The Ship Model Forum

This isn't exactly a scratch build but I think it is worthy of a place on this forum due to the amount of photo etch parts being used and the expansion of the air wing. The later is currently envisioned to be a reverse engineering of the kit supplied aircraft cast with a two part resin. These aircraft carrier kits never seem to come with enough aircraft and just as a note I have approached Airfix about running off a batch of the airwing as supplied in the kit but am not hopeful that they will take it seriously.

Anyway, on with the photos and hopefully the forum gods won't strike me down

The kit as purchased. The former owner got as far as cutting out the aircraft elevators, painting them, and then gluing them into the flight deck.

One of the first things I noticed was how chunky the detail was for things like doors etc so I got carried away and bought all of the available Eduard PE kits or the model. Not a cheap exercise but definitely worth it!

The first thing I tackled was installing the PE in the weather decks, photos of which I'll upload latter. The next thing was to move onto the external PE on the hull. This required removing the surface detail of various vents, cutting out the material behind, and then super gluing the PE mesh over the top. I was introduced to slow curing super glue which gives you enough time to manoeuvre the PE piece into place before the glue cures. Truth be told even then I have messed a few items up and they are not perfectly aligned or square, and I have to figure out a way to remove the excess glue that has made it's way onto the actual mesh.

Today I started work on the island. I still have work to do on the weather decks but I'll tackle that another day.

As you can see the door detail as made is a little chunky and the PE doors look a lot better. I just have to get better at aligning the little bug...! And I have some cleanup to do

Looks like an interesting project, but since the hull and superstructure are still from a kit, this doesn't quite fit the criteria for the Scratchbuilding section. I've moved it up here to the Picture Post WIP section where kits go.

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De quoi s'agit-il?

Thanks Timmy.

As I promised yesterday here are some photos of the various weather decks.

When I cut the hole in the hull for the mesh screens I found in a couple of places the wall of the adjacent weather deck overlapped the hole. I was able to rectify this with some modification of the weather deck walls except in one place.

Future dilemma. Do I cutout the plastic behind the mesh screens on the exhaust funnels???

This is the sum total of the airwing supplied with the kit. A bit disappointing really

So I took the plunge and decided to try and trim a bit of material off one of the walls on the port weather deck which interfered with the mesh covered openings and it seems to have worked. Now to start painting the weather decks and then assembling them.

Decided to spend some more time building old Lusty to develop my PE skills before scratch building the walkways and such for HMAS Melbourne. PE definitely has its challenges even when using slow cure CA and requires much patience. The PE does add a whole new level to the look of the ship though.