1/192 HMS DORSETSHIRE Scratchbuild

[Torpedo]

Very impressive! It looks excellent and sometimes I like the raw styrene and other material look more than the final paint.

[ar]

After doing some digging on the subject, I found the following;
While on the China Station the ship was painted with WHITE HULL and LIGHT GREY UPPERWORKS, with WHITE TOPMASTS.
Durig the voyage to China she was painted in overall light grey, changing over upon arrival on station.
THis is certain.
Hope this helps.

AR,

May I ask if you have any information on whether Dorsetshire was ever painted in white and buff while on the China Station in 1937-39? My growing suspicion is that she was not. Thanks for any help.

[Cadman]

Very nice structural work.

[Steve Sobieralski]

After doing some digging on the subject, I found the following;
While on the China Station the ship was painted with WHITE HULL and LIGHT GREY UPPERWORKS, with WHITE TOPMASTS.
Durig the voyage to China she was painted in overall light grey, changing over upon arrival on station.
THis is certain.
Hope this helps.

Then that's what I will paint her. Thanks very much AR for your help.

[Laurence Batchelor]

A few more Dorsetshire photos I stumbled across for you Steve.

This useful closeup one comes from my complete set of Warship fotofaxs which I didn't check beforehand:



and this one comes from a prewar postcard:



Cheers

[Laurence Batchelor]

Steve if your looking to peace together Dorsetshire's movements in the 1930s I have the following in my notes which might be of help for you.
I'm slow but I get there in the end! :

Dorsetshire - Pendant 40
24-06-1930 - Commissioned for trials until 22-07-30. Total build cost for the ship was �2,101,951.
16-09-1930 - Commissioned for CS.2 at Portsmouth, vice Frobisher.
09-1931 - CS.2 Now with the Home Fleet along with Norfolk, Exeter and York
01-1932 - Sailed with CS.2 for Spring cruiser to the West Indies.
Autumn 1932 - CS.2 visited Copenhagen as part of the British Exhibition there.
30-05-1933 - Relieved Cardiff in CS.6, on the Africa Station.
26-08-1933 - Left Devonport calling at Teneriffe between 31-08 to 02-09, Ascension 10-09 to 12-09, St Helena 15-09 to 19-09, Saldanha Bay 25-09 and finally arrived at Simonstown 30-09-1933.
23-02-1935 - Arrived Devonport, Plymouth to refit having been relieved by the cruiser Carlisle.
02-04-1935 - Recommissioned at Devonport for CS.5, China Station.
13-05-1935 - Departed Devonport calling in at Gibraltar between 17-05 to 18-05, called at Malta 21-05 to 24-05, Suez 30-05, Aden 03-06 to 06-06, Colombo 12-06 to 16-06, and finally Singapore on the 21-06-1935.
02-1937 - At Singapore for combined exercises with Cumberland, Hermes and 9 destroyers from the China Station and also Norfolk and Emerald from the East Indies Station.
11-02-1937 - Left Singapore for the UK calling at Colombo 16-02 to 18-02, Aden 24-02 to 25-02, Suez 01-03-1937, Malta 05-03 to 07-03, Gibraltar 10-03 to 12-03, finally arriving back at Plymouth for her refit on 15-03-1937.
21-08-1937 - Recommissioned for China Station and left Devonport on 14-09-1937.
18-10-1937 - Arrived at Hong Kong relieving Danae.
28-12-1937 - Relieved Suffolk as guardship at Tsingtao protecting British interests from the civil unrest.
10-01-1938 - At Tsingtao when the Japanese took over the city.
01-1938 - At Singapore for the opening of the naval base with Norfolk and Emerald on 14-02-1938.
06-1938 - Exercises from Hong Kong.
30-06-1938 - Joined China Squadron at Wei-Hai-Wei.
09-1938 - Off the Yangtse watching for the Italian cruiser Raimondo Montecuccoli during the Munich Crisis. However the Italian warship had already reached a Japanese port so Dorsetshire left for Amoy to watch the Japanese cruiser Myoko.
05-1939 - At Amoy with Birmingham, Duncan, Defender, USS Bulmer, USS Marblehead, USS Asheville, French Emile Bertin and French Lamotte-Piquet to protect the International Settlement at Kulangsu.
09-1939 - Part of CS.5 China Station with Cornwall, Kent and Birmingham.

