Part 44
Chabanenko has a simple safety rail running around its landing pad, just railing with 5 horizontal bars. No mesh or netting at all. As far as I know, nobody makes any railings with more than 5 bars.
I normally try to paint the lowest bar in either deck or hull color. The result makes it look like posts and 4 rails. Since Chabanenko needs all 5 rails, my first thought was to paint them all white and just glue them down. The upper corners of each railing segment needs to be rounded off, so my second thought was to cut a little off of each upper corner to appear sort of rounded off.
As it turns out, while looking through my spare etch, the GMM etch set for Kuznetsov includes the exact railing that I need. It runs up along the sides of Kuznetsov's ski jump ramp.
All vertical sections and horizontal bars 1,3,and 5 are supposed to be thicker than horizontal bars 2 and 4. After priming and then spraying white over everything, I went back and put 3 or 4 more coats of brushed on white over the areas that needed to be thicker. Unfortunately, I don't really see any difference in their appearance.
The railings come in segments that are 4 sections long and two pieces that are only two segments long. For the back, I did an initial pattern of a 4 segment then a 2 segment and then another 4 segment. The gaps that were left over seemed too wide to me. So I redid it. I used both of the supplied 2 segment parts in the middle and then cut apart a pair of 4 segment pieces and glued them together to form 3 segment sections. The new pattern of 3,2,2,3 gave me 4 pieces to glue down instead of 3 so I was able to space out the gaps a little better I think.
Now it is time to finally do the main deck gun. I prefer the large size of the Trumpeter turret, but it lacks most of the sharp details provided by the aftermarket turrets. The Veteran Models turret has a lot of etch and is slightly smaller than the Trumpeter turret. I will be using it. The turret in this photo is a 3d printed turret I purchased from Hobbyeasy. It is the smallest of the 3 turrets and although the 3d render looks great, the actual part has too many small print supports to remove, and is beyond my ability to clean up. I broke off a lot of the small hand holds, and the large hand holds are nothing more than raised lumps and not separate from the main body at all. So I wont be using it either. It also seems under sized to me.
Thanks for looking.
Dan