The Ship Model Forum

Small update.

Using this blueprint plan here:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/ ... rlord2.jpg
........I decided to create an additional cross section cutaway to show with my model Habbakuk when I take it to a contest.



The "pykrete walls" were made with 1/2" and 1/4" thick styrofoam sheets that I got from the railroad section at a hobby store. The 1/8" balsa wood is used to simulate the composite wood insulation that protects the pykrete from melting and/or to help keep it cold.
All the interior walls and decks were made with Evergreen sheet. I still haven't decided if I want to add any other details to the interior, but I'll gladly take any suggestions if anybody has any.

I also made two 1/700 turboelectric propulsion pods that I'll be adding to the outside of the main wood hull and placing in appropriate areas to simulate where the pods would be and how they were spaced apart. I didn't have enough spare parts and other supplies to make 26 units, so I hope 2 will be enough to show as a "sample" so to speak. The pods were made with 1/700 sonar domes from 2 Spruance destroyer kits I had. They were the only parts decent enough that I could find to use.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/ ... C02193.jpg

Neat work!

New update.

Been spending lots of time the last three days working on the superstructure for my Habbakuk. Since there's no plans or pics of what the superstructure is supposed to look like, I've had to take quite a lot of creative freedom. In the pics, you can pretty much gauge what most stuff is and where it will be: 40mm tubs, 20mm gun galleries, Mk.37 radar units, etc. I still have a lot of work to go yet before painting, which should probably be started maybe early next week. I probably went a little overboard with all the armament around the superstructure. Oooops.

Front View:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/ ... C02219.jpg

Back View: (I plan on putting a boat and davits in the middle where the "alcove" is so to speak. To the left of the alcove, I was thinking of adding another 20mm gun gallery. If I don't, then I may just hang some more life rafts on the structure wall.)
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/ ... C02216.jpg

Top View:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/ ... C02226.jpg

Island looks AWESOME man! Only thing I'd change is get some better twin 5"/38 turrets. Those look like the Hasegawa ones and they are sooooooooooo bad. DMLs look the best in the scale I think but Skywave ones are great too. Just some professional criticism man, change 'em if you can.

Island looks AWESOME man! Only thing I'd change is get some better twin 5"/38 turrets. Those look like the Hasegawa ones and they are sooooooooooo bad. DMLs look the best in the scale I think but Skywave ones are great too. Just some professional criticism man, change 'em if you can.

I've got a whole bunch of 5" guns that I've been robbing from spare kits. There's plenty to choose from.

Need advice on armament options/placement.

Here's a few pics showing placement of 5" guns and also 40mm AA. The second pic shows red marks that will indicate where all the 5" guns are. The green marks indicate where all the 40mm is. I was also thinking of adding small 20mm gun galleries (blue marks) between all the 5" and 40mm placements. So......do I have too much armament or not enough? According to all the references I've read, the Habbakuk as originally designed was to have forty 4.5" dual barreled DP guns, plus numerous other lighter armaments. 40 seems like too much to me, so I scaled back the amount of 5" that I wanted for the ship.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/ ... C02227.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/ ... t/weap.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/ ... C02230.jpg

I'd go with that, but not with them directly on the deck. On the sides in galleries would be good.

Timmy C wrote:I'd go with that, but not with them directly on the deck. On the sides in galleries would be good.

I would go along with that and twin and quad 40s on the premiss that they would be less of a difficulty to mount on galleries, especially in large numbers . A very unusual subject and very much in tune with the new board on "might have beens"
Dave Wooley

The guns won't be sitting "on top" of the deck. The parts in the pics are only to give a rough representation of where they will be placed and how far they are spaced apart. The 40mm will have tubs along the edge/side of the hull. The 5' will be "slightly recessed" so to speak as shown in these example plans I drew up.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/ ... C02101.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/ ... C02102.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/ ... C02100.jpg

Been awhile since I made any updates. Progress has been a bit slow as well as being frustrating. I wish to hell I wasn't working in 1/700 scale. It's too hard on my eyes with all the small parts. But 1/350 is too big, so I might as well stick with what I've got. Anyway.........the superstructure is about 90% done. Here's some sample pics of how it looks. You can pretty much figure out the 40mm positions, 20mm, searchlights, and where everything else is. I'm thinking of changing the color of the oval life rafts to a lighter shade of gray, but I'm not sure what yet?
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/ ... C02263.jpg