I won't bother with the wartime movements as my hand now aches!
Cheers
LB

[Steve Sobieralski]

Laurence,

Thanks as always for your pictures and information. Regarding Dorsetshire's movements, this is very interesting information and much of it is new to me. I do have a complete accounting of her whereabouts during her Third Commision (May, 1935 - March 1937) from my copy of her cruise book for that period. I can also add that she was in Australia (Port Darwin and Sydney) in the March-April, 1938 time period, but I don't know the exact dates.

Progress on the build has been somewhat slow as I have been on vacation and been traveling for my work. Some of what I have been able to work on can be seen below. Like most warships Dorsetshire was equipped with a large number of deck mounted items including ventilators and stowed objects such as paravanes. The ventilators come in two basic types, fixed head (which are cylidrical) and rotating head (which have flat faces, round backs and are tapered top to bottom), each type has three to four different sizes, and there are a lot of them. The photo shows some of these items which have been fabricated and temporarily set in place on B Turret Deck.

As always, thanks to all for the comments and interest.

[Dave Wooley]

Hi Steve An amazing job , your workmanship is first rate .
Dave Wooley

[J. Soca]

That's real neat, keep up the good work

[Steve Sobieralski]

After some mental wrangling I decided that the next thing to be done is to bring the hull up to a further level of completion. The hull is a manufactured laid-up fiberglass item that I purchased from a British outfit called Midway Models about fifteen years ago. It is very good dimensionally and shape-wise and has a nice rendition of the bow knuckle. The finish of the hull is smooth grey gelcoat with no detail molded in at all. I had already made and attached the shafts and struts, bilge keels and rudder post. I had also marked and drilled the port holes, then backed them with strips of sheet plastic glued to the inside of the hull, attached the sheet plastic subdeck and installed the hawse pipes. Finally I had installed the finished wood deck and sealed it. This was all covered in previous posts.

Lurking in the back of my mind was the knowledge that, in spite of the large amount of work that had already been done, there was still a lot to do before the hull was complete. I also realized that the hull needs to be basically complete before anything substantial, like superstructure components, can been permanently attached to it. There are three major areas of the hull yet to be finished:
1. The portholes
2. The stern gallery
3. The hull plating
4. Painting

The main porthole issue was the rigols, the semicircular rain gutters above each one that is exposed to rain. I had originally not intended to model the rigols. They are small, even in 1/192 scale, not always obvious in ship photos depending on the light, and (perhaps most critical) I did not know of a good way to make them. While working on the superstructure, however, I thought of a way they might be made. It worked fairly well and I started added them to the portholes on the superstructure. But the number of portholes in the superstructure was nothing compared to the number in the hull � there must be several hundred (I don�t want to count them).

The method for making the rigols is quite simple. A small hole is drilled into the end of a plastic rod the same diameter as, or slightly larger than, the porthole. The end of a strip of .010x.015 plastic strip is inserted into the hole and the strip is then wrapped around the rod in a tightly wound spiral. The bottom end is held in place by a small clamp.

The rod is then placed in a container of nearly boiling water and allowed to stay there until the water cools. Then using a sharp scalpel two cuts, 180 degrees apart, are carefully made up each side of the spiral. The result is a fair number of rigols, ready to be grasped by a pair of needle-nosed tweezers and one by one, cyanoed to the hull above each porthole.

