The Ship Model Forum

Very nice model. And interesting to see how these split barges have evolved since I saw their great grandparents on the Oosterschelde in the 1980s.

Thanks,

she is now finally finished, even some details that I wasn't going to put, made it in the end. Sorry for the bad pics, I'll make better ones later on.

One of the last things were the energy chains, basically it's a collection of electrical and/or hydraulic connections between the two halves, guided in a protection to allow them to move without getting damaged. The aft one is below the accomodation.

I might add some more sand at the junction between the hull and the vertical transparent plate...

Hey! Excellent job with the scratchbuilt liferaft, the wet gravel looks very realistic. Bravo!

We're on the home stretch now. Been tackling some itchy bits and pieces.

-For the propulsion pods I needed to make some blades, as the hub was made in the pod. An idea I had with Living Stone, although the 1/700 scale on that model meant I made a simple disk with some cut-outs. In 1/400 I wouldn't get away with that, so it was time to try this method. Started with a disk of appropriate diameter, with a center hole for the hub, so the blades would have a proper contact shape to the hub later on. I then had to cut 4 blades out of the disk.

- For the liferaft, I'd normally take them from kits (in 1/700), but I didn't have any ready in 1/400. My solution was to cut a piece of 1.5mm styrene rod and scribe some in lines in it. To handle it, I drilled a 1.5mm hole in a piece of 2mm styrene, this also gives a straight scribing line on the rod. First I filed the first and of the rod to a rounded shape. I then scribed one line all around, just on the edge of the rod and the plate.
I then moved the "raft" approx 0.5mm more up and carved the next line. And so on, until I reached the proper length of the liferaft. I then cut the raft at length and filed the aft end to a more rounded shape.

- biggest job remaining was the accomodation. I first added some details, vent fans, battery boxes etc. Then came the railing and stairs. I then mounted the liferafts and rescue boat and as a last part the bridge itself. I did the bridge last as the upper surface together with the lower surface of the accomodation gave me a good grip to handle it without damaging the PE.
I also added fire boxes and the nav light boxes on the bridge wings. Last thing remaining are the Man Overboard Buoys on the bridge wings as well as the stairs to the main deck, once it is mounted in place. These stairs are rolling as they have to compensate for opening the hull.

- Did also the final layer of sand/acrylic inside the hopper.

Hi Jim,

not entirely the case here. I'm working on the "mother vessel", filling those barges, so I have no experience emptying them. I'm pretty much making the sand part based on you tube movies...
During the drying of the gel inside the hopper I've been busy with the lifeboat and rescue boat.

I have also taken the step of mounting the second part of the hull on the stand and finishing the hinges between them. In the previous post you can also see the hydraulic cylinders that push the barge open.

In previous pics you could see that the edges of the opened halves were not entirely parallel. Here you can see why I did not correct that in a very early stage and why I wasn't too worried about that. With the yellow cover plates, these edges aren't visible.
Now the lifeboat davit is mounted into place. Next step will be the accomodation (with the platform connecting the accomodation with the lifeboat davit for boarding).
Funnel casings are dry fitted in this picture and will be mounted last.

==> its hard to judge whether its right or wrong
unless you have actually been there and witnessed
the process/ captured moment;

it seems fairly evident that have you seen and experienced it!

That looks pretty convincing to me ;

JIM B

Thanks for the explanation Wefalck.

Decided to give the water inside the hopper a go. You can see in movie that the hopper fills with water when the vessel opens, this mixture makes the load shift and drop easier.
I probably should have done first a layer of water on the plate and only then added the sand, in order to have the water level. But I do still believe my actual sequence will give a more realistic result.

The initial layer was slightly too liquid, which meant by capillary effect, it got sucked into the surrounding sand. Not really an issue as the sand wasn't finished yet, so I'll be putting more coats on top.
The result looked promising, but of course the shrinkage of the gel-water-paint mixture means it wasn't going to be sufficient to get a flat surface.
A second coat of gel was then added to give a better filling effect of the "pits".

The layers also give me more chances to get a better colour mix. In the third layer I used a pure brown, which doesn't look right neither. A later and last layer should fix it, the colour will be based on the first layer, but darker.
The challenge is to get a "flat" water surface, with the level in each pit, being more or less equal to the other pits. I'll later on build up the sides further.

I have seen such direction blades in 'pods' before. I gather they serve to keep the flow semi-laminar for a longer distance behind the pod and thus to loose less energy in turbulent flow and drag.

The discharge of mud begins to look quite convincing! Representing such dynamic processes in models is always a challenge and often do look quite toy-like.