And here's more 5" turrets that I'll be adding around the circumference of the ship.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/ ... C02264.jpg

And here's the other side of the superstructure. The "alcove" in the middle is where I'm going to put some davits and a motorboat. But I'll also be putting some other boats in other locations around the ship too.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/ ... C02266.jpg

Long time, no see. Just a short post for tonight to ask a question or two. Hopefully, I'll have a better update later this month with more Habbakuk progress.
Anyway, this is a small cross-section that I built that I'll be putting near my Habbakuk model so other people can see what the inside would have been like.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/ ... rlord2.jpg


The thing is, I want to detail it in some way, but am not sure with what? I can put a few planes inside on the interior hangar decks, but I'm not sure what else? Anybody got any suggestions?

Take a look at some other WWII CVs' hangar decks - girders on the roof, various tanks, pipes, a door in the bulkhead, even people would add some life to it.

If you want to add some life to the scene you can build a maintenance/repair scene with mechanics swarming all over one or more planes with pieces and parts on the deck, maybe an engine pulled and on a stand. Might be hard at 1/700 but simplicity is the key in that scale.

Just my 2 cents man.

UPDATE TIME!

Suffice to say, I haven't been working on my Habbakuk that much, if at all, the past four weeks or so. I was in kinda a rut about trying to get some 1/8" thick plywood to make another layer of decking and figuring out how to make some cutouts in it for the armament. But I finally managed to get some plywood at a hobby store not that long ago, and then last night I was at a friend's house and we worked some more on the hull which I'll describe below.

As I said, I wanted to add another 1/8" layer of "decking" so to speak so that I could make cutouts along the edges for the 5" guns and 40mm guns to sit in. I was trying to give the appearence that the armament was semi-recessed below the flightdeck so the aircraft wouldn't hit the armament if the guns were placed on top of the deck. I was trying to go for the look of the way the HMS Illustrious or other British WWII aircraft carriers had their 4.5" guns slightly below the flightdeck level. I really did not feel like adding any sort of "balconies" hanging over the side for the 5" guns if you know what I mean. The 40mm tubs are slightly overhanging, but that's ok as I wanted them that way. I'll make underneath supporting structure for them soon. The cutouts for the 5"/38 cal. guns were made using a scroll saw. The cutouts for the round 40mm gun positions were made by putting one of those Dremel sanding drum attachments into the chuck of a drill press and then "sanding" out the cutout. Pretty nifty idea from my friend. You can also see in the pics some long thin 20mm galleries that I'll put along the sides of the hull. They are only sitting on top just for "reference purposes". The whole final amounts of armament for this ship have been reduced significantly. I figure there's no need to have so much armament when you have 100-200 fighters/bombers that can also help defend the ship. So whatever armament choices I made in earlier posts in this thread have now been reduced.
The extra thin layer of wood decking was then glued/taped in place last night and left to dry/cure overnight and most of today. The two holes in the middle of the decking were where screws were placed to help hold down the decking while the glue was drying. These will be filled and/or covered eventually. Priming, sanding, and painting of the main hull will take place shortly in the next few days.


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/ ... C02322.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/ ... C02323.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/ ... C02324.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/ ... C02325.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/ ... C02327.jpg

Holy cow, that looks good! That's got to be impressive once you have several fighter and bomber wings sitting on the tarmac, er, pyrocrete, whatever.

... so where are the main armament turrets hiding?

Main armament? You mean bigger than 5" guns sorta like in this pic here:
http://www.mondolithic.com/wp-content/u ... 8/hab4.jpg

I'm not going to put anything bigger than 5" on the model. Realistically, I kinda doubt anything bigger would work on a Habbakuk. Anything bigger would be too heavy and require a good amount of internal support structure, etc. But then again, I suppose anything is possible. But I predict only guns of up to 8" but no larger might work. Maybe someone else here can chip in with better specifications and technical info. than I can.

I need help!
I don't have time to re-post everything that I posted on another forum since I need to get some sleep right now, but I'll leave you to a link here:
http://www.whatifmodelers.com/index.php ... 73.75.html
........and I need advice and suggestions regarding what I wrote in Post #'s 79 and 80 there.

