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 : Pt5

 Today I've decided to work on the decks, now I was using Revel Ocre 88 as my base, this is just a flat colour, no shading, no detail nor weathering; that'll all come later.   But my initial coat was very fine, but just not covering the plastic.  So three layers later the colour is better and more consistent, but it has now pretty much wiped what little intimation of planking there was in the plastic surface.

I has also created myself a problem.  My plan is to paint and detail the deck then mask it before doing the hull sides, and because I hadn't masked it there was now paint on the hull, that needs cleaning off.

Once I was happy I decided to have a play at some detail.  Mixing a little leather brown into the ocre and thinning it, then cutting some stencils with plank like shapes....

I started to put little plank marks, the odd replaced deck plank.

I didn't do too many of these, I will perhaps do more and I'm going to take a look at what happens to a deck after being salt scoured and washed down by mops for a long time and add something like that to break up the field of ocker I currently have.

My next step however was to start preparing for the colourful hull camouflage, and this time I needed to mask around the rim of the deck, to break the steel hull from the wooden deck...

For this I used flexible masking tape to pick out the edge and on the right you can see a vertical tape line, this demarcates the furthest extent of a certain colour I'm going to use on that rear quarter, so the tape tells me I'm safe to paint that first colour to that line.

I also masked out some of the eye catching sea spray shields on the forecastle.

My final step was to pick out a little detail on the stern and look at the two AA guns I need to build there.  I was hoping to build to the 1942 look, but the AA guns as I have them appear to be the single barrel 20mm style, rather than the quad barrel pom-poms fitted later.

I don't have any photo etch, so I may look t building a pair of 4 barrel pom-pom looking parts from scratch.  However, I need to make shields for the gun emplacements... that'll be a challenge.

This is my reference for this....