Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies

Tonight I worked on the quarter deck and mainmast. There are still railings and ladders to go on, as well as secondary and AA guns (which are painted and can't be handled just yet). I also fired some paint on to the base.

Part 1 of our "Introducing" blogs - Gillian & I: https://www.sovereignhobbies.co.uk/blogs/news/118499844-introducing-part-1 Part 2 - H&B Hobbies, MA, United States of America: https://www.sovereignhobbies.co.uk/blogs/news/118497092-introducing-part-2

I was out at the club meet last night, so progress was limited to attaching the yard arm to above mast. Still, it's better than the "nothing" I achieve most nights!

Is that so? Who'd have thought? There seems to be a lot of people (including Americans) asking about flush deckers in 1/350 in general - perhaps not the LRDEs of course. For a type there were so many of in service, it's odd that there are no kits in either of the most popular scales nowadays. Anyways, back to the kit above - I think it looks great, and I wish you every success with this

1/350 flush decker / 4 piper please. LRDE even better. My great uncle was sunk (first of two sinkings) on HMS Stanley. I have 1/192 plans for the flush deckers, but I lack the time for scratchbuilding!

Tonight has been a bit of a disappointment. I started off by giving the sea base another lick of PVA. I think it might work, but it's going to take a few coats. I then set about the rear superstructure, looking to build that up and get on with some PE. I then promptly broke the mainmast parts when trying to pick them up! I did try gluing it back together, but that was a disaster. It broke again. The plastic seems really brittle, or maybe I'm having a bad night. Who knows ... ? Philosophically, I believe it's better to not try and fail, than to try hard and still fail only now you're knackered and everyone can see that despite your best efforts you've still stuffed it up. So I gave up and got the brass tube out of the drawer. I measured the hole spacing on the kit part the tripod mast sits on and copied it by drilling plasticard and using blutac to generally frown upon movement. A replacement mainmast was fabricated thus, only when I soldered the brass starfish platform on I managed to get it about 15deg askew in planform so had to desolder it melting all the solder and re-kitting the whole mast etc etc etc. Long story short, I've wasted the whole night making a mast. And it doesn't even have the Yagi aerial on it yet.

I built the Revell boxing of the Hasegawa plastic in my recent build thread. It went together quite well. There's a nice amount of cockpit detail OOB, but it could be improved upon if desired. Mine only got seatbelts. The MG15 rear machine gun is a shapeless blob. Overall, I was pleased with it and would happily buy the same kit again

Hi folks, 1/700 isn't my usual scale, but as above, I'm pretty bad at keeping up the momentum to finish 1/350 ships as the detailing is so much more indepth. It's not all one session! That would have been a marathon. I started on Monday evening last week and have tried to do an hour or so a night. I think so far it's gone thus: Monday 1st August - sprayed decks C01 Teak, washed with Tamiya IJN Deck Tan then Tamiya Earth Brown by brush, then a final wash of sprayed thinned Colourcoats ACRN10 Dark Earth. Steel decks masked and sprayed RN01 507A Dark Grey Tuesday 2nd - Steel decks masked and sprayed RN01 507A Dark Grey. Brush painted bits, ventilators, turret barbettes etc on the decks. That was boring enough. Sawed the lower hull in half. Fixed the B turret barbette. Wednesday 3rd - Glued the hull back together and filled with Squadron green putty. Spent the modelling time that evening with my youngest daughter who wanted to do some of her Airfix Hurricane. Thursday 4th - Sanded the hull join, sprayed hull RN03 507C then masked for RN10 WA White, finally masking over the WA White and spraying the B5. Demasked, and left it to harden. Friday 5th - Masked and sprayed RN06 MS3, then masked and sprayed RN04 MS1. Demasked, went and got a beer. Saturday - had to go to B&Q to buy materials for Sovereign's new paint shop (we're taking lid spraying and tinning in house) - had to build an extractor, loads of shelving and do some wiring etc. Masked and sprayed RN19 Anti-fouling red and then C02 Black for the boot topping. Added some superstructure at the stern and painted MS3 and MS1 camouflage. Sunday - Added B5 to rear superstructure, sprayed the aviation hangar interiors C03 White and assembled other superstructure above. Made a mess with some Styrofoam and PVA glue!

Some might call me lazy. I prefer to think of myself as economical with time and effort. I give the tins a decent shake, crack the lid off and use an electric stirrer. If I know I've used it very recently, I'll start with a stirring stick and if the liquid feels homogeneous I'll give the stick a quick thrash about then get on with it. I see that many resist such technologies as airbrushes and electricity, but I'm all about avoiding problems wherever possible. I can generate new and inventive errors all on my own without negligently walking in to them by using separated paint. Paints are not dissolved - they are suspended. Leave paint still for a few days and the heavier constituents will sink to the bottom. There's only so much shaking can do, and frankly life's too short to spend 5-10 minutes with a stick doing what electricity can achieve in 10 seconds or less.

I too had been following the project via their Facebook page. It's very sad indeed.

As above, it will attack styrene over a long period of time. That's why oil based paints stick better to plastics without primer. You can spray cellulose thinner on to styrene in low quantities (i.e. thin your paint with it) and it's perfectly fine unless you then try to wipe the paint back off - the plastic will be very soft underneath whilst the cellulose dries. White spirit is pretty safe for plastic use. Don't dip your canopies in it - but to be honest, most little painting errors even on canopies can be wiped off with white spirit so long as you don't scrub at it for ages.

