Building the Shell Welder

[Hubert Boillot]

Hello all,

I started this thread on the now (temporarily I hope) stalled ��Debris Field�� site. Given the site is for the time being not available, and the demands from some members of both forums (thank you for your interest Mr Bauman), I have decided to restart this thread on this site. It is not ��grey ships��, but I hope it will provide some interest for the Modelwarships' forum members.

I am interested by the amazing works I see on this site, but, as a personal choice, I prefer more colourful subjects, Hence the orientation to merchant ships (or racers when it comes to aircrafts), or pre-dreadnought era warships, when they were more exuberant both in color and shape.

I was working on Airfix' Mauretania, when straining eyesight, (and a 6 months delay to see my ophtalmologist(, pushed me to choose a bigger scale subject, and shelve the Mauretania for better times. So I digged out from my (not inconsiderable ) stash of unmade kits the Shell Welder box.

This is where I stood wth the "Maury" before shelving the project.

[Hubert Boillot]

I have always loved that nice little kit, back to the time when it was produced by Frog and cost little pocket money. And the scale (1/130) here at least makes the detailing exercise more relaxing than on a 1/600 liner...So, as there are not too many large scale kits of civil ships on the market, let�'s go for it!

My kit is actually the more recent Eastern Express production, and the molds show their age: indistinct molding, sink marks, huge ejector marks eveywhere (especially on the ventilating cowls), lots of flash, off-register moldings....On top, the mold technology of the 60's shows in the kit, with very obtuse cutting angles (cutting angles are necessary to achieve mold relase of the injected parts, unless you have a very modern, multiple-drawers mold). So what you get at best are ��steep slopes�� where you should have vertical walls, a lot of cleanig of the parts, a lot of filling, a lot of sanding, and probably parts which will look wrong when you have finished cleaning them and correcting off-register molding. In fact I have decided that I will keep the hull and a few other parts, and use the rest as references for a scratchbuilding / detailing exercise.

The photos below show how the parts look like on the sprues...

First, sources, if only for overall reference.

I have found a few photos of the original Shell Welder, surfing the net.

Here are my sources. You should search for ��Shell Welder�� on these sites.

http://www.shipsnostalgia.com

http://www.photoship.co.uk

http://www.merchant-navy.net

[Hubert Boillot]

Now to the kit.

After assembling and puttying the hull, I started with the propeller and rudder, both indistinct blobs of plastic on the kit. The rudder was scratchbuilt with Evergreen card and strips. The propeller blades were built out of Contrail aerofoil struts, twisted to give them some pitch, and cut using the kit's ones as a guide. The propeller axis is again EG rod.

I replaced the main deck with 2mm card.

[Hubert Boillot]

I have also decided to thin down the bulwarks on the sides of the main deck and the foc'sle, which I did with a burr in my motot tool (at least Eastern Express' plastic is soft to work with). In the process, I went too far on the aft main deck bulwarks, and, as the hull is this area is straight and flat, went for plasticard replacement in the end.

I went also a bit too far on the foc'sle bulwark, but the other issue was that the fairleads opening in the bulwark of the kit was of a vague shape, when the photos show very clearly a rectangular shape, with right angles. I doubled the thinned down bulwark with thin plastic cart, after drawing a template on paper.

The thinning down of the bulwark also implies that the kit's foc'sle deck is not wide enough, so a new one was fashioned in plasticard.

The top rubbing strake / reinforcement around the bulwark is EG half-round 1mm rod.

[Hubert Boillot]

I have added bulwark stanchions out of Evergreen thin strip (thanks to the magical ��Chopper��), and started detailing the chain hawseholes / winch area.

The chains channels were added using Evergreen 4 mm channel strips.

[Hubert Boillot]

have replaced the kit's drum reels and bollards with some scratchbuilt items. There are ectually two types of bollards. the ones I have done go on the foc'sle and the rear deck. Each drum reel is made of 7 parts, all cut on the ��Chopper�� whic helps guarantee the regularity and proper angles of the parts. Ditto for the bollards.

The large discs for the drum reels and bollards, as well as the holes in the bollards' plates have been punched out of plastic strip with a Punch n' Die set, another rather recent acquisition. I wondered how I could do any modelling without these items. They certainly cut a lot of time off, when it comes to produce the same parts many times.

[Hubert Boillot]

The next step was the winch. It is done out of various diameter discs punched in thin plastic card. aligned on an EG rod. the drums at the end of the wincg were shaped out of a piece of sprue inserted in the motor tool. My firts trial was not convincing, but the second one was more satisfactory, as shows below.

[Hubert Boillot]

The winch frame was next. The kit's part is another indistinct piece of plastic, soft, imprecise, with huge cutting angles. The new one was made of various thickness pieces of card.

The electric motor was the winch was another challenge. Given its diameter, I had no rod avilable of the proper size. Fortunately, the kit's sprues are more like tree trunks than the current modern kits' ones! One piece of it was inserted in my small Unimat lathe, and truned to the proper shape. Here agin, the second trial poved the right one ! The gear box at the front of the winch, was built out of pieces of card, rod, and punched discs. The handles are pieces of rod turned to shape in my motor tool.

