The Ship Model Forum

Hello:

...and here's the view you get of all of your hard work once the flight deck is added. A lot of it can be seen with a good flash light, but once it's all painted 5-N it'll be pretty dark in there.

Mike

Hello:

I've also started to glue down the walls around the hangar deck, starting with the starboard side (for no particular reason). On the aft corner, I managed to remember to put the crane in before gluing that part down. The front corner went in without any issues, as did the hull/wall part under the island. I've been mostly building on instinct, and really check the instructions from time to time to make sure I'm no missing anything.

Mike

Happy New Year!

...and we have a problem. At this point, I have all of the walls around the hangar deck on the starboard side glued on, and I'm about to start on the port side. I did a test fit of the flight deck today (as I do almost every day) and noticed a problem: there's a big gap on the port side where the two halves of the flight deck meet, but not on the starboard side. So it's like the flight deck is 'bent' at the joint. I'm a bit puzzled as to what could have happened. So far all of the parts supporting the flight deck went on fine, no real fit issues, and the slots in the hangar deck are such that you can't really put the parts on in the wrong place.

So this problem needs to be fixed at the source, with the parts supporting the flight deck. The wedge between the two parts of the flight deck is pretty huge, and would be hard to fix in a way that's not obvious given the planking on the flight deck.

Mike

Hello:

In an attempt to understand my flight deck problem, I temporarily glued the two halves together using two straps of sheet plastic. The whole LONG piece is pretty floppy, but they can't shift or shear relative to each other. I quick test fit of the unified flight deck suggests that the walls around the starboard side of the hangar deck might be tilted inwards a bit, towards the port side. That's pushing the middle of the flight deck to port, causing the bend. The way I think of it, the ends of the flight deck are pegged to the elevator wells, and the walls need to be in the right place relative to that reference line. I'll need to do some more metrology to see if this really is my problem. If so, I might be able to apply some He-Man strength and bend the parts outboards a bit to get them in the right place.

Mike

Hey Mike, I don't think applying he-man strength wil do the trick as the sidewall warp will probably return once you let the ship dry overnight. I suggest you use stainless steel strength. Put some steel spacers between the walls in places where they can not be seen and see of the deck will fit afterwards. Another trick I learned the hard way (I'm looking at you, HP models) is to put the model upside down on a flat surface and see if the sidewalls are warped in the vertical plane. If so, glue some sandpaper to said flat surface and start correcting it.

I had the same problem when I built my Enterprise. After the fact, I think the problem was in the area highlighted by the arrow.

When you build the hangar, there is a gap between in the inner and outer bulkheads, which I didn't think belonged there, so I clamped it together. Apparently, that was a mistake on my part.

IMO, that is where I went astray, and where the gap came from.

I finished that kit about 3 years ago, and don't remember how I remedied the issue.

_________________
Martin

"Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday." John Wayne

Ship Model Gallery

Hello:

Thanks for the tips. I now have all of the 'walls' around the hangar deck glued on, the flight deck in one piece, and it all fits together! For me, the problem was the Pontos PE parts that help to hold the cat walk at the flight deck adjacent to the bow. For some reason that I haven't figure out yet, the were pushing the bow part of the flight deck to port and throwing off the alignment with the main part of the flight deck. Now that I've pulled those parts off, things fit ok. I'll need to file those parts down to get them to fit into place.

More pictures soon.

Cheers
Mike

Hello:

Let's start off this update with the aft 5" gun galleries. The walls were really thick (the front ones were even worse), and so they were replaced with sheet brass. Having glued down the hangar deck walls, I could now glue down the 5" gun galleries. Overall, things went ok with no big surprises, but I ran into a few issues. The kit has a few gussets molded under the round overhang, and I didn't find in pictures, so I took them off. Also, the outer edge of the gallery deck below the round overhang, which is flush with the hull, is vertical whereas it should be angled like the hull. Once I got the parts glued down, there were a few rounds of putty-and-file to shape things correctly. Pictures show a few gussets on the outside of the vertical walls of the gallery, on either side of the round overhang, which I have yet to add.

Mike

Hello:

As mentioned earlier, all of the hangar deck walls are in place. Here's the port side, which I haven't shown yet. No real surprises here, but the usual amount of putty-and-file to get things all smoothed over. I've started to test fit the degaussing cables.

Also, the flight deck fits again!

Mike

Hello:

Moving up the port side, we get to the front of the hangar deck and the port side front 5" gun gallery. I ran into a few problems in this area.

First, part B8 (front most part of hangar deck walls, with the big roller doors) glued in a bit high and a bit forward, al least with regard to the hull sponson for the 5" guns. However, the photo etch attached to B8 is in contact with the hangar deck, so I couldn't put it in lower...unless that photo etch isn't quite in the right place... Out same the sheet plastic and putty to fill in the steps that were left. A lot of work is going into making it look like no work went in.

Second, the 5" gallery deck part was sitting too far forwards and too high relative to the hull sponson. I needed to trim off part of the aft wall, and the bottom aft corner to relieve interference with part B8. Maybe this part was sitting high since part B8 glued in a bit high. Anyways, all is well and this is ready to be glued in and then puttied like the others.