Help?

Don't worry about it - say it's the effect of the ice's natural greenish-blue tinge coming through, or that it's the paint being applied on wood which gives a different shade than when painted on the metal of the island.

Alternatively, if you have a darker blue or grey paint, spray only the hull with it and leave the island as-is and call it MS 22.

I need help and I need a lot of advice. I hate to say it, but I committed one of modeling's most awful crimes: I tried to rush finish my Habakkuk for an upcoming contest this past Nov. 14th and I made mistakes. But the night before the contest, I said "To hell with the Habakkuk!" and went to the contest as a spectator instead and did not enter anything. The Habakkuk sat at home.
A lot of people were telling me not to rush, including my own mother, but I didn't listen that well, and now I paid the ultimate price by having a godawful flight deck which I'm about to explain.
When I made the flight deck, I used thin Evergreen sheet which had to be laid in 6 sections since my local hobby store doesn't have Evergreen sheet in 3' lengths.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/ ... C02484.jpg
I then sprayed it with Testor Dark Sea Blue which is the closest I could get to Deck Blue 20B. Since the Sea Blue was a gloss, I would then have to dull coat it, which I did. Everything (paint and dull coat) was left to dry for a very long time before I wanted to do the flight deck markings. Now here's where my major mistake comes in: I then started laying 3M "low tack/adhesion" blue painter's masking tape down to do the flight deck markings. As I was trying to position the tape so that I could get a nice straight line, I soon noticed that the tape was pulling off the dull coat layer off of the flight deck! O.O CRAP!


If I wouldn't have rushed things and been so stupid, then what I SHOULD have done was the following: Paint, then markings, THEN dull coat. As I was explaining my situation to other modelers at the contest (and getting critisised), one person suggested taking a product called Gojo which is a pumice hand cleaner and spreading that on the deck and letting the ingredients work on "lifting/stripping" the paint/dull coat off the deck. After trying to remove as much paint/dull coat as I can, I'd then have to sand down the Evergreen decking again before trying to reapply my paint/dull coat again.
The only other option if I didn't do the above is to completely buy new Evergreen sheet and build a new flight deck. But the person I talked to seemed to think that the Gojo solution would be the easier and faster method to use.

So I have to ask: Does what I just explained for solutions work ok or does anyone have any other suggestions?

Problem #2:
I was also critisised for painting my Habakkuk wood hull and the wood grain can still be seen in areas through the Haze Gray or red paints. Well, why can't I just leave my wood hull as is because according to the Habakkuk article written by William J. Wallace in that Warship magazine, he wrote the following:

The outside hull would be insulated by a complex 9in thick composite material, made of plywood and insulation boards (masonite type) in 27 layers. This tough outer shell would dovetail together and be attached to the hull by 1ft 6in dowels embedded in the ice.

Therefore, why can't my wood hull stay as is to "represent" that outer insulation layer? But I was told instead to completely strip off all the gray and red paint, sand smooth the entire wood hull AGAIN and then repaint everything.



Problem #3
Same modeling friend also did not like the way I had my display base as shown below.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v216/ ... C02485.jpg
He suggested removing all the pics and text, and instead building/displaying a 1/700 WWII AC and put that next to the Habakkuk for scale purposes. He suggested painting it black to act as a "silhouette" so to speak. If I did that, then I probably wouldn't put much detail on the AC and would skip tiny details like the 20mm guns and other small stuff. It's only the main hull, superstructure, and perhaps a few other main pieces I'd have to build/paint.
But if I do this "silhouette", then where do I add my other pics/text, if I do? I'm not going to remove the cross section that I built. That will be staying on the base.
What does everyone think? Should I do a "silhouette" or not?

I guess the thing with problem #2 is that the 1:1 ship would be using wood in 1:1 scale with 1:1 scale grain, while your model is in 1:700 using 1:1 scale wood with 1:1 scale grain. Thus, the wood patterns should be near invisible in your scale. One does not depict wooden grain in their 1/700 wood decks, and so it only makes sense to not do so in the hull.

Nonetheless, I don't think your hull needs further smoothening - it looks fine the way it is.