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

Ship Diorama Build Blog : HMS Rodney : Pt2

This base build is very time consuming, mainly due to the requirement to allow layers to dry and set before proceeding onto the next layer.  As such when I move onto the two other models I'm going to make both ships at the same time, this is so that I'm using the same materials at multiple times across the pair.

As mentioned before the first colour layer was put down and covered, I have since repeated this, layering the tissue paper and 50:50 PVA to water mix and softening or adding wavelets as I've gone.

As this dried you can see the previous colour layer coming through quite strongly.  But before more colour could go on it needed now to dry completely.

So, I set about mounting the black plastic hull base from the model itself.

First a test fitting into the wave front for the bow...

 Then I spent time cleaning up the base to allow the line of the hull to sit into the sweeping water feel now built up...And once I was happy I drilled two holes in this base...

Through them I then pushed a cocktail stick...

Cutting it neatly and then adding a dot of superglue to fix them in place, these are now through the plastic and into the polystyrene, but they're not permanent, the base can be pulled off, it's only held by a little excess PVA and the sticks.

Adding the weight, stuck down with a liberal swish of superglue completes this preparation...

And a hull test fit confirms things are going to work out....

Next, with thinner I took aquamarine and blue/green acrylic paints and gave a nice but randomly shaded 

At this point the base has been left to dry for 24 hours.

I plan to pick out the wave crests with some white and add a little more detail to the wake, but the base colour, wave shape and layers of modelling are done.

We'll return to the base only for the edges needing colour and building our frame and badge.

On to some actual model painting!

See the other parts here:

Part 1

Part 3

Part 4

World of Warships : Code Give Away

Hey readers, sorry I've been absent so long... To make up for things, for my five readers who use these codes there's free stuff on WarGamings World of Warships.... The code can only be used once and only one per account, so once you've used one you've used all you can.

Find me in-game on the EU server as "Xelous" for some Coop battles.

Codes for Existing Accounts:

HEBCT-VN2E8-G4K6X

HEBCU-XSBPF-M64PC

Existing players can redeem your codes via the Wargaming.net shop.

Codes for new players opening an account:

HEWCB-H48ZV-PVGFY

HEWC9-TRFAK-5R9M8

HEWCU-5YEYS-A395Z

If you want to sign up for a World of Warships account, click the link below where you'll get some bonuses and so will I... https://warships.net/Xelous

World of Warships : Cruiser Grinding

I've been, between lots of work, playing some world of warships this week.  I've actually been pushing my German Cruiser grind from tier IV to V.  Which I completed earlier...

I've had some excellent games, admittedly I've only been playing Cooperative, but it has been great fun.  And I love the option in Warships to play cooperatively.