GALLEY ALLEY! ~~~~ The Oared Vessel in 1/700th Scale

[Pieter]

Ah, ram shaped bows near Sidon....what could possibly go wrong...

Very nice builds BTW.

[callen]

pfieuw... nice scratchbuilding on a whole new level, and tinyness.... splendid work, and must admit, totally in awe for the result so far...

Very kind. Thank you, Silenoz. I'm just going to repeat my old mantra, though, that these techniques are not any more challenging than kit-building in 700th scale. I realized that when I went back to kit building this past year and got chased around the ring by my Fujimi Ise. The main difficulty, aside from accuracy, is developing a technique to build what you want to build, which is why I'm sharing my saga here. I want to encourage anyone who things they might give it a try: it's doable!

Simply superb scratchbuilding, Callen! Its a real treat to watch your work!!

Bob Pink.

Hey Bob! Great to hear from you! Thanks for the encouragement! I do quite a bit of blogging on Facebook now, but it's a struggle to get modelers there to make full-blown blog-posts about their work. The tendency is to just post one's finish pics, which is not nearly as fun.

Ah, ram shaped bows near Sidon....what could possibly go wrong...

The attachment victoriatemp.JPG is no longer available

A testament to the sturdiness of Victorian battleships, and the stupidity of Victorian admirals.

Very nice builds BTW.

Thank you Pieter.

[callen]

Alright Gentlemen!

We have an update here! More than an update! I have finished a ship model in 700th Scale! The first time that's happened in eight years! Kinda giddy down here!


So, where we left off, everything was lily white, or, rather polystyrene white. Well...all that white has gone away!

Priming and basecoat color went off without a hitch. The main reason for the delay has been the extremely cold weather here where I live. I've had bad experiences airbrushing and priming in the garage when it's too cold. I'm going to focus for the short term on the Khufu Sun Ship, since she is now complete. The others have progressed as well, but I'm not going to post about the Argo or the Phoenician until I finish them. It's just too unwieldy to describe three builds simultaneously.

So, starting with a nice base coat of MM enamel 'wood' I then proceeded to add some under-colors. When I started doing this, I restricted myself to brown, yellow and white, but I decided to get a little creative this time around. You can see some bright red here in this shot. In particular, I wanted to try and achieve that nice reddish brown color many of these ancient Eastern Med ships seem to have. The Khufu Sun Ship, IIRC was built from Lebanese Cedar, which is somewhat red in color.

Having done the under colors, I then went back with the same color as the base coat again. However, I mixed it up a little and also shot some 'Go Mango' which is a glossy slightly peach color from the Testors model car color range. This, so I hoped would give the model a reddish tinge. The results were somewhat unsatisfactory to me, with not enough base brown on the Starboard side, so that the underpaint showed through too much. Also too much peachy color.

Popsicle time! I finally decided to get serious about mounting the model on its base. Should have done this sooner, as the steel rod aided tremendously in handling and avoiding damage.

Where does one find a stand for a two-inch ship model? I asked my wife Becky if she'd go with me to the hardware store one day as we were out shopping and help me look for something that might work. But, at the last minute I decided to check the bead-stuff at Hobby Lobby, and that's where I found these things. This is a brass and plastic ear-ring stop, or something like that. Here you can see I just hand brushed some gold paint on it to see what would happen. But the size of the ear-ring stop was just about perfect as a base for the model.

So, I primed and painted one with MM Lacquer Stainless Steel, and then ran the mounting rod through the ear-ring stop. The polycap inside made for a friction fit. I then drilled a hole through the wood base, cut the mounting rod to length and glued all of it up with CA. This was the result.

[callen]

Having touched up the Starboard side of the barge, I was ready to put together the final details. These included the five pairs of rowing oars which, in the original ship now on display in Giza, are tied to the trellis-like structure forward of the main cabin.

Penny for scale. Note the slightly different colors of the various oars. I _like_ that. My favorite thing in painting is to create (hopefully) subtle variations of tone throughout the build, reflecting the effects of sun, wind and weather on the model. This, to me, is the real fun of painting.

First oar in place!

Actually, this turned out to be the most difficult part of the whole build. These oars did not want to go into neat little 'x's in the trellis. The end result is that several of the oar blades are somewhat out of alignment with the others. This may cost me in competition.

