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Found 5 results

  1. Hi All, This project has been underway for over a year now & I almost have something to show for the effort. The old Lindberg plastic La Flore kit, never really that & long since re-branded as the "Jolly Roger Pirate Ship" for the kiddies (There's also a stand plate in the kit reading "Flying Dutchman"; I never saw that release), has a lot of potential & I was inspired by a similar project on another forum to "have a go". I read all the Patrick O'Brian books years ago, saw the movie in the theater & now have the video disk, so had more than enough inspiration to start. "The Frigate Surprise" by Lavery & Hunt was gifted to me by my wife several years ago, so there was no way to plead lack of information as an excuse not to go ahead, either. The Admiralty draft shows a vessel with less sheer, less draft & less drag to the keel than the kit moldings, but I chose to ignore that issue; O'Brian's Surprise was older & sailed better than the historic ship anyway, so this is the ship from the books, rather than the historic ship or the ship in the movie. The one in the movie is a modified HMS Rose anyway, with the jarring anachronism of a raised quarterdeck & other issues, so that version will be ignored throughout this build. The book & movie versions both carried old-fashioned "long guns" for a main battery, but the historic ship was refitted with a main battery of 32-pounder carronades for Royal Navy service & I chose to model this feature because it is never seen in plastic model kits, so the resulting model will be a blend of the fictional & historic versions. That broadside of "smashers" may be the reason for the historic vessel's short service life, but this project began by making & molding masters for 2 sizes of cast resin carronades. I shortened the hull one gun port plus the distance between 2 gun ports, because the kit was proportionally narrower than the draft showed for Surprise. Actual gun port count, location & spacing was dealt with another way, later... The transom was mostly a lot of fun with Evergreen styrene strips, after sanding off most of the mid-18th Century French details, reshaping the top edge & drilling out 2 more 6-pane windows on either side: The kit decks needed replacing altogether due to all the holes in all the wrong places. I shortened them to fit the modified hull & used them for patterns, adding some missing areas in the process: I added plank seams by embossing with a darning needle & ruler. This induced the right camber, which was preserved by adding cabin bulkheads & laminated beams, close to scale depth where they could be seen & deeper elsewhere...because the masts in this kit are stepped on the decks... So far, so good, & now there was a guide for building the round bow to replace the kit's beakhead bulkhead: I was able to use slightly heat-curved .040" styrene sheet here because I am a vac kit producer & trim a lot of the stuff off the edges of commercial kit moldings. I know, this is almost cheating, isn't it? The older style quarter galleries had to go, too. The offending area was sawed out, bits of scrap fitted at the top to fill out to the new shape & 3 faceted panels added to each side. A paper rubbing of the area was used to determine the overall shape here, & lots of trimming & fitting got everything to lean & look right: More strip & some rod carried the basic look of the transom moldings around the quarter galleries, & finally those windows could be cut: There are over 350 photos about this project already & the hull isn't glued shut yet. I'll pick carefully through them & add more installments as time permits. Cheers!
  2. Hi all! Back in 2015 I had a great time with Pyro’s ancient Niña and Pinta kits, and I also picked up a Santa María to go along with them. The first two builds were quite enjoyable, and the completed models were simple but attractive. When it came to the Santa María, though, I ran out of steam. The original Niña and Pinta were both carabelas redondas (caravels) of about the same size, so the box-scale models displayed together well. The Santa María, though, as a larger nao, should have been visibly bigger – but the box-scale kit was the same size as the other two. Also the Santa María kit, dating originally from 1953, was noticeably more toylike than the later Niña & Pinta models... I only got as far as assembling the Santa María hull (she’s the one in the foreground) before abandoning the build, but I’ve decided to take it up once again!
