Ship Diorama Build Blog : HMS Rodney : Pt9

I've had a very long pair of sessions, between walking the dogs and doing some other stuff, and in those two sessions I've done a little detailing of the first turret, worked on rigging, painted the rear mast and build the other main turrets and half the secondary turrets.

The rigging is Mig's 0.03mm stuff and I've had a wild time with it, lets look at some of the other lines I ran.

Initial attachment was fine.  A dot of superglue on the relaxed line and leave it to set for a good five minutes, then pull straight and stretch (for it is elastic) and drop into another piece of glue... but... Oh my, what a struggle.

I then set the aft flag pole... with it actually, unnoticed sagging and being a pain to set straight again... but initially I had it perfect, so that annoyed me.

With the rigging drying and this pole, I thought I also had a chance to play about with the flags.

So with foil down on masking take I started to try and paint a white ensign.

And I hated how it came out....

I also tried to make tiny letter signal flags, this is an X.... 

I was basing these on white matt acrylic paint, letting them dry and then using fine-liner on them.

To give you an idea of the size of these flags the main ensign compared to the side of a match head.

This came to naught.  So I decided it was time to fix the rigged super structure island.  Not wanting to get the glue leaking through I lined it up and started to see how it fit.

Not well....

It took a lot of holding to get the structure glued flat.

I then decided to build the secondary port-side battery.

I am very bemused by the range of rotation on these turrets, they would have been nearly useless on the actual ship....

I then had a piece nearly get lost... A15, the antennae...

Vanished.... I was manipulating it in a pair of tweezers and it flew off.

After stretching a piece of sprue I made a replacement.

Only to suddenly see the antennae was stuck to the starboard side of the bridge structure!

I was getting rather tired by this point.  I therefore picked a couple of low-hanging fruit items... and built the forward 16" turrets.

And as I'm writing this very post and uploading this image...

I see that the structure is not down right, so I've just pulled everything back out and added a line of extra thin glue and held it down, fingers crossed.

But, lets had a gratuitous shot with the turrets in place.

And then on the base!