The Ship Model Forum

Hi Dave!
Thank you so much for your kind words! I've been overwhelmed by the amount of interest and feedback I've gotten on this project; I never would have expected it. And I very much appreciate hearing from masters like yourself.

John

Hi Richard,

Well, here's a bit of a teaser since your last question!

This is one of the Shermans I'm working on for the 59. It is a Hobby Boss M4A3 and the story of building the tanks for the 59 will take quite a few pages all by itself! This photo shows the Sherman in a very early stage of construction with scratchbuilt wading trunks and other mods. When it is done, it will be camouflaged, but you'll have to wait for more on that until later!

John

Happy St. Patrick's Day to all the Irish and wannabe-Irish readers of ModelWarships! I'm not Irish, but I will take this day as a good excuse to quaff a refreshing Guinness!

Now, before I get too deep into that Guinness , in this post I’m going to show you how my painting strategy is working out. But first allow me to backtrack a little. Earlier, I mentioned painting the hull numbers on the model. There are a lot of handy products and tools available for hobbyists, and when I find one that is useful at the right price, I use it. However, if it will cause a significant delay in model construction or adverse cost, I’m only too happy to improvise. Painting the hull numbers is an example. I didn’t have the correct size decals for the hull numbers, which are basic block numerals, and I didn’t want to take the time to order them online and wait for them to show up. Instead, I took some block numeral decals I already had, calculated the reduction factor I would need on a copier to reduce them to the right size, and copied the numbers. I then used an Xacto-knife to cut out the numerals for use as a template. After joining the numbers together to make a ‘59’ template, I applied a generous amount of glue from a glue stick to the backs of the templates, and positioned them onto the hull. After taping around the templates to prevent overspray, I carefully sprayed the numbers white. This technique won’t assure crisp borders without a lot of work, but in this case, since the white numerals were only an intermediate step and would be painted over, I didn’t worry myself about having pretty-looking numbers.

Once I had the hull numbers painted, I was ready to go to work on the camouflage. First, I masked off areas that needed to remain ocean green and then, applied Navy green that was lightened by the addition of gray. As I mentioned in my previous post, I like to use Magic Masker liquid mask made by Walthers. I can quickly apply the mask where I want it and then build up the demarcation line with a generous amount of masking liquid thus increasing the width of the boundary. Then, I can apply masking tape without too much concern about being precise because the need for precision was met by initially applying the liquid mask. Although there are occasions when I rely on tape alone, taping would take quite a bit of time on a model the size of the LSM-59. Unfortunately, Walthers appears to have discontinued Magic Masker so I’m going to have to find a substitute, but I’ve seen a couple of products that might work as well. I’ve used Micro Mask before and it is terrible; I won’t use it again.

Here’s a couple of photos of the hull after applying Navy green with masking still in place.

Next, I masked off the areas to be painted flat black. Again, I lightened the paint by adding gray. After stripping off all of the masking, here’s the result:

The next step was to paint over the original small hull numbers to replicate what is shown in the photos of the actual ship. Here’s a couple shots of how this turned out.

I've got a bit of touch up to do but after that, I’ll be spraying the hull with Future in preparation for weathering. That is something I don't have a whole lot of experience with, so it will be a learning process!

In the meantime, I still have many details to work on and I’ll tell you about those in my next posts.

John

I painted myself green for today What do you use for a airbrush ?

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If you are not living on the edge then you are taking up to much space

aha,camo painting ,it is a tricky piece of work,it is very well done .one allways worries about bleed thru.someone on this forum told me about painting the edges with future first it seals the edge and does not show.

Hi John In the book Warships and Warship Modelling Bill Clarke used a picture from the Nobie Smith Collection to illustrate how camouflage on LST 104 is almost unrecognizable due to weathering having obliterated any traces of the original patterns , it's a superb picture . I have to confess I see the application of comouflage as a very skillfull operation but weathering is an art form. Great job you are doing
Dave Wooley

John,

Although it is too late to be useful in this build, here is another idea for painting numbers and letters. I have used rub-on letters as stencils. First paint the number/letter color. When it is dry apply the rub-ons. Then paint over the rub-ons with the surrounding color. When the paint is dry lift off the rub-ons - masking tape works nicely for this. You might have slight paint edges around the numbers but these are easy to remove with gentle scraping.

With this technique you can have any color text and numbers, and the resulting painted characters are much thinner than decals or rub-ons, will not yellow with time, and do not have the "decal edge."

This is a good way to apply lettering and numbers on irregular surfaces (deck plating, louvers, screens and grills, etc.).

Phil

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A collision at sea will ruin your entire day. Aristotle

RussClarke said:



I use Tamiya tape. Never had a problem.

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Any ship larger than a Destroyer is a waste of metal.

DrPR, I'm not following you. Could you go into a little more detail on how you do this or possibly post photos of the process?