Having glued the first two oars in place, I suddenly realized I'd made a dreadful error. The foremost oars in fact, only extend to the second frame of the trellis from the bow. So, these had to be moved later. That's where my troubles began and the whole effort got really really fiddly. On top of that, the bond of the ship with the stand loosened, so she was wriggling around the whole time I was applying these oars. I'd try to glue her back, but she kept moving. Pulling her off the stand and trying again was a perilous option because the hull is so fragile. (Remember, it's hollow, not solid) I had this terrible fear of trying to wrench it off the base and having the whole thing crack up in my hands. She didn't want to leave, but she didn't want to stand still. Kinda got tricky at the end. Discretion is the better part of valor.

Do you know what a 'baldachin' is? I'd never heard the word before I started reading about the Sun Ship. Apparently it's an awning or pavilion for an altar or other religious item. There was a baldachin installed on the Khufu Sun Ship half way between the bow stem and the trellis. (Modeling Egyptian ships will definitely increase your vocabulary. )

I debated for a long time whether to add it. You know how it is when you get to the end of the build and that voice in your head says: "Those other bits are optional! You're tired! You've been at this a long time! You're done! You can stop now!" But then you go, "Nah!" and do it anyway. That's how I felt about the Baldachin. (By the way, I don't know how to pronounce that word, since I've only read it. Is it Bahl-dah-cheen? Bahl-dah-kin?" Feel free to chime in if you know.) So, what we're talking about is basically a wooden-roofed awning with ten support pillars or uprights in two rows. The roof of the baldachin must be level, that means the pillars must be progressively shorter as they progress towards the bow. In the above pic, you can see that I put two styrene rods down on the weather deck. These are there to help ensure the alignment of the baldachin uprights.

Even though I hadn't decided whether or not to do the Baldachin, I did stretch some sprue from brown plastic in the hopes that I could have some very fine elements that were the appropriate color and wouldn't need painting. In the event the stretched sprue wound up being a bit too light and had to be painted. Since I had to match the color to an enamel paint, I was worried that too thin stretched sprue would melt under the chemicals of the enamel. The end result was, I chose some bits that were a good deal thicker than the original. This is a flaw in the model, but I'm not sure I could have done any better. Next time we'll try something thinner and see how it goes.

Baldachin complete! As I said, the uprights are a bit too thick. On the actual ship they are paper-thin, but here you can see they're only marginally thinner than the trellis uprights. But, well... I just decided to leave it. You can't imagine how fragile a two-inch hollow hull is.

[callen]

A few shots of the finished model.

I say 'finished' but I may go back with some decal work and try and create some panelling effects. However, I'm going to leave her alone for the time being. This was a build that started out really slow and tedious, got really boring, and then, after I did the heavy lifting became fun and magical. There is a special feeling knowing you've recreated a ship for which there is no kit, or at least no kit in your scale of choice.

One last shot of the ship in its case, ready for the world...unless or until I go back and do the panel work. I'll be posting some updates on the other two galleys soon. Until then, Happy Modeling!

[Timmy C]

Congrats on finishing! They're gorgeous.

[maxim]

Really impressive! Especially the delicate hull of the Egyptian ship!

I like also the two galleys!

[j.mahieux]

Hello Callen,
Your work is fine and graceful, a real marvel,
Bravo,
Jean

[callen]

Hello Callen,
Your work is fine and graceful, a real marvel,
Bravo,
Jean

Merci beaucoup, Mon Ami. I am reading your books on almost a daily basis. Thank you for your interest and continued support! Best wishes!

Really impressive! Especially the delicate hull of the Egyptian ship!

I like also the two galleys!

Thank you Maxim! Glad you like it!

Congrats on finishing! They're gorgeous.

Thank you Tim. Trying to keep the faith in my fashion. Thanks to you and Tim Dike for keeping this amazing site going. It's a great place to share one's work.

[callen]

Well, gentlemen, I have not finished another galley yet, but there has been some significant work done, so I will share an update with you, for your consideration. We're going to focus on the Phoenician Galley painting and detailing effort today.

This is how she came out of the priming and base-coat process. Near perfect experience this time around.

Next comes the undercoat paint. The idea here is to have subtle variations in shade for the various wooden parts of the ship. You guys know the drill. I decided to use yellow, white and red this time around. I thought about green too. I wish I had used it, actually. Well maybe next time.

