The Ship Model Forum

Hello @ all,

here my actual new project. The coaster "Noordborg" in scale 1/87 by Artitec. A resin kit with PE-parts, plastic pipes .....



































The next steps will be the masts made of plastic pipes, wire and PE-parts.

The quality of the kit is fantastic. Some little putty and sanding, but only at few positions..... The parts fit perfect, the details are great.

Instead of the original colors of the Noordborg - light grey hull, white bridge, grey decks - I will make the hull in a red color with a black waterline and red under water part, a white sripe on the top of the hull, the decks in light grey, the funnel in red / white.

Hope you like it so far!

BR
Michael

The Artitec-kits are probably among the best you can get in polyurethane resin. However, if you had the technical capability and patience(!), there is still a lot of scope for improvement - mainly of details that suffer somewhat from the constraints imposed by the resin casting process.

I would thin and hollow-out the ventilators as well as cut off the handles and replace with wire (strange that they didn't provide etched parts for them).

I would replace the bollards with turned ones.

I would replace the spill-heads with turned ones.

All this to increase the 'definition' particularly of round objects.

I saw the model advertised on their Web-site etc., but I never saw the actual resin cast. It is interesting how they represented the pushed-in plating, very realistic.

Let's start the painting. First a dark grey primer......




Then the first "real" color... white.... with a little grey seeing through the white color.... like shadows..... I like it more then "brand new" shiny white









Next step - light grey .....

Cheers
Micha

Are you painting it in the already assembled state ? It's quite difficult then to pick out the details and have sharp separations between different colours ...

Yes of couse - I paint it always like that Same as usual

Well, it's often not easy to find the right moment to stop glueing and start painting.
But Your "Noordborg" is looking very nice. The Artitec-models are really fantastic...but in a wrong scale. 1:350 would be fantastic.
Jens

The decks are painted in dark grey with a paint brush, then also some details in black. After that the hull is airbrushed in dark red, as well as the funnel.....

Then I started with some details such as the name on the hull, the base for the wooden parts (get oil colors later), and so on.... some further details follow....

















CU
Michael

After painting all the details of the ship I added a first washing with black oil colors, followed by a detail wash of dark brown oil color. Finallly rust is added with red-brown oil colors.
Matt clear coat on everything followed by a glossy clear coat spayed over in a cloudy way....


















And the display.... later with a water sufrace ...


BR
Micha

This is only the second kit I've seen from Artitec, the other being the Zuiderzee-Botter. also here, and they are impressive.

Even given their very high quality, it takes an exceptional modeler to obtain an exceptional result. Your coaster is beautifully done and looks every inch the tough, hard working little vessel she represents. I particularly admire your painting. Very, very nicely done sir.

Best regards,

Mac

Brilliant paint job. Personally I find the oil-canning as made by Artitec on the hull a bit over the top. In general it's a lot more concentrated in certain places, not evenly distributed along the whole hull. That is however a small remark since it's better than no oil canning at all !

One remark on your paint work. The navigation light casings are painted black on the inside (by regulation). Only the light itself is red/green.

Neptune wrote:� The navigation light casings are painted black on the inside (by regulation). Only the light itself is red/green.

I guess that depends on the period depicted. I seem to remember that the regulations were changed sometime in the early 1970s. Before then the lamp-boards were painted red and green.

Beautiful work but where are the guns?

Yes if I'm not mistaken the current Colregs were made/implemented in '72, but I'm not entirely sure of that. I'm also not sure if there was a regulation before that. I do know there would certainly have been national rules as I suppose the Colregs were based on those (probably the British ones).
As for the painting of the boards in the colour of the light, do you have any pictures of such instances?

I'm afraid, I only took up photography seriously in exactly that year, 1972. I also don't have a lot sources from the time when colour photography was around. I had a quick look into some books with colour photographies (not too many) from the 1960s and found some images that show the boards or nooks for the lamps painted in red and green - as I remembered it from my youth. I also remember the feeling I had, when the regulations were changed, that ships lost a bit of their classical maritime aspect.