After some time I am now back to my major project, the Massena. As I was still not in the mood to fix my problem with the windows and bulleyes I decided to give the fore- and after-bridge a bit attention. From the fore-bridge Jim Baumann sent me a great picture showing a lot of detail, so I started there. The first thing I decided to do was to glue the cardhouse on the second storey to the floor but before that I had to do the interior (which I had to add as the cardhouse has many windows an is open at the back towards the central stairway-tower. As the plan show there was a binnacle, a chest of unknown purpose and six communication tubes housed in the cardhouse. The binnacle was turned and the Kelvin's or navigator's balls (2 mm balls from an old added from an old Ball bearing) on two styrene triangles glued to it. The communication tubes were made from thin electronic solder (as the rest of the tubing on the bridge) and lead through the floor in the coning tower below it. The chest is just cut fom a square styrene rod.
Jim's picture shows also the complex structure of beams below the crow's nest. These were etched and stripes of carefully bent 0,3 mm styrene glued between them.
One thing I really like at these aged ships are the early small- and quickfire-guns. I have built lots of them (german 3,7 cm Hotchkiss, 8 mm Maxim, Nordenfeldt-gun, german 8,8 cm L/30 SK) with great fun. So I happily started with the "canons de 47 mm de marine". Two of them were placed on the first storey of the forward bridge (later the two 37 mm guns were also replaced with 47 mm guns. I haven't decided yet, which of these variants I will represent on the model), two behind the aft-bridge (later replaced with 100 mm guns) and four of them in each of the crow's nests.
Thegun was mounted on a base of struts screwed on a base in shape of a cut off circle. To represent this I constructed a explosion drawing of eight struts linked together at the upper end, that were then etched. The etched struts were then rolled and soldered together the struts spread and soldered to the (also etched) base. The feet of the struts were the decorated with huge screws (cut from an 1 mm styrene rod) as seen on the model of the gun in the musée de marine in Paris.
For the master of the barrel and the two "tubes" on both sides of the barrel these were turned and glued together. From this master a silicone form was taken and the barrels cast in resin. The gun carriage, the shoulder support (two halves) and the pistol handle were all etched from 0,2 (the carriage from 0,4) mm nickel-silver.
(grafic of etched parts used for the 47 mm gun)
The parts were then glued/soldered together and finally painted (I recently laid my hand on a can of very good gold-spray for the brass parts. It's nearly as chromium plate in gold).
For the railings I used stanchions from Peter Lienau (which can be purchased at
http://www.hobby-lobby-modellbau.com/onlineshop/index.php/cat/c484_Reling-1-100-Standard.html). As the railing on the first and second storey had a thick (wooden?) rail on the top the top hole in the stanchions had to be drilled to 0,8 mm and than half cut off. The top railing was then bent to the shape of the bridge (it's quite a frigging job to bend a 0,8 mm brass rod to a complicated shape ensuring that the form stays plain) and soldered to the stanchions. The lower railing was made from thin copper wire.
(just a test of the later gun configuration)
The binnacles on the cardhouse and the wings of the second storey were turned as the one in the cardhouse (but only to the one on the cardhouse navigator's balls were added).
(as you can see I made a failure with the railing on the lower storey leaving the gap for the stairway next to the cabin behind the stairway tower. This is fixed by now.)
(view from behind, giving a look in the cardhouse)
To be continued ...
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