The Ship Model Forum

I know there are quite a few of these on the boards now but I decided to add mine... mainly to give me a place to vent all the frustrations I have in my love/hate relationship with building ships. Background - I haven't built any real models in about 20 years but decided to get this ship during the pandemic lockdown. I soon put it aside to build the Flyhawk Agincourt, thinking it would be an easier build to start with (I'm not sure I was correct about that...). I then returned to this.

I'm not very experienced so compared to most of the builds here this will be very basic. Deluxe kit, using much but not all of the PE. No weathering, no fancy deck, no rigging. I chose the Denmark Strait fit, mainly to avoid the complicated paint scheme of the December edition. One other dirty little secret... I bought a second kit as a 'parts ship' for when I inevitably screw up. Though the parts ship had to be the December model due to lack of availability of the Denmark Strait version. If you have the cash I highly recommend it for piece of mind.

Anyway this was the state of the ship when I started documenting:

An issue that I ran into is that the superstructure is too wide to fit between the forward 5.25" turrets - as far as I can tell I assembled everything correctly, but unfortunately I didn't catch it until the superstructure was nearly finished. Has anyone else had this problem? I guess I should have test fitted the parts earlier. In any event, I had to sand that part of the superstructure way back to fit - so much so that I was in danger of sanding away the openings in the side. The port side was worse than starboard. The ports look a little messy now, I am open to suggestions for the best way to clean them up...

Well, I tackled the aircraft. They are very nice of course but there are a couple of strange issues. First, even though the Flyhawk kit has two aircraft, photo etch is only provided for one. Since I bought a second kit I could do a second... but after building the first one I think that one will be "in the hanger". Second, Flyhawk doesn't provide the 'trolley' which the aircraft should be sitting on - a bizarre omission. I haven't been able to find any source for one in any medium (if anyone knows of one, let me know...) so my options are to scratch build it, ignore it, or have the aircraft hanging in the air on the crane. I haven't made up my mind yet, if anyone wants to step up to the plate!

I added as much PE as I could tolerate but omitted some of it. In particular the upper braces for the engine pod - maybe if I get a second wind I will add them.

The Walrus looks good. Perhaps you're not quite as rusty as you think.

Thanks Dan! But it's a good thing I had two sets of parts so I could screw the first set up.

I ran into some issues with various PE stairways - noting major but they would have been easier to deal with had I realized it earlier.

1) The stairway to platform for the starboard aft 5.25" gun is blocked by a winch and another fitting of some kind molded into the deck. It would have been easy to chop them before I got everything together but now it's going to be a pain.

2) Similarly, the stairways to the forward 5.25" platforms interfere with molded in fittings, although those were easier to remove. In that case it's possible I didn't get the gaps in the railing in quite the correct spot. Note that although the deluxe kit has you cut and replace many of these features with more intricate brass and resin (?) pieces (skipping that part, thankyouverymuch), the offending items in this case are not among them.

3) The stairways that bridge the gap from the forward superstructure to the platform above the hanger. These are supposed to pass over railings provided by Flyhawk, which have cutouts presumably to let the staircase pass though. Unfortunately the cutout is too narrow and too shallow. Actually the only way the staircase bridges the gap is if that section is omitted entirely. This would be very easy to do when assembling, but seeing as I already had to re-install that railing twice after clumsily wrecking it, I don't think I can handle messing with it a third time. If I damage it again then I will fix it..

4) There doesn't seem to be any PE equivalent for one stairway up in the forward superstructure. Since I have an extra set of PE I took one of the spare stairways and cut it to length

I started work on the gun turrets - I love the look of the King George V guns, especially the huge quad turrets so I really wanted to nail it. I opted NOT to use the brass barrels, because I thought there was no way I was going to be able to get them to be uniform and straight (I wish Flyhawk made this part a little easier... in hindsight I wonder about 3D printing new trunnions). This is much more important to me than any small fidelity gained with the brass. The plastic guns are quite good, although they needed more cleanup than it seemed initially.

For the blast shields for the UP launchers, I was initially planning to use the plastic pieces rather than fiddle with the PE parts. On first glance they look good. Flyhawk has tapered the bulkhead thickness so that they appear very thin while keeping enough thickness at the base to maintain shape and strength. But the gussets are also tapered, which looks a bit odd. And at some point I realized the shape of the aft plastic piece is wrong. The turret roof in this area is not parallel with the deck, but actually slopes down towards the back of the turret. The plastic piece is tapered to offset this (so the top of the bulkhead is parallel with the deck). This is wrong, at least according to the official KGV as-fitted drawing. The shield should be parallel with the turret roof, not the deck. The PE part gets it right. So in the end I suffered through more teeny brass.

More turret...

Yeah, i also was not sure about the guns, but I went with brass and used a jig to make something uniform. Agreed, it is not easy. I didnt get perfect result, but did get the fidelity. It is a tradeoff indeed! Problem with brass guns ofc if you start - you need to go bras everywhere...

Yours looking good though, keep it up! I too built the Early 1941 version but as I was doing a conversion I had to scratch build few things, like those shields on top of turrets. Must be nice not needing to do this.

