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I'm putting this in Marine as I'm not sure where else it should go - this is a North Sea Oil rig so I think its appropriate... For my next forey into the weird and wonderful "different" models to build, I decided to have a go at something industrial. There is method in my madness as it may play a part in a future model show display for my club... more of that anon (maybe!). Anyway, I managed to find on on eBay that wasn't silly money, although you do get a LOT of plastic for your wonga... Its a BIG box, but this one has been through the wars. The sprues inside were still inside their plastic bags, and there were lots of them! There is also a decal sheet and a large instruction booklet. Now one of the things I indent to do with this is to extend the model down to the sea bed. So to do this I needed to find a plan of the underwater structure. Thankfully I found a PDF from BP which described the dcomissioning of the NW Hutton oil platform which is of the same design as North Cormorant and this provided soem very useful diagrams eg So first order of the day is to start on the support structure as provided by the kit. THis comes together with 4 pieces which fit together like this THis gave me my first suprise of the day - its BLOODY HUGE!!! 16 inches long by 6 tall and 6(ish) wide! My intention is to extend the legs about a foot below sea-level which is the table in the above photo. So after measuring up the legs I ordered a load of evergreen plastic tube, the 8 main pieces of which are for the main support legs. White waiting for them to arrive, I painted the whole thing with XF 9, Hull Red which would be the base primer colour for the structure out in the N Sea. I then gave this an overcoat of Klear (the new scented stuff - not wasting my valuable bottle of old Klear on this!) as I intend to do some hairspray paint chipping later. While that was drying yeterday the postman arrived... So I test fittted the 8 pillars to see how big the base would need to be since these are angled outward... this is what I ended up with The base board is 18 inches by 12 inches! I've got an acrylic sheet coming that will be the water surface so I'm intending to split the model in two parts for ease of transport and storage later on, with the kit being one part and the scratch built subsurface structure the other. If I do it properly, the model built from the kit will sit on the water surface and appear to be connected to the legs below. So as not to make things too easy for myself, I've been toying with the idea of lighting it - there will be lots of lights on the rig for illumination and warning... I'll have to think about that aspect...

As part of my club's table for Telford, I undertook this massive build back in in June. It is finally complete! The water surface down to the sea bed is all scratch built and I've extensively weathered the platform and added some 1:200 scale figures to populate it. The whole thing is probably the biggest model I've ever built - 20£ wide, 10" deep and over 3 foot tall. Build thread here: http://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.php?/topic/235004743-1200-revell-north-cormorant-oil-rig/ I have no idea where I will put this after Telford, I don't have a shelf big enough to put this... oh well I'll cross that bridge (platform) when I come to it! Note: this is actually an Oil PLATFORM not a rig - its fixed to the sea bed rather than floating, which is an Oil Rig which is usually used during the exploration phase of an oil filed development. So here are the photos... Scratch built jacket It will be on the IPMS Farnborough stand in Hall 3 at Telford next week, come and say hi!