WEM H.M.S. Barham 25.11.1941.

[zs180]

The ship also carried three large Carley rafts (Micro Master 3D printed part)

mws33.JPG (38.69 KiB) Viewed 2500 times

and no less than 24 small ones (the count grew every time I studied the photographs). These were constructed from their finest representation available: the FlyHawk set with a resin body and PE grating.

As a last step numerous PE oars were glued to a strip of cardboard in preparation for painting.

It took much longer than anticipated to finish the boats and floats but maybe the time devoted to them was not completely wasted.
As the last group of equipment to be constructed before painting I will now turn my attention to the armament.

[Bouncy70]

Those boats are simply beautiful. My hat is off to you!

[Strategos Augustus]

Another, smaller one, often reffered to as �balsa raft�, sometimes �copper punt� was scratchbuilt. Above it the original WEM part, not much more than a token representation, can just be made out.

mws22.JPG

mws32.JPG

Never seen this type of craft before. Do you know what its purpose was?

Very impressive work.

[Strategos Augustus]

Partially answered my own question:

From http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/naval2.htm

A copper punt was a small raft, often, if not usually, made of balsa wood, in the form of a catamaran, little more than six feet long and about four feet in beam. Originally it had been used by the shipwright, in the days of wooden ships with copper sheathing, which covered the underwater parts of the ship to just above the waterline. After a storm, it was quite usual to find much of the copper peeled off at the waterline, and the shipwright would launch the copper punt, and would go round the waterline, his mouth full of copper tacks, hammering the copper sheets back into place. In the steel navy, the copper punt remained, and was used by the painter to go round the waterline 'cutting-in' the boot-topping, i.e., painting the nice straight line that marks the change from the ship's side grey to the underwater anti-fouling paint. An example of a copper punt can be seen on board HMS Warrior in Portsmouth.

So I suppose they kept it around for touching up and/or inspection around the waterline?

Interesting.

[EJFoeth]

s-l1600.jpg

Currently on ebay... might be of interest?

[Bill Livingston]

"An example of a copper punt can be seen on board HMS Warrior in Portsmouth".

Exactly... here are a couple of pictures of it...

[zs180]

It's been very long since my last post here...
All kinds of distractions during summer plus an ever-increasing workload lead me to a total standstill...
But now the shipyard is active again and some real progress can be reported - if there is anyone alive who cares to know.
So, the last group of fittings to be prepared before painting: the armament.

I usually start construction of the armament with the main turrets and did it so this time as well. There is a great choice of 15� turrets as you can see in the picture: from left to right WaveLine, Trumpeter, Micro Master, Admiralty Model Works and WEM.

. I chose the 3D printed one from MicroMaster the shape and size of which seem perfect to me. All the others had issues mainly concerning the very complex shape. Somewhat surprisingly Trumpeter�s turret is not bad at all and everyone using it can be fairly satisfied. However, I chose to go down the rocky road, because something had to be done to the rough surface of the 3D printed turret. I scraped and sanded the sides smooth and glued PE armour plates (Artist hobby) to the turret roofs. The integral blast bags were modified with additional puttying and brass barrels from Master were glued to them. Minor PE details were added as a finishing touch. In this picture all four turrets can be seen in various stages of construction. I left the fabrication of individual turret roof fittings to be done later.

The 6� casemate gun barrels (Flyhawk) did not need any preparation, I just glued them to a piece of cardboard for painting.
As for the four twin 4� MK XIX AA mountings I preferred Flyhawk�s superb renderings over WEM�s resin castings which have much less and softer detail.

In these two pictures all three types of 4" guns can be seen:

[zs180]

My AA guns are actually a hybrid with parts of Flyhawk�s 4� AA set plus the injection moulded shield found in their Warspite upgrade set. I know that the rivets on the shield are grossly oversize but the whole thing just looks so cool with them�

Here the 4" mountings can be seen on the deck
without shields:

in a row:

Next I assembled the eight-barrel 2pdr pom-poms. Here again I had to decide which I want to use: over the years a nice collection had accumulated: WEM, Flyhawk, Lion Roar, Artist Hobby, Voyager to name but a few. WEM�s own, imroved pom-poms are second to none, but are designed to be constructed with the barrels at zero elevation whereas I wanted to depict the ship with pom-pom barrels at about 45 degrees I elected to use Flyhawk�s offering with Lion Roar�s finer sights.

Artist Hobby�s pom-poms are sweet and I will surely use them in another build. To overcome the �flat barrel� problem of PE guns I ran a bead of superglue along the thicker portion of the barrels. Upon studying the only high-res picture I have of HMS Barham from the period in question I came to the conclusion that there were two types of platforms aboard for her Mk VI*mountings: a pair with splinter shields and a pair with rails. This theory is not backed up by hard evidence but as it adds visual interest to the model I embraced it and modified my pom-pom platforms accordingly.