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- @Shipific on IG
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Yes pascalemod IIRC your guns looked quite good - my result would not be nearly so nice. I do think a lot of people get carried away with doing max detail, when a poor job looks much worse than taking the easier, if slightly less detailed path. Speaking of which, there are a number of railings on the ship I need to fix (in hindsight I might have skipped railing altogether, but that ship has sailed unfortunately). I will be having to weigh the cost/benefit of PE again when I get to the radars for the medium caliber and pompom directors, which I've heard are VERY difficult. I will be using the plastic funnel grates for sure!

In any event, here is 'X' turret. The quad turret guns are such a tight fit that I don't thing gluing will be needed, which is nice in case I want to change their position. This is a mixed blessing, as the guns fit so tightly in the turret that it is very difficult to press together, and very easy to inadvertently end up with a big gap. X turret nearly ended in disaster when it started to pull apart while half melted by styrene cement.

Try to ignore the mess that is the aft superstructure, I still have some cleaning up and fixing to do there...

Good progress indeed.
Wanna draw your attention to the way boot topping is painted. I think boot topping could be a tad higher, extending on the belt. You might end up with the cruiser proportions on the model almost, with very tall freeboard optically. Just a thought.

For comparison look at armoured belt and where boot topping is on mine. It is your ship of course so ultimately your call!

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Good catch pascalemod. I will see if I can fix it. Did you find the overall freeboard to be correct? I know that one is a bit inexact since it changes with the load condition of the ship...

I would have preferred full hull but I am planning to display with Agincourt as a WW1 vs WW2 display and Agincourt is waterline only.

So, I think that the freeboard was pretty accurate overall. I compared it to photos and then squinted looking at my model. I tried to compare the relative height of armor belt between the boot topping and top of armor belt, to the thickness of the boot topping overall. It was not exact science. So if you go back browse my model, feel free to use it as reference as I did sadly spent too much time on it. You can also see where hull plates are, where scuttles are - and draw the line somewhere.

She sat low, I think for the 1941 May sortie against Bismarck.

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Plus, at top speed most battleships would sink in about half a meter, so you need to consider that as well

I'm afraid that would not be accurate, I am depicting the famous meeting in harbor between Prince of Wales and Agincourt - so freeboard at 0 knots is most accurate

ETA: Hypothetically, if truly trying to show the ship at speed, the stern should be deeper as the back of the ship 'squats' yes?

I tried to do a little digital CSI based on this photo from April '41. I came up with the boot topping coming up to the lower edge of the tape in this shot. So if I'm correct, the overall freeboard is a little high compared to the ship as in the photo. She clearly was floating deep as pascalemod indicated - the boot top is nearly submerged (and a little deeper at the stern). Note that my tape position is still slightly lower than pascalemod's ship.

Most likely I will paint the new waterline, but leave the hull as-is unless it looks super weird with a thick black line. I could try to remove the waterline base entirely but it will probably cause the lower edge of the hull to lose the proper shape, unless I scratch build some bracing. Eventually I might put in a seascape but that is a long way off, I have to build several more ships and decide how to arrange them.

The hull will sink in and trim a bit, so the stern could sink in a bit deeper. For Hood's wave pattern I did a few calculations returning both trim and sinkage; the latter was around half a meter in the higher 25+ knots range, but the trim angle was negligible, so she remains on an even keel. The wave pattern at the stern itself shows a large wave elevation, so it appears as if the stern is deeper, while it is not.

Sorry we made you redo a bit, but I think youll be glad when you photograph and it looks "right". A high freeboard it has, it just isnt high versus the length and height of the :censored_2:. Same freeboard on a cruiser would look pretty tall also.

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Well I made my go at correcting the waterline... it's not going well. After going through tremendous pains to get the line straight (I scribed a reference line by sliding the hull along it along a sharp ruler shimmed to the proper height) I painted it... and the paint bled through the tape, leaving a ragged and terrible looking line. I blamed it on spraying the paint too thickly - something I struggle with. I also suspected I didn't press the tape down firmly enough. After it dried for 24h I tried putting tape on the black side and brush painting the gray over the black that had bled through.... only to have it bleed right back through the tape. Fortunately I tried this on only a short section. Now I am wondering if this roll of tape is just crap. I haven't had issues with Tamiya tape before.

To make matters worse, I built up a high tape 'wall' around the superstructure but didn't enclose the top, as I was worried about damaging all the delicate pieces there. I've done this before without issue but this time specks of black paint somehow swooped up and in, leaving lots of lovely little black spots on the horizontal surfaces. I'm currently experimenting with creative weathering to cover up at least the deck.

In summary, I am not pleased right now. But no need to apologize pascalemod, I fully brought this on myself.

Here is a tip. Paint with clear lacquer (and let that bleed under tape) first. And only after that, paint with colour you want. This will give you much better finish perhaps next time. And indeed better take it easy and keep coats thin.

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Well, I did my best at cleaning up the waterline. The rear ship wasn't perfect either right? Anyway position of the waterline seems more accurate. The ship does look a little high in the water but I will deal with that for now... maybe some day it will end up in a sea base