I started installing the rigols at the stern. Also shown are the rectangular shutters for the windows in the admiral's day and dining cabins and ladder rungs which occur at the bow and stern. The rungs are made in a similar way to the rigols using thin wire wrapped around a square plastic strip and then cut down both sides with a knife. They are then glued into drilled holes.

One of the reasons I chose to model Dorsetshire was that, of the County Class, only she and Norfolk had sternwalks. This would, I thought, add a bit of interest and uniqueness to the model. I may regret that decision as I have come to find that the sternwalk is a rather geometrically complex and difficult to build little item. I have made a start on the sternwalk�s construction. The deck has been attached to the hull and the curved sloping canopy has been temporarily attached by two small metal pins. Still to be made and attached are stanchions/posts which extend from the deck to the canopy, handrailing, railing grillwork, and triangular braces under the deck the hull. One mystery that was solved when I got the as-fitted drawings from the NMM was the location of the door to the sternwalk, which was at the extreme point of the stern.

[Filipe Ramires]

Interesting strategy the one you are using for doing the rigols, Steve. They look very nice indeed. Taking some notes here to try that in smaller scales.

[Guest]

Good tips there Steve , thanks for that , we live and learn.
Dave Wooley

[ModelMonkey]

Absolutely superb!

[Steve Sobieralski]

Here are some more progress shots of the sternwalk. It still needs a little work and cleanup, but is basically complete. The framing and railing is probably a little heavy, but the extreme closeup shots tend to emphasize it and I think it will be fine when viewed from a little more distance. The grill work in the railing is some railroad photoetch that is not exactly what was there but I think is fairly close.

Unfortunately I could not build it to be removeable, so when I spray paint the hull I will have to try to get some paint coverage inside while not gunking up the outside with too much paint.

[Avery Boyer]

Amazing work!

[J. Soca]

Stunning work

[Laurence Batchelor]

You have captured the stern-walk beautifully

[Steve Sobieralski]

In the first post of the build fourteen months ago I described how I built a main gun turret that I hoped to be able to use as a master for casting at least three more for use on the model.

Building the turret was actually the first thing I did on the model, and as I have built more and more of the various components I have periodically put everything together, just to get an idea of what the completed ship would eventually look like. Wherever I did that, having only one turret to put in place would dilute the effect considerably, so I finally decided that it was time to either cast more turrets from the first or, if for some reason that did not work out, build three more.

First, let me say that I had never attempted casting anything from resin before and I was amazed at how easy it was and how good the results were. Having this ability opens up lots of new horizons for the modeler and I have already started using it to cast some other things, including a spare tire and wheel for a car model (OT, I know).

I won�t go into a lot of detail about what I did as casting techniques have been written about by people far more knowledgeable on the subject than I. Briefly, prior to making the mold I added a plate slightly smaller than the bottom of the turret so the bottom of the turret would not be the top of the pour.

Then I attached some scrap plastic to the plate to hold the master suspended above the bottom of the mold. I used a plastic parts drawer divided in half to contain the mold.

The two-part RTV mold material was mixed, poured into the parts drawer around the master and allowed to set. I think I over-reached a bit by trying to cast the range finder lugs with the turret in a one piece mold and the rubeer mold tore slightly when I removed the master. The tear closed up once the master was out, however, and was never visible in any of the castings I made from it.

I was able to easily cast four turrets and even though both the range finder lugs and bases of the gun barrels were not useable because of air bubbles. The photos below show the progression from out of the mold to finished turret.

The unuseable range finders and gun bases were cut from the casting and the blast bags re-drilled to accept new gun bases.

New range finders are made and attached, new gun bases fabricated from tubing and the barrels added. Minor imperfections are filled with Mr Surfacer and the turret is painted and ready for the model.

[Laurent]

Hi Steve ,

nice work here ...

I never casted something , but I'm more & more convinced this is the way to go to reproduce parts ...

I still have some cowl ventilators to do , I thought of doing them by hand , but cast them would be a lot easier ...

Regards ,

Laurent

[J. Soca]

Superb