To be fair, the absolute last thing I needed was another ship project on the go, but I got talked in to it through a Facebook group I co-admin which initiated a group build themed on the Battle of the Atlantic. Being an admin, I thought it bad form not to join in, but realised that finishing a ship would be good for me so decided a fresh start with lowered aspirational standards might actually help. I therefore took a bit of a detour on the way home from Duxford in July and dropped in at Hannants in Lowestoft. In retrospect, there are postal companies available which would have saved an enourmous amount of time droning down mile after mile of the dullest roads in Britain, but never mind. It's the Trumpeter 1942 boxing. The mouldings are quite nice on the face of it: I raided the stock room for White Ensign Models PE747 to go with, and also got some brass barrels, masts and yardarms from Master to go with. The Group Build kicked off on 1st August. Being Trumpeter, it doesn't take too long to find an issue. The upper and lower hull halves are different lengths. Just blending in the prow or stern didn't seem clever as the torpedo bulges don't line up either. Anyway, I set about spraying the deck. All paints are my own, perhaps/hopefully obviously. I started removing moulded ladders which will be replaced by photo etched parts later. The moulding on B turret barbette shows poorly aligned tooling. I decided it would be easier to just sacrifice the ventilators to get the barbette cleaned up properly Then I replaced them with Evergreen strip. I intended to display this model in a seabase, but I just don't feel right about using waterline plates, so I decided to address the hull, by sawing it in half. The width of the razor saw blade almost cured the alignment issue, and some wet and dry on a flat, hard surface did the rest. The halves were rejoined and glued to the upper half. The seam was filled and sanded The hull was then sprayed 507C thinned with cellulose thinner for maximum drying speed, then masked with Maskol before painting on Western Approaches White and B5. Tonight's exercise is to remask and hopefully get the MS1 and MS3 colours on. Tonight I have: The hull camouflage was completed: Then the underwater hull was painted in the Royal Navy's anti-fouling red colour and the boot topping painted on. Building up superstructure prior to camouflaging it: I took a break and painted the Walrus cockpit areas (not the glazing!!) black and the rest of the fuselage silver. When the Dark Slate Grey/Extra Dark Sea Grey goes on later, this gives a sort of illusion of not being a solid blob of plastic. I made a start on a sea base. This is my first attempt at this particular technique. And a wee bit more superstructure assembly and I'm calling it a night.

Quite. I popped out on Saturday to procure pictured items and knocked this together inside an hour. It works spectacularly well, if I do say so myself. My day job is in the oil & gas industry, in early phases of project design. Whilst not my speciality, I do know that explosion hazards require what is known as a dimensioning cloud. This really means a cloud of flammable gas sufficient in size to be ignitable. Whilst not down-playing safety, the likelihood of generating a cloud of paint and thinners vapour in the extract duct sufficiently concentrated to explode is just not a practical concern. Consider it like fuel/air ratio required to burn in a combustion engine. Whilst one can smell thinners vapour, it's an incredibly lean mixture. People would be blowing their modelling rooms up left, right and centre lighting candles to stretch sprue the same evening as painting if it were a concern.

It's not a must have, but not having one is probably going to limit you. Someone who's good with an airbrush will achieve a superior finish and be able to achieve more effects than someone who is good with a brush will be able to, in the same way that a good rear wheel drive car is preferred by far more driving enthusiasts than good front wheel drive cars. A reasonable dual action airbrush and a compressor is easily the best thing I ever bought for modelling.

In Britain, the red was dope for protection against sunlight.

It builds ok, so there's nothing stopping you enjoying that. It's also not so bad if you want to waterline the model. The Yorktown class carrier was built under treaty to a maximum displacement and ended up with a very distinctive and sleek hull form. Trumpeter weren't too concerned with that and gave it a hull like a contemporary oil tanker: http://paulbudzik.com/current-projects/Enterprise%20Scratch/Images/uss_enterprise_scratch_bow.jpg'>http://paulbudzik.com/current-projects/Enterprise%20Scratch/Images/uss_enterprise_scratch_bow.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Yorktown_(CV-5)#/media/File:USS_Yorktown_(CV-5)_sinking,_7_June_1942.jpg'>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Yorktown_(CV-5)#/media/File:USS_Yorktown_(CV-5)_sinking,_7_June_1942.jpg If you were bothered about that, the Merit International kits of USS Yorktown and USS Enterprise are far better shape-wise, but I keep in mind that they also cost twice as much as the Trumpeter kit. I'd suggest you stick with Trumpeter, build it, set it in a water base and put the B25s on deck

The FS595C colour fan we have was around £150 I think, and the BS381C book was around £240. Feel free to mail me a little card with your paint brushed out Stu and I'll do the above comparison for you. You can't go by the photo or printouts, but the photograph will show how the swatch and standard chips compare relatively.

Thanks Stu. I'll give it some thought. It would be an easy one to produce given it's a current standard colour which doesn't need an Indiana Jones adventure to find a sample people agree on

Is there much of a demand for FS36170 then? Is it only the F35 it's used on?

So the general opinion is that we're not quite ready for uniforms like this then?

As promised: ACRN06 is Dark Slate Grey (and yes, it's right): I think most would agree Dark Slate Grey is not characteristic of FS36170 and is unsuitable for use there.

Sorry, I misread that. It's a bit too green - I'll post up a picture tonight.

How attached to the particular kit are you? (Or how bothered about accuracy are you?)

For 2017, I'll join in if you'll have me