johndon

Now on to one of the most fiddly parts of this build, adding the round strip to the top of the lip that I added to the hull. I am quite pleased with how well the added lip has blended with the hull sides, the join is, for the most part, almost impossible to see. First up, I've added a strip of masking tape to the back on the lip, no mean feat in itself when the lip is on .75mm high which enables me to position and hold the strip in place while keeping hands free. Once I'm happy that is is up against the existing strip, I'll hold a steel rule being the tape and then apply the cement... More work needed on getting rid of some of glue that oozed out when adding the plates to the hull sides.

Really impressed with the colouring of the deck but that fit round the secondary armament is pretty bad, it is going to take a fair bit of surgery to correct that without it being obvious...

Paintwork on the hull looks fantastic - I've never got the hang of pre-shading, I always end up covering it all up...

One side of the hull now has all the Eduard PE fitted. I did notice that the instructions have you fit 22 sets of plates each side whereas the Anatomy of the Ship book only shows 20. If you only fit 20, at the recommended spacing in the instructions, then the plates don't go far enough towards the stern so I fitted all 22 sets. Next up is to decide on exactly how I'm going to do the plating along the length of the hull, currently undecided between the masking tape and layers of primer method and, potentially just drawing the lines with a pencil...

I'm a little concerned that may happen when it comes to masking for the rest of the plating...

Started adding the vertical hull plates from the Eduard PE set. Time consuming and boring, doing it before I add the round lip to the hull sides otherwise the supplied fitting template won't work. Using the template is great but you have to be very sparing with the glue otherwise, when you press the plate in to position the glues oozes out and the template gets stuck in place. A bit of primer over the first 4 has highlighted a couple of glue spots that need to be removed...

A sleepless night hasn't been wasted...

Nice work on the hull so far. I'm trying to decide how/if to try and represent the 'oil canning' on the hull of the Iowa, I've seen some very effective methods using paint but they would only work on a single colour hull and I'm doing a camouflage scheme...

Very impressive work.

In between working on the hull, I made a start on the two ship's boats tonight (apologies for the quality of the photo, my iPhone seems incapable of taking a decent photo tonight): The Pontos instructions call for two fairleads to be fitted to the deck at the bow. These are microscopic, no more than 1.5mm long by about 1mm high with a tiny gluing surface but, after about half an hours work, I managed to get them fixed in place with the help of some superglue accelerator. Picked up the boat a couple of minutes later to fit the railing at the stern and both fairleads had disappeared, to where I have no idea. At least they were so small that, from more than a couple of inches away, they were pretty much invisible so no great loss. Why do we try add such tiny details to a four and a half foot long ship... John

Lovely work. Having built a couple of 1/700 ships in the past, I'm pleased I made the move to 1/200...

Far from the most interesting photo you'll see tonight but, having added part of the lip that goes round the edge of the deck, I've given it a coat of primer to see how it looks and, it's not too bad and pretty much invisible from anything more than 18 inches away but it still needs a bit of work. Given that the strip is only .25mm thick I did try to err of having it slightly inboard of the hull edge so it can be built up slightly, had it overhung, sanding it would likely have made it so thin it would fail. Next job is to run some Mr Surfacer round the join sand and prime until any gaps have gone. At that point I'll fit the rounded top strip.

Sorry to hear about your wife, I lost mine 6 years ago and modelling certainly helped in the aftermath. 20mm are looking really good. Still undecided what to do for the Iowa, I have the Pontos set but I also have half a dozen 3D printed 20mm which look fantastic and just require painting but it'll cost rather a lot of money to get enough...

Thanks Steve, much appreciated. Almost there now, just the buffers to do at the front which, if I'd not screwed one up, would be done as well, I've had to order some super glue remover to recover. I have to say that, as fiddly as this has been to put together, I've thoroughly enjoyed the process. John

Excellent work so far.