After all those McDonald's colors I went back over it with Model Master 'Wood' and also 'Go Mango' from their automotive model paint line. The 'Go Mango' added an orangish tinge suggestive of cedar wood. For some reason all these Ancient Mediterranean Ships seem to have a deep reddish-orange color to them, from the Khufu Sun Ship to the Olympias Trireme replica. It's a much more interesting color than straight brown, somewhat uneven, but also hopefully somewhat subtle.

Notice the portside missing oar?

Handling 700th Scale galleys is a perilous undertaking.

[callen]

Replacement oar.

Mounting rod glued in place.

Here she is finally permanently mounted to her base! At some point the yardarm broke off, but it wasn't lost.

What is this? It's a craft store hole punch, used for scrap books and the like. This one makes small-sized holes, much smaller than the typical notebook hole punch used in offices.

Why am I showing you this? I'm so glad you asked!

I need to create small disk-like objects for the 'hanging-shield detail' typical of these ships. The Phoenicians may have been the first people to hang warrior shields on the sides of their vessels, a practice that continued right through to the era of the Renaissance Carracks. At any rate, the Bronze Age shields used by the Phoenicians to decorate their ships were generally round, from the illustrations that we have of them. So, I thought I would try this extra-small hole punch on a sheet of styrene, and then collect the blanks from the catch bin in the jaws of the punch and see what I had.

1/16th of an inch is 3.64 feet in 700th Scale. This disk, which is not quite round, would be a bit more than four scale feet in width. That's too big to serve as the basis of a war shield. Ok. Have to try something else...

Here's something! Lion Roar IJN porthole covers. A porthole cover is a disk, but it would be too small to serve as a shield. I know that, but...well, sometimes things are over-scale, and sometimes a modeler can take advantage of these facts. Like, for instance, adapting a too-thick 40mm bofors barrel into a Renaissance-era cannon.

Alas, Lion Roar did a good job. This porthole cover is just about the right size for a porthole cover...and too small to be a shield.

Well...hmmm. How about this?

[callen]

Tiny mylar hexagons, highly reflective and gold tinted to near mirror-perfection. Otherwise known as...

GLITTER!


Here you can see a single glitter next to the Lion Roar porthole cover. The glitter, although hexagonal, appears to be about the right size. Not sure about the historicity of the hexagonal warrior shield, but, actually it's so small that, unless it's magnified, they more or less look round. These shots made with my SLR camera use a Macro Lens, so there is some magnification going on. I decided to proceed with the glitter as a basis for the Hanging Shield Detail.

The thing about glitter... it 'glits.'



Experimenting and trying to catch the light to photograph this part of the build, I found that, if I held the model just right, the glitter would light up like a search light...

But if I moved it just slightly...you could barely see it.

Be that as it may, I decided glitter was my best bet, and proceeded...

Notice the yardarm is back up. Everything in scratch-building can be fixed.

[Dan K]

Fantastic work, and quite the passion project. Truly unique.

[j.mahieux]

Hello Callen,
I hope you have built scaled showcases for this micro-museum!
There, it would be fun to spend a "Night at the Museum", in the role of Jason, to go in search of the "Golden Fleece"!
Jean

[Silenoz]

golden fleece? you mean golden flea?

Superb work in this mini, mini scale...

[Quintus]

This is a great view. I love so small ships

[spottier60]

Just visited the fascinating Tutankhamon exhibition held in Paris, showing a few of the 35 model ships found in the grave : they were supposed to become 1:1 scale in the "other world" and thus allow the Pharaoh to navigate in his second life...
Nice to see the craftsmanship going on 3300 years later with your very fine ancient ships !
Stephane

[dafi]

Simply wonderful !!!

XXXDAn

[JIM BAUMANN]

...Callen ==> alas I am a bit late to chime in...

But really...-very excellent miniature work
on some often somewhat neglected marine subjects!

most commendable!

JIM B

[callen]

Gentlemen, your comments and support mean a great deal to me. It's quite something to know that some of the best modelers in the world are commenting and appreciating your work. Thank you all for your support.

And also, forgive me for the lapse. It's been a while...

You know, honestly, modeling is a moody thing. I am not a consistent modeler. I tend to binge and abandon at stretches, sometimes not doing anything for months. Also, my mood changes...in the middle of a battleship I get bit by the carrier bug, or, having worked assiduously on a submarine, I suddenly want to build an ocean liner...you know how it goes. At least, I hope you do. My friend Jim Baumann is the very soul of consistency. I wish I was that way.

Be that as it may, I haven't been idle! So! Here are some updates for you!