Ship Diorama Build Blog : HMS Rodney : Pt12

You may recall my attempt at making flags on foil, well... i tried again...

Laying out foil and picking it to fit the aft flag pole...

I even got the St George cross really nicely done...

It just utterly disintegrated when lifting up from painting...

So I went back to masking tape, and made this HORRID thing... I need to work on this basically... It may take hours.

I then painted all the ships boats with a brown wood, highlighted parts in white and fitted out the main boat deck.

Plus this one dinghy I saw.

I'm not happy about that hull slung boat yet, I did it's internals wood brown, but then the hull white, and whilst handling it into position I put marks in it, the hooks aren't straight, they match the marks in the plastic but I don't like them being pigeon toed like that.  Nothing I can do now though.

I also set the guns to be trained out to port, this is the angle the model will be set at, so we can see the secondary battery port side and the main guns on the base for the first time.

Ship Diorama Build Blog : HMS Rodney : Pt11

 Now I'm going to detail the anchor chains, forecastle and secondary spray shields, this is just lots of lumps and bumps of plastic really, so it's a case of colour, highlight, mask, colour over and over.

Swapping between grey, white, black and skyblue so many times makes you a little bit tired.

But next I needed to add the four capsons to the anchor chain ports, these I gave three strong coats of white to whilst still on the sprue.

I also painted the boat gear and fore cranes black still on the sprue.

A dab of sperglue in each hole and then move and the capsons are in place.

The cranes however I wanted to rig... I found the mig rigging wire too thick, so I asked the wife for a stand of hair... and with patience and superglue.... I rigged each crane still on the sprue.

This took maybe half an hour to fiddle the hair into place, leave it and keep the place draftless to stop anything moving before the glue cured.

Fitting these boat cranes finished off the forecastle.

Next we're going aft.

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!

Ship Diorama Build Blog : HMS Rodney : Pt8

 Today is superstructure day, I spent some time detailing items on the deck, but I mainly started to colour and add the plastic parts to the superstructure island.

Aft of the island are these range finders, for some reason they look like I've painted them really heavily in this image, they're not at all....

These are very thin first coats and didn't seem to go on very well, I can only assume since washing the parts pre-build they've slowly gotten a little bit greasy from my handling them.

With that I looked back to detail the decks on the super structure too, most of this area will get rust and other weathering.

I then decided to build the mast.  Upon dry fitting I found that the rear piece here, the A-frame didn't fit, the footings needed careful and lengthy filing to make them fit into the holes in the deck, and I made a mistake.

You see I fitted the fore-mast here, connected it to the A-Frame in sheer relief that I'd gotten the latter in, after the marathon filing session.

But, of course I cocked up, and I blame the instructions here a little, I sat the little nipple on the fore mast, and thought nothing of it... but then realised a basket had to hang off of it.... GAH.

This basket is meant to be between the two, not just on the front... I think I can ignore this, my OCD won't be triggered... IT WON'T.

But I also put the rest of the mast on.  And the rear baskets.

And yes, that long boom... I broke it too... nothing a dob of superglue didn't sort, but it has a slight droop...

Around the bridge I then added the view finders and these struts were a nightmare.

Finally I wanted to see things coming together.

As per the last post I've still not picked out the deeper shade for the top of the turret, which will also go on the items atop the bridge and go on the masts.

This darker shade is either a very deep blue, or a near black.  And... well, I don't think it should be black, so I'm maybe going to mix my own aquamarine to tar black, but that will entail painting the top of the turrets the bridge top and the masts.

However, that'd ALSO mean the hull shouldn't have been tar black, so I may just go with tar black...