USS Bagley (DD-386) by catopower - 1/200 - Avangard - CARD

[Snug Harbor Johnny]

  'Love the way its coming together !   'Looks like the wood fillers in the hull voids makes for both a sturdier model - and one with less kinks or dimples in the hull.  I'm watching with great interest.  Thanks, mate !     Johnny

[ccoyle]

10 hours ago, catopower said:

Hmmm... not excited by the results, but then, I've got a lot to learn.

 

If you end up being unhappy with the final result, you can always opt to fill, sand, and paint. This is how some of our Polish friends produce their immaculate hulls. Of course, most of them seem capable of producing immaculate hulls without the extra effort, so there's that. 😋

[catopower]

Thanks Ken, and a Merry Christmas to you as well!

[catopower]

Oops! Thanks Johnny, Chris!

 

Your comments must have come in while I was sending my last post... 🤔

 

I appreciate the supportive comments. So far, things have turned out better than I thought they might. 

 

Once the deck was mounted, there was a little overhang that I ended up carefully sanding away, but that seemed to work. It means that the deck is a tad narrower, 1/32" or so. I don't think this will cause any issues. There is only one assembly which spans the full width of the hull, and that's coming up in the next step or so. It's the rear bulkhead section of the forecastle, and I should be able to compensate during construction. 

 

That assembly, by the way, was probably the most confusing part of the instructions. For the longest time, I had no idea what I was looking at or where it was supposed to go.

Now, it looks like I will be an interesting assembly to work on.

[catopower]

Merry Christmas, All!

 

Not much to report today, but I started looking at how I'm going to mount the model, since I'm going to have to drill holes in the bottom before too long. I had some standard brass pedestals for ship models, the kind with the keel slot in them. Since the steel navy ships don't have an external keel, I went ahead and used a chop saw to carefully cut them down and ground and filed them clean, so the tops are flat.

 

Then, I realized that the bottom of the hull isn't THAT flat, so I went back and ground a very slight "V" into the pedestal tops. The proposed mounting of the model will then look like this:

The base is just one I have laying around. I actually think I prefer cherry wood. Also, I think I may opt for a 24" long base, which only extends about 1-1/4" beyond each end.

 

Meanwhile, I've gathered the parts for the first assembly, which I need to go on deck, just behind the forecastle. I'll need this in place before I can add the forecastle deck and the remaining hull coverings. But, I might need to deal with the underwater details first, while I can still freely turn the whole thing upside down.

Edited Friday at 05:37 PM by catopower

[catopower]

Over the weekend, I realized that first assembly had to wait until I get some of the details added to the underside of the hull. So, I worked on making the skeg and adding the bilge keels.

 

The keg is provided as a folded over piece of card stock, with a hollow space inside. Figuring I'd damage that pretty quickly, I measured the hollow, a nice 1/16" wide space, and cut a piece of wood to fit inside. The only issue I ran into was getting the skeg assembly to fit flush against the hull. I had to do a little sanding, but I still had some thin gaps that would let light through if you backlit the model.

 

I didn't want to mess with the keg much more, so I just made sure to glue it securely in place on the hull. Then, I went back and took a tiny amount of the spackling compound I used to fill the hull, and I spread a tiny amount along the seams. Using a brush to press some of the material into any cracks, I then took a lightly dampened brush and cleaned up the surface.

 

Once, this had dried, I took a small amount of the acrylic paint I mixed earlier, thinned it well, and applied it along the seam. I then cleaned up any excess paint first by wiping with a piece of paper towel, then took a damp brush and blended any remaining excess, so it's no noticeable.

 

Note that I think using a damp brush on the hull of a paper model only worked, because the parts were "press" printed (what's the term I'm looking for here?) and not printed on my inkjet printer.

\

What I did seemed to work pretty well. Also, the paint mix looks to be a pretty good match. It's actually a little dark, but I serves doubly as shading. I'm thinking that in the future, I may just fill any cracks between the lower hull plates with spackling compound and then just painting all the red areas.

 

Next came the bilge keels. This wasn't difficult, especially given how well the gluing and painting worked on the skeg. For these, I glued them into place using Aleene's Tacky Glue, just like with most of the other paper parts on this model, but by the time I positioned the keel, it kind of dried out. So, I ended up applying a dilute coat of glue along the connecting seam. The glue dries clear, and you really can't see any residue after wiping the excess.

To be honest, I don't even recall if I applied paint like I did with the skeg. I was kind of flying by the seat of my pants here. Mostly, my attention was on keeping the curvature of the bilge keels nice and smooth, as it was easy to introduce some wobbliness while trying to glue it into place. 

 

It seemed a little odd to me that the keels rise up at the bow end so much, but I followed the fine, printed guide lines exactly. Being primarily a wooden sailing ship modeler, this is the first model I've ever built where I had to add bilge keels, so I'm just trusting Avangard on this.

 

You'll note in both pics, I've drilled out a couple mounting holes and inserted temporary brass pins. These allow me to set the model on the pedestals and to keep it from falling off them. Again, this is only temporary. I'll either mount the model directly on longer pins and into a display base, or I'll use the brass pedestals and replace these pins with mounting screws. That's not going to happen until the work on the underwater part of the hull is done.

 

For now, this is how I set the model up...

Next, I'm working on the shafts and screws...

With the Avangard kits (I know nothing about any other kits yet), any rolled parts don't have any overlap. The rolled edges are glued, edge to edge. So, for these, I've used a paper shim to support the seam from the inside. You can see a little bit sticking out of the rolled part in the upper right corner.

 

Once the blades are glued in place, I will probably paint them and the hubs bronze. That's what I did with the V108, and I was happy enough with how that turned out.

 

Anyway, a little post-Christmas progress.

 

 

 

 

[ccoyle]

58 minutes ago, catopower said:

but I still had some thin gaps that would let light through if you backlit the model

 

This is why I never, ever let my guests backlight my models when viewing them! 😂

 

1 hour ago, catopower said:

the parts were "press" printed

 

offset printing