Thanks Jim,

A second layer of sand was applied on the volcanoes. At least on one side. You can see the difference between the wet mixture and dry mixture. When dry it is still glossy, but in this case, since it is mixed with water on the real thing, it should be a bit glossy.


It was also time to build the propulsion pods. Did that before on Living Stone, so not such a big challenge. the drop shape is made of two parts, both were small rods placed in my dremel, one filed and sanded conical, the other half ball shaped. I'll add the blades later on. More difficult to make a tiny propellor to mount inside the tunnel than to make the drop shape in one go and add blades inside the tunnel afterwards, using part of the drop shape as propellor hub.
The "strange" thing about these pods is that they have a small rudder between the propellor and the hull, you don't see that often on these things. I assume this will give added steering capabilities, even when the props are reduced in rpm.

still a most interesting project--with many challenges persisting... the sand et al!

but nevertheless..-- very good!
JB

Hi Wefalck,

thanks for the comments. Consistency is the issue with such small things. Even the winding of copper wire I believe would be difficult to keep the exact shape, I assume that I would deform half of them by manipulating them... The rounded edges would be a plus I guess, but on the other sides, lifebuoys are slightly flat as well.

In any case, time to take some decisions on the sequence. The issues at hand were:
- How to keep the correct angle when only one side is connected (solved by my initial drilling of the brass support pins and additional solution is the correct angle of the forward and after "edge" of the hopper. Those edges will rest against the vertical part of the stand)
- How to install the hydraulic opening cylinders between the two parts if both parts would be connected to the stand
- How to finish that narrow strip of sand between the stand and the halves
- How to finish the inside of the hopper with the angled structure

Decided to first prepare one side to connect to the stand. This solved most of the issues.
I built a "box" inside the hopper of one half. I then gave the box a base coat of brown and added some layers of gel-sand mixture. By installing this half, with the box resting against the vertical part of the stand, it kept its correct angle. I first had to remove a line from the sand on the stand, quite destructive to the cutter blade I used...
I then carefully added gel-sand mixture to connect the bottom and make a continuous stream of sand.

This sequence also allowed me to mount the sand surface plate (with brown base layer) and make a start of the sand piles inside. This method gives me rather easy access in a difficult to reach corner (angled side of the hopper with PE railing on top). The second half will be more difficult to finish.
There is a pattern of mountains inside, since that's the way they are filled by the barge loading system of a Cutter Suction Dredger. These mountains remain visible throughout the dumping. I noticed that my mixture is rather too liquid and starts slowly to flow and settle during curing. This means I'll have to do it in layers.

Indeed, these are simple, yet difficult to make items ... but they look quite good!

At this scale, I could also think of winding some copper-wire of suitable diameter around a drill shaft or similar, to cut off rings with a cutter knife, solder them together and then slightly flatten them.

New effort for the lifebuoys. I decided the original ones weren't good enough and off-center. So I needed a more reliable way of producing them.
Decided to make an imprint on the 0.3mm plastic with the punch, but leave it inside the plastic sheet. Then I drilled the center. Afterwards I used the imprint to center the plastic on the punch and eventually punched them out. It wasn't a 100% success rate, but it certainly was better than just drilling and then trying to center it in the punch.

They were then also put in place, giving some more color to the ship. This is just a dry-fit, the hinge is only put there to check.

Thanks Marijn, I must admit I'm cheating on the last part. I'm actually cutting half of the locator pins and the remaining ones I bend over to glue them to the deck. I don't have a 0.3mm drill and I'm not too comfortable drilling that close to the edge of the ship with a 0.5mm drill (not to mention such a hole would be way too large and visible that close).

One of the issues is of course that this is generic PE, suitable for long lengths of straight railing. Although my subject is an easy vessel in many respects, it clearly isn't when it comes to railing. Lots of small stairs with 3-4 steps, which of course means I need to follow that with the railing.

Here is some more info on the ABER product. It's quite a beautiful product, very fine PE, yet still a little sturdy. The only "bad" habit I noticed is that the fine bottom railing parts are actually thicker than they are high. This means they tend to twist when you try to cut them. Hardly visible when you paint it afterwards though.

The second half of the ship is nearly finished, so now I'm pondering on the question how to mount it on the base (and mount the "hydraulic cylinders"). I think I'll fix one part first with the second one dry fitted. Once fixed I'll start applying the gel and sand on that part.

Last sequence will probably be first accomodation to have a longitudinal fixed point, then the lifeboat davit, central. Then I'll need to make a connection platform between the accomodation and the lifeboat davit. Last will be the funnels, since they should not touch/squeeze the davit in angled condition.