[Hubert Boillot]

And this is how the anchor winch looks like "in situ" on the foc'sle...

[Hubert Boillot]

And finally, this is how the winch frame and drum look like when finished...

[Hubert Boillot]

Next: the ventilation cowls. The kit's parts are terrible : off register, and with huge ejector pins marks marring them. There was no way I was going to have any use for them, apart as overall dimension guides for the new scratchbuilt ones. The cowls are made of EG tube of different diameter, cut at 45� on the chopper, and glued together. When the cowl face was too big for the trunk, I added a smaller diameter tube in the center of the bigger one, as per the drawinf attached.

The rest is just cutting and filing into shape. When I had two concentric diameter tubes for the larger cowls, a small burr in the motor tool at slow speed was used to achieve the desired internal shape. Et voil� ! Realsitic looking ventilating cowls, with the continuous ��void�� from the cowl outh to the bottom of the trunk !

[Hubert Boillot]

I finshed off the foc'sle detailing with the brackets for the front bulwark, and by adding the box-like structure at the rear, and the platform for the stairs. The positioning holes for the various components of the foc'sle have been drilled by hand.

With the hull at this stage, I was impatient to start painting. Now, I am not a true expert at painting, and I had not done a lot of kit-building recently. So my stock of paint tins is pretty comprehensive, but pretty old as well (I believe some tins are more than 20 years old!). And, of course, the ship had significant parts in the dreadiest colors of all : White ! ! After many layers of brushed paint, the Shell Welder looked not too well, as the photos above of the winch frame show ! Me not happy ! Especially as I could have achieved better results if I had not been lazy, and taken out from the basement my airbursh and compressor !...But more on that later.

[Hubert Boillot]

One word about detailing extras. Atlantic Models (a sub-brand of WEM) have produced a nice PE set for the Shell Welder, in the usual high standards you can expect from WEM products. Of course I got one. In fairness my concern with this detail set is that the thickness of the brass sheet is a bit on the low side, and too ��2-dimensional��, especially given the scale of the kit. This is probaly OK scale-wise (although I did not check), but the appearance is not always what I expected.

Well, future will tell what parts from the PE set I will end using. This is what the fret looks like after I used Jim Bauman's trick of building some scale thickness on the rails' stanchions with thick paint.

[Hubert Boillot]

Back to the paint work. I was decidely not happy with the look of the kit after what I felt was a blotched-up job. Returning from vacation, I decided to take the plunge of stripping the paint off the kit. A plastic bag to keep the kit after spraying it with oven cleaner, a few hours' wait, and a toothbrush to scrub the old paint did the trick !

The only issue is that in the process I scrubed away some of the PE portholes I had added to he hull, who went MIA in the kitchen sink.

[moomoon]

Very interesting, and thanks a lot for the ships gallery websites

[Hubert Boillot]

So now I had no excuse to just moan about the appearance of the PE portholes. I thus went into trying a new technique.

Concentric circles of the proper diameter were drawn on my computer, then printed on thick (160g/sqm) paper. After two different trials, my advice is to soak the paper in liquid CA glue, which wil ��bond�� the paper fibers when you move to the next step, wich is punching rims with the Punch n' Die set. It took more than the needed number to get perfectly concentric paper rims of 3,5 mm outside dia., with 3,0 inside holes

[Hubert Boillot]

Very interesting, and thanks a lot for the ships gallery websites

Hi Moomoon, thansk for the comments...

I have a few "old new" posts left before I come to the present status.

Hubert.

[Hubert Boillot]

Continuing on the new portholes...

Next step was to roll a piece of tin wire I found in a fly-tying corner of a fishing shop. Fellow ship modellers, if you have not done it yet, go and raid a fishing shop : it is a treasure cove of thin wire, thread, slf lines, hair-thin monofilament...plenty of opportunities for us ship-modellers. The interest of this tin wire is that it has no springiness and holds perfectly the diameter it has been given by rolling it around a metal rod. The coil was cut in the middle with a sharp blade, and here you are : circular rings of 3mm dia and 0,25 mm thickness.

The wire rings were glued to the paper rims wth CA glue. I tried PVA glue as well. It worked fine, but was not as sharp as the CA glued rings. Et voil� ! I now had portholes I felt happier about, which were CA-glued into place on the cleaned hull. I added portholes gutters above the portholes by cutting segments of the same wire rings;

[Hubert Boillot]

Finally, before going back to painting, I added reinfocing brackets inside the bulwarks of the main deck.

The doors to foc'sle on the main deck were initially from the Atlantic Model PE set. Here again, I felt they were too thin. added to my initial blotched up paint job, they completely disappeared...Hell this is almost a scratchbuilding exercise anyway ! So I did new ones out of thin plastic card and copper wire (again the source for this was the fly-tying area of the fishing shop), and the door locking mechanism out of slices of L-shaped EG stock.

[Hubert Boillot]

The assembly was resprayed several coats of Tamiya White primer in a rattle can. It sprays easilty, and achieves a nice smooth finish. Now the base is much better to continue the work, especially as in the meantime I took out the airbrush and compressor!

Below is the rear hull after priming, and the PE rails and handwheels as well...

Finally, whilst the primer dried, I added thread around the foc'sle drum reels...