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....

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