Ship Diorama Build Blog : HMS Rodney : Pt13

Well, it's been eleven months since I started her, and now it's been nearly eight since I last touched her, but finally, after a tumultuous period I'm back at the model making bench... Working on finishing the Rodney, the first task was to remove the dust which had gathered.  Then to start to fit the out rigger boats.

I took the ship off the weighted base, and the turrets off to dust her.

The waves were the worst thing to dust.

I spotted this section of the deck, behind the middle turret mount needs painting.

The first starboard side boat, the cleats added with poly cement and left to set, then the boat gun with super glue.

Close up of the port-side boats through my new magnifying boom.

And a general look at my work bench.

Highlights are the use of my new magnifying lighting boom... lovely.

Ship Diorama Build Blog : HMS Rodney : Pt10

 Today, before I get working I thought I'd sort out the things on my desk... of course with working from home my work space is pulling double duty, but here it is.... 

Yes, that is a coffee and a pint of juice, this is hopefully going to be a nice long uninterrupted modelling session.

First things first, lets review the other three secondary battery casements and get them superglued and we can plan out the rest of the boat deck too....

I do this supergluing by actually decanting the glue onto another surface, the best I've found is the plastic coated card on pakaging, here I'm using an old packet of tablets wrapper, decant and I can dot the glue around with a cocktail stick and touch things.

I use cocktail sticks and bluetac to hold parts for painting...

So they're the three starboard side secondary battery, I give them and the others a first coat after test fitting, they all get the sky blue colour first.

I also give the two unpainted main turrets a coat of grey, then skyblue highlights

Before masking them and adding flash details in darker tones and painting the rooves.

My references here are a little hazy, so I've used artistic license.... She's my ship now.

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 : 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....