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Any ship larger than a Destroyer is a waste of metal.

Hopefully DrPR doesn't mind my jumping in, but what he described is a trick I learned years ago when I was building an RCAF Hurricane (Airfix 1/72 kit--naturally )

What you would do is first put down a spot of the colour your numbers (or letters) will be. I like using Model Master Canadian Vodoo Grey as it's a really light grey and I love Voodoos Plus, being an enamel it gets a nice tight bond on the underlying primer etc.

Let the spot colour cure thoroughly. Then take the dry rub (letraset or some other like Archer--I've used HO scale RR transfers in the past) letters and rub them down on top of your under-colour. It's important to get a nice clean separation and smooth--really, really smooth transfer. I've had people ask if you could use waterslide decals instead of dry rub transfers, and the problem is that the carrier film on waterslide decals messes things up. What we're looking for is to use the transfer as a mask, protecting the light colour from the overlaid camo scheme. Waterslide decals will end up masking too much with their carrier film--not to mention I doubt they'd come up as easily at the end.

Once your transfers are rubbed down, and any bubbles or lips are smoothed down, spray on your camouflage. Don't future down the transfers-they won't come up after. After the camo colour has had time to set properly, get yourself a small loop of masking tape (standard tape is better than Tamiya tape is it has more "grip"), loop it around your fingers "backwards" with the sticky side out (just like we learned in the army to use packing tape as a makeshift lint brush) and gently press the sticky side of the tape against the spot where the dry rub transfers are. When you pull back, the tape should lift away the transfer, removing the mask and showing a nice sharp letter (or number) in your spot colour. I prefer the "clean jerk" approach to lifting the tape--doing it really fast like ripping off a band-aid. You may want to experiment based on your paint and primer setup--you want to avoid lifting the camo colour save for that spot being covered by the dry rub transfers.

I hope this helps explain what I think DrPR was talking about. It's a neat way of masking, and I still do it occasionally if I have to airbrush custom codes etc, since my standard masking/friskit talent is exactly nil.

Cheers,

Sean

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Now Complete: 1/72 HMCS SUMMERSIDE (MM 711)
Now Complete: 1/72 HMCS ST. CROIX(I-81)

Current Project(s): 1/72 HMS WALNEY(Y 04)

Now I follow. Thanks.

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Any ship larger than a Destroyer is a waste of metal.

Hi Russ,

Thanks for the comment! I've seen the note on the forum that you mention; it's a pretty clever idea. With the LSM-59, I'm not worried about crisp lines because I intend to heavily weather the ship anyway, which will obscure any problems with the paint edges, hopefully.

John

Hi Phil,

That sounds like a great technique. I think I've seen your previous discussion of that and like you said, it's a bit late for this project, but I'm going to put that away in my bag of tricks for a future project.

John

Hi Dave,

Thanks again for checking in and commenting. It's always appreciated! I'll see if I can locate the photo you mentioned because I'll be striving for a very weathered ship when I finally build up the courage to tackle that part of the project!

John

Hi everyone!

In this post, I’ll show you the progress on the bow doors and the bow door flaps.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, at the lower leading edge of the bow doors were small flaps that hinged upward so that the lower edge of the bow doors would not dig into the ground upon beaching.

The opening mechanism for the bow door flaps was extremely simple: the operating cable was anchored to a u-bolt at the midpoint of the bow door by a clevis shackle. The cable then passed back to the bow where it fed through a sheave or pulley. From the sheave, the cable returned to the bow door, where it passed over a pulley that guided the cable downward to the flap doors. The cable end was attached to the flap door by means of a turnbuckle that enabled the linkage to be adjusted. When the bow doors were opened, the movement of the bow doors would pull up on the flap doors via the cable. By the time the bow doors had opened wide enough to lower the bow ramp, the flaps would be approximately perpendicular to the bow doors, depending on adjustment of the cable linkage.

Here’s a photo of the cable arrangement on LSM-310, in case my explanation was too foggy!
Once I had applied the camouflage on the hull shown in my previous posting, I removed the bow door flaps so that I could finish them, which is why you might have noticed in the photos accompanying one of my recent posts that the bow door flaps were missing. All that really remained to finish the flaps was to add frames and hinge points, paint what had been worked on, and mount the flaps onto the bow doors. In the photo below, you can see the flap doors installed on the bow doors.

Next, I’ll be building the sheaves (pulleys) that mount on the hull. Then, I'll make up the cable run and associated components. However, I won’t actually install the bow doors and cabling until the hull is ready to be permanently mounted onto the base.

It occurred to me the other day that while I've been focusing on describing the painting of the hull and building detail parts, I’d forgotten to tell you about the base I’ve built for the model. In my next post, I’ll show you how that’s turning out.

John

Hi John
Always wondered what those flaps were . Very interesting how they work .