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mws28.JPG (42.02 KiB) Viewed 1816 times

[zs180]

Pom-poms (temporarily) placed where they belong:

Last item in the inventory of the ship�s armament are the Vickers 0.50 machine guns. I used Flyhawk�s PE parts with barrels elevated because WEM�s own pieces, though very nice, look slightly overscale to my eyes.

[zs180]

The machine gun platforms on the main turrets were scratchbuilt using PE mesh and lead foil. I deviated from the plans inasmuch as I altered the shape of the lower platform on turret B with reference to a photograph which shows it to be rectangular rather than circular. A very nice PE catapult (for turret X) was provided in the WEM kit which was a joy to assemble.

In the last three pictures the result of much work can be seen: hundreds of tiny bits awaiting painting.

[bismarck builder]

Zs180
your attention to detail is outstanding your Vickers 50's are awesome
gary r

[pascalemod]

This is an amazing project. Wow.

[JIM BAUMANN]

soooooo..... George!

You waited until we were all safely away at Telford .....

and then sneaked in this magnificent update !

most excellent work-- I am impressed!

Cheers
JIM B

[zs180]

Gary, pascalemod and Jim,
thank you very much!

[zs180]

I have started painting of the model at last. First I disassembled the dry-fitted bridge structure. I prefer to use enamel paints. First to be applied was Revell 9 Anthracite Grey. I do not paint anything pure black with regard to the scale effect. The boot topping was sprayed first� because of the bulges it is almost impossible to mask it from the top and get a straight line, so I will mask the boot topping instead. A section of the mainmast and the funnel cap were painted this colour as well. Next the decks of the signal platform, the compass platform, the admiral�s platform, the air defense platform and the 15� gun director platform were sprayed a lightened WEM Corticene.

After a light wash I carefully scraped paint off the the previously attached PE tie-down strips giving a nice contrast.

. I painted steel decks WEM 507A, lightened with some Revell 35 Matt Flesh. The first real challenge in the painting process was getting the teak cover of the forecastle and quarterdeck right. I attempted to achieve a darker shade than usually for two reasons: first, to my knowledge wood decks were no longer holystoned in wartime, second, in the well-known original footage showing the ship�s demise the deck of the capsizing ship seems very dark compared to the colours of the camouflage. I mixed roughly equal quantities of WEM Teak and MOLAK 194-M Brown Yellow (a vintage tin of at least twenty years of age) and covered the wooden deck with it.

I then picked out several planks with lighter, paler and darker variations of the original deck colour, at first masked and airbrushed, then freehand with a fine brush.

[zs180]

After a copious amount of AK 301 Dark Wash for Wood Deck

the surface was sealed with Vallejo Acrylic Matt Varnish.

I may have overdone the staining but it is better to reserve judgement until the whole paint job is finished. All the colours applied so far were mixed just before use in the cup of my Aztek airbrush thus leaving no opportunity to recreate the exact shade at any later date. As previous experience suggests, this will hopefully not be a problem later.

[SovereignHobbies]

Excellent work!

[marijn van gils]

Fantastic work George!
Glad to see you are back at the workbench!

Recreating the same shade again later shouldn't be a problem. Eyes are powerful tools, and I think you can get close enough by eye. Some light weathering should unify the last little bit.

[zs180]

James & Marijn, thank you very much!
Marijn, in my previous post I tired to imply that I seldom have to make any corrections to the deck colours later in a build, that is why it is no problem to use a mix that is hard to reproduce.

[zs180]

Some progress has been made, here is the report.
Deck fittings had been painted by hand and after a very tedious deck masking procedure

the camoulflage colour of WEM 507C (very slightly lightened with Revell white) was sprayed on the vertical sufaces. All the previously prepared other parts such as the individual bridge leves, funnel, gun turres, boats, etc. have also been painted this way.

The WEM camouflage colours used:

Next, after some additional masking I applied the darker camouflage colour, WEM 507B (minimally desaturated with Revell flesh colour), the shade of which is now believed to be an equal mix of 507A and C, and the colour so far designated 507B is equivalent to 507A. Numerous corrections have proved to be necessary to obtain an acceptable degree of aligment of the camouflage panels on the individual structures of the ship, e.g. hull, barbette, gun turret. In defining the exact panel layout I relied on the WaveLine instructions which, confirmed by original photographs, seem fairly accurate, while the coloured illustration shown in the Profile Morskie monograph has numerous minor inaccuracies, yet it is copied in a number of other publications, Trumpeter�s own instructions being one of them. There was another tough call: I decided not to carry the boot topping to the upper end of the bulge although it was this high in 1941, because it would have been impossible to produce a horizontal line, the bulge of the model being non-straight and too large � a flaw that I recognised late in the build and would have been almost impossible to remedy anyway.

Now, with the painting process practically finished I am looking forward to what comes next: applying washes, enhancing contrasts and weathering.