That looks good! Especially if you're not too experienced with PE. And also with that system of attachment, which is much more difficult than having a solid bar at the bottom of the runs to glue to the deck.

Although I agree it looks more like sloppy modeling, I don't really see a better solution for the time being. The sides will in any case be cluttered by dredge material and the bottom will have the plate with dredge material on top, so little will eventually be visible in there.
Bare metal doesn't really exist at sea, when a steel surface is exposed in a sea environment, it takes about 30 minutes - 1hr before it turns completely orange.
So for maintenance purposes at sea, when a deck is chipped of rust and the primer is not immediately applied, it has to be brushed again with a wire brush before you put the primer.
The hopper of these ships was, even at new building stage, never really painted and already had the rusty brown appearance of the steel they used. Only the top appears to have had a white sort of primer and then the black/anthracite.

Made some progress on the walkway, I'm using one half as the experiment before I continue on the second half. I cursed myself for even trying to use PE. Very flimsy, but I guess it's an excellent quality due to its fine nature.
The PE I use is from Aber, 1/400 railing, 1/400 stairs and I also have 1/400 slanted railing. I use the slanted railing for the stairs, but in reality railing on stairs isn't like this... I also tried to use it on the slanted part of the hull, but the angle is wrong and I had hoped to bend it to the correct angle, but this can't be done.
The railing is supposed to be drilled, with a jig for drilling the holes, being incorporated in the side of the PE fret. However this only allows for drilling straight lines. The advantage for my build, is the railing has small extensions at the bottom to put inside those drilled holes, this extension is nice to stick to the side of the catwalks.

I'm still figuring out how to work with this PE, so quality is inconsistent. I do try to put the yellow steps at the top and bottom of each stair as it brings some life to the moss green.

This is always a narrow line to tread: replicating a sloppy paint-job as on the original, it typically looks like a sloppy modelling job then ... perhaps you can add some wear, bare metal coming through to tone done the 'sloppiness' ?

There are lots of techniques for 'distressing' aircraft- and armour-modellers have developped. Sometimes it is suffienct at small scales to go along edges with a soft (6B) pencil and rub this with a cotton stick or one of those rolled paper stick pastel-artists use.

A small update again. As expected, due to the amount of fittings that I have ready, slightly faster progress is made now. Foreward most of the detailing is done, 1 extra platform with a winch remaining as well as the stairs and railing.

I did tackle one of my last hurdles for finding a solution to the walkways on the sides of the hopper. Normally they are grating, but I didn't manage to cut my normal material this fine. I decided to go for full plating for this. The strip is made of 0.3mm styrene, which tends to bend when cut this finely. I therefore reinforced it with 2 x 0.3mm steel wire pieces. 1 was enough, but then it wouldn't lay straight on its supports.

My normal method for this kind of thing is to drill holes and insert staple shaped pieces. Due to the holes they are easy to adjust in height to create a straight supporting structure. However, on this ship it would turn into a swiss cheese and eventually a mess. So I decided to make only 4 real supports of 0.3mm wire and create the large amount of supports by cutting up a piece of PE railing (heights nicely corresponded to what I needed).

Disadvantage of this moss green deck paint is that things are quite difficult to see. The advantage on the other hand is that all other colours (red escape exits, life buoys, yellow highlights) are very visible.

The paint job in the hopper is done sloppy on purpose, it appears they did it like that on the original as well (paint gets destroyed completely by the dredged material after all. The only sharper lined feature will be a black (I think I'll use Anthracite) top border on top of the white.

Thanks for the encouragement. The paint has arrived, so I'm expecting a fast progress now.

I did forget my issues with this particular colour on my last model, Living Stone. The Moss Green is very transparent and has a very strong tendency to clog all pigment in certain areas, leaving edges etc. empty of it. The solution appears to do this is thin layers with drying time in between, to be able to fix some pigment in place before adding the next layer.
It took again 5 layers to get a decent (I'm not saying good though...) coverage. Next time I will also add less detail before air brushing.

Funnels are nearly finished now, only need to add the exhaust pipes and the DEME logo's on the side. Still contemplating painting the grills on the side in a different colour (which in reality they seem to be).

Then I'll go from forward to aft adding the detail and colour.

Neptune, i like the way she's coming along! The sand curtain merging with the base is a very clever solution, it works! Am looking forward to see deck and funnels painted and to see the model completed. It's a very original project and your scratchbuilding technique is very effective. Really cant wait to see this finished.

SG