Maritime Content

That Steam pinnace is a marvel Rob

Wot ee said. Jon

Just caught up with your build and it is looking great. Stay Safe beefy

Missed this one until you mentioned it on Saturday at the show turned out very nice brave man to go for 1/700 scale. To small for my eyes. Stay Safe beefy

Thanks James, appreciated. Funnily enough, being a born-again masochist, the rigging is what I enjoy the most. The Kongo's would be a good fit into the RN at the time and as they were of British design to begin with so your what-if doesn't seem such a stretch. Look forward to seeing what you come up with. I completely agree, and I hope more companies would do the same. We are bombarded with later reconstructions and fall well short of these vessels in their original configurations, though more appear to be coming through.

Agreed. 🙂 Regards, Jeff.

Well after a weekend away at Perth and the SCOT Nats show which I needed after a few family issues recently I have added to the stash, Library and paint store with some nice freebies thrown in from @Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies cheers and enjoy your break. beefy

Don't worry Jeff, this is called "modeller's eye", and is well know affliction, indeed we all suffer from it. Opticians not only have no cure, they will make it worse One of the (maybe the only) good things about getting old, it modeller's eye decreases with age. Just stand back and enjoy the fact that you made that incredible thing Nice detail on the boat angle btw Cheers Steve

But only you can see them. Jon

Secondary guns and boats in place. I've given the boats covers.

I obviously need my spectacles replaced - I can't see any. (Except your hull painting - you've missed some bits. 😁) Regards, Jeff.

Hi Paul, it's certainly possible, but either we've never found it or perhaps the documentation was destroyed. Whilst some document types like the Admiralty Fleet Orders and Confidential Admiralty Fleet Orders appear mostly but perhaps not entirely intact, other documents such as memorandums almost certainly are not complete. Almost all camouflage design drawings appear to have been destroyed. We know they did exist as they are referred to in the text documents which accompanied them, but the drawings are not with the documents covering them. Much is missing.

What lovely ladders between the layers! 👏

Moving along. Starboard side 16 ft dinghy done. It's a mixture of Revell, Pontos, Micro Master parts. Port side boat will be slung out on the davits, ready for lowering. It's still in the works. Drawings show the stowed boat on its skids with a slight cant of the bow outboard. That's really needed to allow free access to the ladder down from the signal bridge. As usual, I cringe at the flaws shown by the macro lens that are not seen withe the naked eye. Best, Jeff

G'day Ray, I often find locating holes too big for the pins that go into them. My usual solution is to plug the holes with styrene rod and then re-drill them. She certainly is coming along well. You're making me think that I should look into some WW1 cruisers myself. Regards, Jeff.

Yeah it's definitely an oddball, You can see the Ekranoplan on google maps. They moved it a few years ago from storage to a beach for display, but it got stuck on a sandbar. That's where a lot of the pictures of it looking abandoned come from. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Ekranoplan+Lun/@41.9403278,48.3784342,107m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m14!1m7!3m6!1s0x4049cf8d1ad410bd:0x22d3bb2247ea9971!2sEkranoplan+Lun!8m2!3d41.9406711!4d48.3789282!16s%2Fg%2F11hk4r8wbd!3m5!1s0x4049cf8d1ad410bd:0x22d3bb2247ea9971!8m2!3d41.9406711!4d48.3789282!16s%2Fg%2F11hk4r8wbd?hl=en&entry=ttu

Looking good. The BritModeller rebuild of the IJN continues a ship at a time.

Time away from things can be invaluable, I paused my Taiho build repeatedly otherwise I'd of ended up botching it in all honesty. Shokaku is gonna look great, glad you've picked her up again,

I just want to bring this topic back up to ask, would Sheffield have had her wood decks stained or overpainted dark grey? Or maybe just the forecastle but not the quarterdeck?

Tadaima! Thank you to Tegethoff for giving me the inspiration to come back to this with his Kongo kit! In my time away I've completed the Sumo wrestler seen below and have made a start on a standing stone vignette. So overall, not much has been done. I've added quite a lot of PE railings this evening, the part which was giving me the most annoyance last time I touched Shokaku, back in October (!?) Honestly, there isn't really that much left to do by my reckoning. Yes, the planes will take quite a while to do, but ship-wise, its nearing time to paint her grey. Once the railings are finished, she can be masked and painted and parts like the guns, masts etc can be painted in their own time. Really glad I took time off with this, it means I'll actually be able to finish it now. James.

Very nice model, and a cool piece of work on the stand! 👍 These are a quite remarkable aircraft/ship or whatever you'd term it. I saw a YouTube film about one of these lying abandoned by the shore in one of the old Soviet republics, a massive thing by the looks, and such a shame it's just left to rot...

Even though it was unintentional then. I really do like that paintjob. Might try to replicate that myself. James.

The layup you might say before the final hoist That was a little of a PIA using EZ one cannot put to much tension or the symmetric's gets pulled out of joint.It might of been easier to use stretched sprue in that case? Also Don on the IJN I use Sapele/angle cut for the base all of them and my Kreigsmarine I am using Paduak/Roman

Yes James the Eduard set but I did not use every piece.The painting came about over a period of time when the build had stalled and using a different batch of paint so yeah just chance.The rigging is my favorite part on the build the ship comes to life.Now,the 1/200 Scharnhorst I am working on some rigging will be completed before the forward/aft superstructure's ever get glued to the deck.The German/IJN have lots of rigging on their boats.

I've started work on a Lun class Ekranoplan this weekend. It's a Takom model 3002 - https://www.scalemates.com/kits/takom-3002-lun-class-ekranoplan--1359139 Very simple kit to construct. It took a couple of hours. And there's not a lot of components that make up the kit. I had it built in a single afternoon. Base is Stainless steel, Welded it up myself, I need to add some rubber to the arm to hold the model a bit more securely. Paint wise It's just a base-coat. Titans panzer grey from a can, titans white over top, and then a 6000grit cutback and some base washes. It's almost ready for a thin white to be applied over the top. Not sure what I'm going to do with the underside yet, I saw a build video where someone had used a really bright blue that Mig have specified for one of the schemes and it looked wrong, so I may do something darker with a french blue. Not sure yet.