edges of the hull opening, in order to eliminate this step.  It was very fiddly, but it enabled me to scribe the “hunting” port on the lower battery.

A long time ago I learned to make molds at school.

Our first, and only, mold that we had to make was of course much simpler 😉.

I don't think it was technically possible, in that time, to provide these holes directly and at the right angle without the extra hawser pieces.

[Bill97]

So Marc do I understand you correctly that your goal, and mine should be, was to make it look as if the hawser pieces are not separate pieces?  Once glued in the surface should be smooth to include filling the crack all the way around and extending the board planking lines across the seam? We knew I was gluing my halves together to soon!  Maybe I can still pull this off. 

 

How did you do the bolting of the wales?  I like that. 

[Hubac's Historian]

You can definitely still inlet the hawser piece into the hull-half so that the outer-surface is flush because the modification happens to the hawser piece;  you simply hold the hawser piece in-place and scribe the wale boundaries (top and bottom) into the surface of the hawser plate.  This will give you the reference you need to cut a tapering shoulder into the hawser plate (top and bottom).  From about mid-plate, your shoulder should taper from zero to about a heavy 1/32” - whatever it takes to bring the aft edge flush with the exterior planking.  Of course, you don’t have to do this and very few that I have seen have ever bothered to.  It’s just a personal bugaboo of mine and one of the modifications I have found that reduce the plastic feel of the model.

 

I describe the wale bolting in detail, not many pages from where I pulled the hawser excerpt.  Basically, I cut really thin slivers (-1/32”) of .030 styrene rod onto my plastic cutting matt.  I separate them (they tend to want to clump together) and then flash them with a wand lighter (flame is about a 1/4” above); this melts the dots, slightly, and causes them to form a slightly domed appearance.  I tried a number of things, but this was the method that gave me the scale appearance I was after.

 

I sharpen a toothpick and use the tip to apply a small dot of liquid plastic cement (I like Testors) where I want the bolt head.  You can then “pick up” each bolt head and place it with the very tip of a sharp Exacto blade.

 

Once in-place, I just press the dot with my finger tip for 5-7 seconds to get a firm weld.  Once these are on, they’re really ON, and you’ll have to shave them off, here and there, where you might need to as the build progresses.

 

It sounds extremely tedious, and it is, but you’d be surprised how quickly you find a rhythm.  Just don’t task yourself with trying to do one whole side in an evening.  Do a wale, and then take a break.  Do something else.

[Bill97]

Thanks Marc. Will keep you updated on my progress.