Mike

Hello:

One last thing for today. I've spent some time on 20 mm gun production. The instructions say to make 49, but I counted 44 places for 20 mm guns, so I'll make 44 for now and see if I need to make more later. So far I have 30 guns and 10 bases made. Nothing terribly exciting, but it needs to get done.

Mike

Hello:

We haven't seen the air wing in a while. I had the air brush out to do some priming, so I thought I'd start priming the air wing. One thing lead to another, and now nearly all of the air wing has been primed.

Mike

Looking good.

I can appreciate the work involved. I'm just finishing up my own 1/350 air wing: P-I-A. I hate it.

Hello:

Yeah, the air wing is a pain. I guess you could say that it's a good way to learn patience. It is tedious and repetitive, maybe even more so than making all of the AA guns (more on that coming soon).

Since the last update, I've painted the undersides of all of the planes light gull gray. I know it looks like nothing happened, but sometimes it takes a lot of work to make it look like nothing happened.

Last night I got 15 of the F4F's painted gray-blue. Most of them just have 1 coat, but I put a second coat on a few plus two of the SBDs. So, if it takes me a night to paint 15, and I have 52 to do, then that's about 3.5 nights of work. I need two coats (the second coat is quite a bit faster), plus detailed painting like the wheels, and we're looking at over a week. Plus the canopies...

I hope to power through on getting the blue onto the air-wing before I burn out and turn to something else on the Big-E, or worse yet, work on an airplane

Mike

I feel your pain. Only bigger.

For my Bonaventure, I had to 3D print all the aircraft (no-one makes 1/96 RCN aircraft from the 60s) then sand/putty/sand, then prime, then paint, then decal.

Each aircraft took an average of about 20 hours to print. Probably 1 hour of sanding/putty work. Then painting - first spray, then detailing by hand, probably two each. Then decals (20 per aircraft) that took me about 45 minutes per aircraft. So...about 4 hours per aircraft of actual interaction with the plane.

In my case, I started with the air detachment first, then switched focus to the model. I had a basic hull and deck - it's mostly detailing work.

_________________
ICBM Address: 44:78N 063:63W

Ex RCN, HMC Ships Gatineau, Athabaskan, Charlottetown, St. John's, Montreal, Charlottetown, Summerside, Montreal.

Hello:

For some reason, I was quite eager to see the degaussing cables go onto the kit. After much ado, here it is. It went on fairly easily. I bent it at the ends to follow the curve of the hull, and used a bunch of little pieces of tape to tack it into place. Once I was happy, then I glued it down. There's a gap where the hangar deck catapult sponsons were, and I plan to fill that with the unused bits of the degaussing cable from the kit PE parts.

Another milestone is that the fore 5" gun galleries are glued in place. It took a fair amount of persuasion to get them in, but they're in, puttied, filed, sanded, etc. There's still a little of the putty-n-sand to do, but they're pretty much done. I've also added the catwalks around the front of the flight deck, and the flight deck still fits! This time, I did all of the work with the flight deck on the kit and everything inverted, thus adding those parts wouldn't affect the fit of the flight deck.

But all is not sunshine and lollipops. There are a few tricky problems to fix. More on that later.

Mike

Hello:

I vaguely recall someone mentioning that the rings at the very front of the bow were really bad. It was only after looking at a good photo of the area that the as-molded kit area started to bother me. Here's a comparison of what it's supposed to look like (please disregard the red circle...that's for something else) vs. what you get. The kit gives you two vague bumps, and those vague bumps are too far apart.

Hello:

Filing off the molded on kit bumps was easy enough. From the photo, I determined the separation of the two rings and their internal diameters in 1/350 scale. The ID is 1.3 mm, so I got a 1.3 mm drill bit and wrapped some copper wire around it into a coil. I clipped off one revolution of the coil to make a ring, and repeated that a few times to make the 2 good rings plus a few spares. I filed a semi-circular cross section groove in the deck at the bow centered on the new location of the rings, then glued them on. Now things look much better.

Mike

Hello:

The Enterprise has gone belly up so that I can work on the propeller shafts and rudder. First, the shaft struts were dealt with. The as-molded kit shaft struts are about 1.5 mm thick, or scaled up would be over 20" thick. I don't think that the shaft struts were thicker than the armor on a battleship, so I thinned them down. I first used a ball grinder in the dremel, then files, to get the thickness to ~0.6 mm, which was about as thin as I was comfortable taking things. Then I beveled the edges to give the appearance of being thinner. In the picture, I've done in inboard shaft struts but the outboard struts are as-molded, so you can see the difference.

The Enterprise also had a set of shaft struts about mid-way along the shaft. I'll just cut off the one molded on (and very thick) strut, and fabricate two new struts. Also, I replaced the kit shafts with brass tube since I happened to have exactly the right size (~1.5 mm OD) in hand.

Mike

Hello:

I think I know what you mean. I just have the aft set of struts (the ones just forward of the propeller) on now. There's another bearing and struts midway along the shaft between where the shaft comes out of the hull and the propeller. I haven't added that one yet. The brass rods are just slipped in place now (no glue), so I'll just slide the rods out, slide on the middle bearing, slide the rod back in, the glue on the struts.

Mike