  3. This is the Life-Like Hobby Kits reissue of Pyro’s U.S.S. Constellation model from 1966. The U.S.S. Constellation is a sloop-of-war, the last sail-only warship built for the United States Navy. Commissioned in 1855, she served for close to a century before finally being retired in 1954. During her long career Constellation performed a wide variety of duties including trade protection, Civil War blockade duty, cargo transport, and as a training ship. She brought humanitarian relief for the 1879 Irish famine, and even served as the reserve flagship for the then-Commander in Chief of the Atlantic Fleet, Admiral Ernest J. King, in 1941. Perhaps Constellation’s most significant contribution was early in her career with the slave trade patrol, during which she captured three slave ships and freed a total of 705 slaves. She is now preserved as a museum ship in Baltimore, Maryland. I happened to pick up a rather battered copy of the kit on the cheap a while back, but the real appeal of this model is as a reminder of a trip to Washington, D.C. and Baltimore with my dad a few years ago (that’s him in the foreground). We made the trip without the wives or kids, so we were able to do all the “boring” guy activities – USS Constellation, National Museum of the U.S. Navy at the Washington Navy Yard, USCG Taney, the Chesapeake light ship, junk food dinners every night – without fear of trying the patience of loved ones. It was great! This model will be a Christmas gift for my dad. 🤗
  4. Hi all! I thought I’d return to a build I began (and suspended) a couple of years ago, Pyro’s U.S.S. Constellation model from 1966. The U.S.S. Constellation is a sloop-of-war, the last sail-only warship built for the United States Navy. Commissioned in 1855, she served for close to a century before finally being retired in 1954. During her long career Constellation performed a wide variety of duties including trade protection, Civil War blockade duty, cargo transport, and as a training ship. She brought humanitarian relief for the 1879 Irish famine, and even served as the reserve flagship for the then-Commander in Chief of the Atlantic Fleet, Admiral Ernest J. King, in 1941. Perhaps Constellation’s most significant contribution was early in her career with the slave trade patrol, during which she captured three slave ships and freed a total of 705 slaves. She is now preserved as a museum ship in Baltimore, Maryland. I happened to pick up a rather battered copy of Life-Like’s reissue of the Pyro kit on the cheap a while back, but the real appeal of this model is as a reminder of a trip to Washington, D.C. and Baltimore with my dad a few years ago (that’s him in the foreground). We made the trip without the wives or kids, so we were able to do all the “boring” guy activities – USS Constellation, National Museum of the U.S. Navy at the Washington Navy Yard, USCG Taney, the Chesapeake light ship, junk food dinners every night – without fear of trying the patience of loved ones. It was great! ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Dating from 1972, Life-Like’s reissue of Pyro’s 1966 U.S.S. Constellation kit isn’t exactly new, and over the years the box has had its share of bumps – but the parts look as pristine as the day they were manufactured! In the spirit of Pyro’s simplified, quick-build model kits, I don’t plan to go crazy superdetailing this one. Maybe add some details, correct a few shortcomings… but mostly I just want to have fun with the build. One change was to add some lead weights to the inside of the hull for a bit of heft to make it more stable on its display cradle. _______________________________________________________________________________________________ The fifty year old molds are not today’s state of the art, but the parts fit reasonably well with the help of a little filler. I managed to snap off and lose the starboard bower anchor cathead while assembling the hull, but a length of .030 X .030 inch strip made for a quick repair. Pyro’s uncomplicated four-piece hull assembles quickly and easily. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ Pyro depicted the capstan on the spar deck as a simplified pedestal onto which a separate capstan head, with its removable bars in place, was to be fitted. The representation was pretty basic, so I substituted a capstan raided from a 1/350 Zvezda Varyag kit. I didn’t add the removable bars to the new part, though. Their deployment didn’t make sense to me as the hatch covers are not in place – the men turning the capstan would have fallen into the ship! _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ The ports on the hull are molded as open with the gun muzzles visible. Cutting open the kit gunports, fabricating a gundeck inside and fitting cannon would have been a sizeable task – well beyond the scope of what I want to do with this simple kit. I contented myself with drilling out the cannon muzzles. Also, although the Zvezda Varyag capstan was definitely an improvement over the original kit representation, it too was replaced with one from a Revell U.S.S. Olympia kit that I liked even better. I nicked the adjacent fife rail while trimming away the capstan base molded to the deck; the white plastic strip is a repair. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Finishing the deck clean up, I made a simple replacement for the uninspiring kit galley stovepipe from plastic rod. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ The kit helm parts, on the other hand, were well designed, but it was the plastic injection technology of the 1960s that let them down; both parts were “short shot” with most of the grab handles on the wheel perimeters incompletely molded. After cleaning up the wheels, tiny lengths Plastruct .010 inch styrene rod replaced the poorly molded handles. The rebuilt wheels should look good under a coat of paint. With these and the other minor fixes completed, it is on to the deck cannon! _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ In addition to the cannon muzzles molded into the hull sides, the kit also comes with twelve separately molded weapons for the topside weather deck. Although the U.S.S. Constellation museum ship no longer has these cannon on deck, I opted to include them on the model anyway because the kit parts are so nicely done. Unfortunately the tiny parts, though well mastered, suffer from severe mold misalignment which meant the cleanup process destroyed some of the detail. They still look pretty nice, though. I upgraded them slightly by drilling out the muzzles and adding the knobs at the back ends of the barrels using .018 inch discs cut from .010 inch plastic. Test fitted in place, they add a pleasing busyness to the deck. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ The masts are next. Having designed the kit back in the 1960s with young modelers in mind, Pyro simplified the composite, multi-step masts into single parts, and the complex bowsprit was reduced to a mere three parts. The moldings are basically accurate and surprisingly convincing – although some details like the molded-in flags were less successful! The biggest problem with these parts came from the low pressure plastic injection molding technology of the era; the combination of heavy sprue attachment points, knock out pin marks, and mold misalignment on these fragile parts made for some pretty tedious cleanup. My kids were able to get entirely through the ‘Happytime Murders’ puppet movie before I had the three masts prepped to receive their platforms! Once cleaned up and with the platforms attached, though, the test fitted masts don’t look bad at all. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ In typical Pyro style, the spars for each mast were molded integrally with the billowing sails. Since I want to depict the ship as she appears today as a museum, these sails won’t be needed. Rather than try to remove the spars from the sail parts, I opted to construct new ones from brass tube and rod. The tapered yards would be simulated with .8mm brass tubes (Lion Roar LT0018) combined with .019 inch brass wire (Detail Associates 2506) slipped inside and left protruding from the ends. The first were the gaff and boom for the spanker sail. I began by drilling locator holes in the mizzen to accept the .019 inch brass wire. After cutting angled gaff and horizontal boom pieces of the appropriate lengths, they were secured to the mast with dabs of cyanoacrylate. The spencer (trysail) mast was then added using lengths of Plastruct .025 inch round white plastic rod. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ I also made six .8mm tube/.019 inch wire yards – two for each of the three masts. Although period paintings (and Pyro’s original kit parts) indicate that the Constellation actually shipped up to twelve these spars in service, the present day museum has only this abbreviated rig. These will be set in place after the masts have been painted and attached to the deck. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ Next came the bowsprit. After cleaning up the parts, I test fit the kit spritsail yard and twin martingales to the bowsprit – not very convincing. The kit bowsprit was acceptable, but I replaced other parts with brass tube and rod. The twin martingales – inaccurate for Constellation anyway – were replaced with a single “dolphin striker” made from the same .8mm tube with .019 inch brass wire inside it as with the spanker gaff & boom. For the lighter horizontal jib boom stay supports I used smaller .5mm tube with .010 inch rod inserts. I left a little of the rod protruding from the ends to help attach rigging later. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ A last task before painting is to sort out the shrouds/ratlines. While I’m game to accept most of Pyro’s rough and ready moldings, those massive injection molded ratlines are just too much! No problem, Peter Hall’s Atlantic Models comes to the rescue with some beautiful etched brass replacements. This set (ATEM35001) was not designed to fit any particular ship, but as generic replacement parts to be trimmed to fit individual models. In this case, the parts seem to match the Pyro Constellation’s main shrouds pretty closely right off the sheet. Test fitted to the ship, they promise to be a massive improvement with little effort! Though generic, the etched shrouds/ratlines fit reasonably closely for the foremast… ...but the main and mizzen mast shrouds don’t quite match the channels (also known as “chain wales” – those little platforms on the hull sides that form the base for the shrouds/ratlines) What’s going on here? Actually, this is a common problem among plastic sailing ship kits. Kits very often simply have the shrouds molded symmetrically which requires the channels to be incorrectly aligned with the centers of the masts. In real ships the shrouds/ratlines would begin almost vertical and fan aft, each at an increasing angle moving toward the stern so as to not interfere with the yards and sails attached to the mast fronts. Here’s a drawing showing this from Model Shipways’ The Neophyte Shipmodeller’s Jackstay: You can also see it in this aerial photo of the U.S.S. Constellation museum: Like most plastic sailing ship kits, Pyro’s Constellation model suffers from the “centered shrouds” problem. With the more accurate etched parts, though, the correction shouldn’t be all that difficult. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ The mizzen was especially off with a substantial part of the shrouds hanging into space when correctly positioned. A simple fix was to add new, correctly placed, channels from .010 X .080 plastic strip which bring the shrouds farther aft – much closer to the appearance of the real ship. The fore and mainmast shrouds received the same treatment. Now to the tops! _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Next come the shrouds for the top masts. These are pretty straightforward as they just require a bit of trimming to fit perfectly. Test fitted for now, I’ll fix them in place later after the masts have been painted and secured to the hull. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Painting begins with a coat of Tamiya Deck Tan (XF-55) on the weather deck followed by Tamiya Flat White (XF-2) for the masts, boat, and hull sides. I airbrushed the colors to get even coverage of these highly visible light tones, but most of the rest of the painting will be done by hand. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ The Constellation’s hull colors are pretty simple: white and black. I had already used pure bright white, which works in this small scale, but straight black seems too stark. I tried samples of three different blacks, finally settling on Tamiya Rubber Black (XF-85) which was just a bit lighter than the straight black. Normally I’d mask and spray the black bands beside the white, but the heavy raised surface detailing would make this approach difficult. Fortunately, that same heavy detailing can make even a fairly heavy handed brush application look reasonably good, so I set to it: With the basic colors on, the hull is starting to look like a man o‘ war! _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Additional variant “wood” colors give the deck a bit more interest. The natural wood caprails, hatches, and deck hardware were painted with Tamiya Buff (XF-57) with a slightly darker Tamiya Desert Yellow (XF-59) for areas in shadow. The quarter gallery window frames, decorative stars, ‘Constellation’ banner, and eagle aft were picked out in white. Smaller details received the same colors, but the cannon barrels were painted a slightly less intense black, Tamiya NATO Black (XF-69), to reduce the contrast with the Tamiya Buff carriages. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ Here’s how Constellation looks with most of the painting done and the major parts test fitted together: The copper-clad underwater hull and the display cradle still await their colors... _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ I’ve been taking a break from the U.S.S. Constellation build of late, but just the other day I happened across a bit of inspiration close to home: It is part of a 19th Century stepped mast quietly rotting on the dock at the Old Sacramento waterfront. I asked the Park Service folks there if they had any information about it, but the identity of the ship is unknown. They said it was probably a remnant of one of dozens of ships abandoned here and in San Francisco by crews deserting to join the 1849 California Gold Rush... Anyway, it reminds me of the masts on the preserved U.S.S. Constellation. I guess it is the modeling gods’ way of telling me that it’s time to get back to work! ____________________________________________________________________________________________________
  5. Hi all! I thought I’d return to a build I began (and suspended) a couple of years ago, Pyro’s U.S.S. Constellation model from 1966. The U.S.S. Constellation is a sloop-of-war, the last sail-only warship built for the United States Navy. Commissioned in 1855, she served for close to a century before finally being retired in 1954. During her long career Constellation performed a wide variety of duties including trade protection, Civil War blockade duty, cargo transport, and as a training ship. She brought humanitarian relief for the 1879 Irish famine, and even served as the reserve flagship for the then-Commander in Chief of the Atlantic Fleet, Admiral Ernest J. King, in 1941. Perhaps Constellation’s most significant contribution was early in her career with the slave trade patrol, during which she captured three slave ships and freed a total of 705 slaves. She is now preserved as a museum ship in Baltimore, Maryland. I happened to pick up a rather battered copy of Life-Like’s reissue of the Pyro kit on the cheap a while back, but the real appeal of this model is as a reminder of a trip to Washington, D.C. and Baltimore with my dad a few years ago (that’s him in the foreground). We made the trip without the wives or kids, so we were able to do all the “boring” guy activities – USS Constellation, National Museum of the U.S. Navy at the Washington Navy Yard, USCG Taney, the Chesapeake light ship, junk food dinners every night – without fear of trying the patience of loved ones. It was great! ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Dating from 1972, Life-Like’s reissue of Pyro’s 1966 U.S.S. Constellation kit isn’t exactly new, and over the years the box has had its share of bumps – but the parts look as pristine as the day they were manufactured! In the spirit of Pyro’s simplified, quick-build model kits, I don’t plan to go crazy superdetailing this one. Maybe add some details, correct a few shortcomings… but mostly I just want to have fun with the build. One change was to add some lead weights to the inside of the hull for a bit of heft to make it more stable on its display cradle. _______________________________________________________________________________________________ The fifty year old molds are not today’s state of the art, but the parts fit reasonably well with the help of a little filler. I managed to snap off and lose the starboard bower anchor cathead while assembling the hull, but a length of .030 X .030 inch strip made for a quick repair. Pyro’s uncomplicated four-piece hull assembles quickly and easily. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ Pyro depicted the capstan on the spar deck as a simplified pedestal onto which a separate capstan head, with its removable bars in place, was to be fitted. The representation was pretty basic, so I substituted a capstan raided from a 1/350 Zvezda Varyag kit. I didn’t add the removable bars to the new part, though. Their deployment didn’t make sense to me as the hatch covers are not in place – the men turning the capstan would have fallen into the ship! _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ The ports on the hull are molded as open with the gun muzzles visible. Cutting open the kit gunports, fabricating a gundeck inside and fitting cannon would have been a sizeable task – well beyond the scope of what I want to do with this simple kit. I contented myself with drilling out the cannon muzzles. Also, although the Zvezda Varyag capstan was definitely an improvement over the original kit representation, it too was replaced with one from a Revell U.S.S. Olympia kit that I liked even better. I nicked the adjacent fife rail while trimming away the capstan base molded to the deck; the white plastic strip is a repair. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Finishing the deck clean up, I made a simple replacement for the uninspiring kit galley stovepipe from plastic rod. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ The kit helm parts, on the other hand, were well designed, but it was the plastic injection technology of the 1960s that let them down; both parts were “short shot” with most of the grab handles on the wheel perimeters incompletely molded. After cleaning up the wheels, tiny lengths Plastruct .010 inch styrene rod replaced the poorly molded handles. The rebuilt wheels should look good under a coat of paint. With these and the other minor fixes completed, it is on to the deck cannon! _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ In addition to the cannon muzzles molded into the hull sides, the kit also comes with twelve separately molded weapons for the topside weather deck. Although the U.S.S. Constellation museum ship no longer has these cannon on deck, I opted to include them on the model anyway because the kit parts are so nicely done. Unfortunately the tiny parts, though well mastered, suffer from severe mold misalignment which meant the cleanup process destroyed some of the detail. They still look pretty nice, though. I upgraded them slightly by drilling out the muzzles and adding the knobs at the back ends of the barrels using .018 inch discs cut from .010 inch plastic. Test fitted in place, they add a pleasing busyness to the deck. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ The masts are next. Having designed the kit back in the 1960s with young modelers in mind, Pyro simplified the composite, multi-step masts into single parts, and the complex bowsprit was reduced to a mere three parts. The moldings are basically accurate and surprisingly convincing – although some details like the molded-in flags were less successful! The biggest problem with these parts came from the low pressure plastic injection molding technology of the era; the combination of heavy sprue attachment points, knock out pin marks, and mold misalignment on these fragile parts made for some pretty tedious cleanup. My kids were able to get entirely through the ‘Happytime Murders’ puppet movie before I had the three masts prepped to receive their platforms! Once cleaned up and with the platforms attached, though, the test fitted masts don’t look bad at all. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ In typical Pyro style, the spars for each mast were molded integrally with the billowing sails. Since I want to depict the ship as she appears today as a museum, these sails won’t be needed. Rather than try to remove the spars from the sail parts, I opted to construct new ones from brass tube and rod. The tapered yards would be simulated with .8mm brass tubes (Lion Roar LT0018) combined with .019 inch brass wire (Detail Associates 2506) slipped inside and left protruding from the ends. The first were the gaff and boom for the spanker sail. I began by drilling locator holes in the mizzen to accept the .019 inch brass wire. After cutting angled gaff and horizontal boom pieces of the appropriate lengths, they were secured to the mast with dabs of cyanoacrylate. The spencer (trysail) mast was then added using lengths of Plastruct .025 inch round white plastic rod. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ I also made six .8mm tube/.019 inch wire yards – two for each of the three masts. Although period paintings (and Pyro’s original kit parts) indicate that the Constellation actually shipped up to twelve these spars in service, the present day museum has only this abbreviated rig. These will be set in place after the masts have been painted and attached to the deck. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ Next came the bowsprit. After cleaning up the parts, I test fit the kit spritsail yard and twin martingales to the bowsprit – not very convincing. The kit bowsprit was acceptable, but I replaced other parts with brass tube and rod. The twin martingales – inaccurate for Constellation anyway – were replaced with a single “dolphin striker” made from the same .8mm tube with .019 inch brass wire inside it as with the spanker gaff & boom. For the lighter horizontal jib boom stay supports I used smaller .5mm tube with .010 inch rod inserts. I left a little of the rod protruding from the ends to help attach rigging later. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ A last task before painting is to sort out the shrouds/ratlines. While I’m game to accept most of Pyro’s rough and ready moldings, those massive injection molded ratlines are just too much! No problem, Peter Hall’s Atlantic Models comes to the rescue with some beautiful etched brass replacements. This set (ATEM35001) was not designed to fit any particular ship, but as generic replacement parts to be trimmed to fit individual models. In this case, the parts seem to match the Pyro Constellation’s main shrouds pretty closely right off the sheet. Test fitted to the ship, they promise to be a massive improvement with little effort! Though generic, the etched shrouds/ratlines fit reasonably closely for the foremast… ...but the main and mizzen mast shrouds don’t quite match the channels (also known as “chain wales” – those little platforms on the hull sides that form the base for the shrouds/ratlines) What’s going on here? Actually, this is a common problem among plastic sailing ship kits. Kits very often simply have the shrouds molded symmetrically which requires the channels to be incorrectly aligned with the centers of the masts. In real ships the shrouds/ratlines would begin almost vertical and fan aft, each at an increasing angle moving toward the stern so as to not interfere with the yards and sails attached to the mast fronts. Here’s a drawing showing this from Model Shipways’ The Neophyte Shipmodeller’s Jackstay: You can also see it in this aerial photo of the U.S.S. Constellation museum: Like most plastic sailing ship kits, Pyro’s Constellation model suffers from the “centered shrouds” problem. With the more accurate etched parts, though, the correction shouldn’t be all that difficult. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ The mizzen was especially off with a substantial part of the shrouds hanging into space when correctly positioned. A simple fix was to add new, correctly placed, channels from .010 X .080 plastic strip which bring the shrouds farther aft – much closer to the appearance of the real ship. The fore and mainmast shrouds received the same treatment. Now to the tops! _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Next come the shrouds for the top masts. These are pretty straightforward as they just require a bit of trimming to fit perfectly. Test fitted for now, I’ll fix them in place later after the masts have been painted and secured to the hull. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Painting begins with a coat of Tamiya Deck Tan (XF-55) on the weather deck followed by Tamiya Flat White (XF-2) for the masts, boat, and hull sides. I airbrushed the colors to get even coverage of these highly visible light tones, but most of the rest of the painting will be done by hand. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ The Constellation’s hull colors are pretty simple: white and black. I had already used pure bright white, which works in this small scale, but straight black seems too stark. I tried samples of three different blacks, finally settling on Tamiya Rubber Black (XF-85) which was just a bit lighter than the straight black. Normally I’d mask and spray the black bands beside the white, but the heavy raised surface detailing would make this approach difficult. Fortunately, that same heavy detailing can make even a fairly heavy handed brush application look reasonably good, so I set to it: With the basic colors on, the hull is starting to look like a man o‘ war! _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Additional variant “wood” colors give the deck a bit more interest. The natural wood caprails, hatches, and deck hardware were painted with Tamiya Buff (XF-57) with a slightly darker Tamiya Desert Yellow (XF-59) for areas in shadow. The quarter gallery window frames, decorative stars, ‘Constellation’ banner, and eagle aft were picked out in white. Smaller details received the same colors, but the cannon barrels were painted a slightly less intense black, Tamiya NATO Black (XF-69), to reduce the contrast with the Tamiya Buff carriages. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ Here’s how Constellation looks with most of the painting done and the major parts test fitted together: The copper-clad underwater hull and the display cradle still await their colors... _____________________________________________________________________________________________________ I’ve been taking a break from the U.S.S. Constellation build of late, but just the other day I happened across a bit of inspiration close to home: It is part of a 19th Century stepped mast quietly rotting on the dock at the Old Sacramento waterfront. I asked the Park Service folks there if they had any information about it, but the identity of the ship is unknown. They said it was probably a remnant of one of dozens of ships abandoned here and in San Francisco by crews deserting to join the 1849 California Gold Rush... Anyway, it reminds me of the masts on the preserved U.S.S. Constellation. I guess it is the modeling gods’ way of telling me that it’s time to get back to work! ____________________________________________________________________________________________________
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