Ship Diorama Build Blog : HMS Rodney : Pt7

Today, for it is a glorious weekend (for real, not just when I scheduled the post to be published) I had a good three hour stretch to work uninterrupted, I therefore started to spend time doing little details, a turret and getting ready to detail the superstructure... But along the way, I also had a self inflicted cock-up.

The funnel needed a white band around the top, and so I started to add some white details elsewhere.

A little of the black was added to the super structure in my last session, so I started to flesh things out with more of the white.

Then I got a little bored and decided "GUNS"

Using a little piece of blue-tac I elevated the guns, this set is going to be fairly highly raised and then a dot of glue to hold them at that angle.

While it dried I added the life boats to the roof.

This was done by placing the boat, turning the turret over whilst my finger was on the opposite side and giving it a touch of the extra thin cement.  And this technique, which I was using so well, would come back to bite me very soon....

These little runner like things need to sit on the deck in two holes, one at either end, either side of the fore and aft turret.

So just like the boat on the turret I held the skiddly little thing in place and inverted the hull, touching a dot of the cement on the two pins.

It was at this point I realised the tooling, and perhaps even this stamp, of the model was four years older than me, but with confidence in my old friend I dropped the second of these skips into place.

I put my finger on it and flipped the hull over.

Two dots of cement... AND MY FINGER IMMEDIATELY FELT WET.

This is bad, this means the cement has wicked out the holes, up and around my finger tip.

Which of course means that cement is melting both the plastic deck AND my lovely paint job on it.

PANICK!

I cleaned it up, with a little thinner, then scraped the flaky dried clods away and cursed myself, for this is the port-side, the main side which will be closest the viewer when displayed.

I went to do something to calm my nerves, the funnel...

And when everything had had twenty minutes I got the ocre back out and did a fine coat.

It looks worse in the picture, once dry it was fine and below the temporarily fitted gun turret it's hardly noticable, unless you know, or read this blog.

I added a few colour details to the deck and decided to leave things there for the day.  Unnerved.

The turret however needs a dark coat to the roof, and I'm yet to pick the shade... Solid black seems perhaps wrong.

Ship Diorama Build Blog : HMS Rodney : Pt4

Tonight I've spent a fruitful two hours completing some details, clean up and fitting then I've actually taken a brush to the model...

The first piece was adding some wire cut and bent, then super glued into position, to represent the two wing bars, I'm not even sure what these things are, they're serviced from the gun deck by ladders, which are molded into the plastic.  In real life they were suspended by a double back rope pulley, but I can't possibly model that, so I'm just giving the intimation of them.

They were held in place with a piece of masking tape, super glued and then cropped to length.  Bending was performed with a pair of pliers, but I could not for the life of me get them straight.

The next problem was fitting the roof on the bridge, and in the image above you can see the two proud forward prongs of plastic, these needed sanding down but the detail retaining.  Else the roof was sitting high out of place.

Much sanding and test fitting later and it looked about right.

Finally the rear of the bridge has a vertical slit gap that needed a touch of filler.

 And the same on the front.

And the roof was fitted.

Then, the whole thing had to dry a little before some 2000 grit sand paper was used to smooth the rear wall and take the seams off of the bridge module.

A glorious look at things on the base was then required...

And you can see the leading markers from the bridge top... and guess what came in the mail today...

Yes, I am going to add rigging.

Brush time... I can't resist painting, I paint with a brush, not an air brush, so I thinned some Revell Aqua Colour Ocker 361 (88) at about 70% paint to 30% Revell Acrylic thinner and put on a very fine layer on the decks.

The challenge here was to keep the details of the plastic, which does have a hint of deck planks.

Three coats on the forecastle and fore section of the gun deck (forward of the middle mount) and you can really see it coming together.

And I painted the aft section of the bridge and superstructure, which is clearly decked too.

You can clearly see the decking still on the super structure and how thin my paint layers are on the deck, here we see the near finished deck of the super structure (3 coats) and the main deck (1 coat).

See the other posts here:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3