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If you are not living on the edge then you are taking up to much space

Hi , Looking very good,

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Simple but effective.

Hi everyone!
Thanks for checking in and leaving your comments. In particular, most recently, Richard and the Admiral have left notes. They're always appreciated!

Today's posting is a bit long-winded because it is about the base I've been working on for the model. I began work on the base at the start of the year; you'll see that in the photos below because I hadn't begun camouflaging the LSM-59 when I took these photos.

From the beginning, I knew that the base was going to be big. The model is about 51 inches or about 1.3 meters long all by itself. Since the display would show the 59 landing vehicles at Iwo Jima, that was going to add another 6 inches to the length of the base for the bow ramp alone. Then, after adding about 4 more inches at the bow and the stern so the model won’t look too crowded, all of a sudden, I was looking at a base that was 64 inches long! In the same regard, the width of the base was going to be rather large, too. The model is about 8 ½ inches wide. I wanted to have about 4 inches of space on either side of the hull once again so as to not crowd the model. This meant that in the end, the base was going to be about 16 inches by 64 inches. Good thing I have lots of room!

I rarely build bases for my models and I’ve never built a seascape base before, so I was a bit hesitant about proceeding. Fortunately, examples of seascape bases abound at ModelWarships.com, along with lots of ‘how-to’ guidance, which gave me an idea of how to proceed. The first step was to get some lumber and then pick up some acrylic paints and gel medium at the local Michael’s crafts store.

The base began as a particle board shelf, which I cut down to the desired size. Then, I attached thin wood strips along the sides.

Here's a look:

Once the base was assembled, I painted it with Payne’s Gray acrylic, which is a dark black-blue and allowed it to dry.

Here’s a photo.

The next step was to tackle the ‘beach.’ Iwo Jima is a volcanic island and one of the unforgettable characteristics of the island is its black sand. I pondered how to replicate this for quite a while and read about how other modelers had simulated beach scenes. Some modelers have used actual sand but I decided against that because the grains would be out of scale. I wanted something that would be relatively smooth but a little coarse. I decided to mix up a batch of Celluclay with model railroad fine black ballast and fine brown cinders. Celluclay is a papier mache’ model railroad product that dries hard as a rock. To give the mix the right color, I added acrylic black paint until I felt I had the right shade.

Here’s a photo of the mush I created.

I applied the mush by hand to the beach end of the base while wearing gloves. Once I’d gotten all of mush onto the base, I applied masking tape around the model’s hull and attached the hull to the base with screws. At this point, I carefully sculpted the ‘beach’ around the bow of the ship.

Here’s a photo of the hull sitting on the base with the waterline masked.

Here’s a couple photos of the ‘beach’ taking shape.

While waiting for the beach mush to dry, (which took a couple days!) I began working on the water. For this, I took a page from other modelers on ModelWarships and used acrylic gel medium. On a base this large, application takes a very long time!

As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, LSMs would drop their stern anchor when approaching a beachhead and after unloading, use the anchor to pull the ship off the beach. One of the reasons that I made the base so large was so I could display the model with the anchor deployed. For the anchor cable, I used thread that I’d coated with white glue. The white glue smoothes out all the fuzz and helps to keep the line straight. One end of the ‘anchor cable’ was fastened to the base prior to applying gel medium and the rest of the cable was temporarily attached to the stern of the model.

While unloading on a ‘hot’ beachhead, LSMs would maintain an ahead bell on the screws, which meant the ship would be kicking up a prop wash, as shown in this US Navy photo (courtesy of NavSource.org) of LSM-43 unloading at Iwo Jima during the invasion.
I wanted to simulate this, so I took care to build up the prop wash with gel. I also simulated the pooling around the diesel cooling water discharges that were amidships on the port and starboard sides.

Here’s a photo showing the area around the stern.

After the gel had set, I carefully removed the ship from the base and peeled off the protective masking tape along the waterline.

The water around Pacific islands is typically described as very blue, so to achieve this, I used a couple of different shades of blue: Phthalocyanine Blue and Ultramarine Blue. I used Titanium White to lighten the blues of the water and to highlight the prop wash.
Here’s a photo of the model on the base after the initial painting. I still have more experimenting with shades of blue and white to do, but after I am satisfied with the water and the beach, I’ll coat the water on the base with Future floor wax. I’ll post photos when I get to that point.

Here's an in-progress shot of the painting:

In my recent post about painting the camouflage, I got a little ahead of myself talking about spraying the hull with Future and weathering. Before I can do that, I have to apply the large hull numbers. I’ll show you that in my next post.

'til next time -
John

wonderfull job and water
humm i am waiting for more these pics.. superb

Hi John
I sure am learning alot about LSM's and I love it .You have a great begining for a excellent diorama . Is it going to be on display somewere ? Looks like something you would see in a museum .

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If you are not living on the edge then you are taking up to much space