1/350 IJN Maya with Flyhawk

[Overpin]

I'm finally back with some work on the Maya! I completely lost my building mojo during the fall and just haven't gotten around to it. Progress has been strictly limited to weather the hull and working on the catapult deck. As soon as I have the deck finished I'll startworking on the turrets and superstructure.

 

[Overpin]

Recently I've been fiddling some more with the Flyhawk PE, finding the instructions lacking at best and some of the parts very fiddly indeed (no idea how you guys do this in 1/700 ). The funnel has been very tricky indeed, I had to cut off  what I assume are ammunition boxes to make space for the support structure under the fwd funnel. This is again a point in the build where Flyhawk's instructions aren't being very helpful, now I'm just hoping enough ammunition boxes are included. The small rails (whatever they really are) on and on top of the funnel were all pretty tricky, and unfortunately some of them ended up mangled by me but overall I'm pretty happy. I'm sure a coat of paint will tidy it all up nicely! 

 

 

 

 

 

I have been dry fitting parts, including the fwd superstructure and there are some issues probably requiring some surgery to rectify. As you can see the gap on the fwd deck is pretty bad. I'm toying with the idea of filling the gap by gluing in some styrene strips as an extension on the superstructure to make it flush with the deck.

 

Edited May 11, 2018 by Overpin
afterthought

[Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies]

On ‎12‎/‎10‎/‎2017 at 11:48 PM, Bendinggrass said:

Hello Fights On.

I find your comments about the use of the rangefinders really interesting. Please correct me if I am wrong on this, but I always thought (without any research, I admit) that the rangefinders used the principle of "parallax" to determine the distance to the target, so that the actual space between things such as funnels did not play a part in this. I ask about this because the known distance between, for example, funnels could be so much off the mark at times..... 

Any elaboration would be very appreciated on this.

Thanks.

 

You're both right but are describing different types of range finder and thus methods. The big battleship "binocular" type with two view finders use parallax and trigonometry. Knowing the distance between the two views and both triangulating on the same feature (e.g. mainmast) you can read off the angle between the two viewfinders and that's all you need to work out the "height" of your triangle. These are called "coincidence rangefinders" and what the operator sees is a split image.

 

He trains the two views together until they coincide on the target making a complete image - in the example pic he's using the foretopmast as the reference point but you can use anything you can clearly align. Then he reads the range off because the instrument does the trigonometry for you.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coincidence_rangefinder

 

 

On submarines though you don't have that, so you need to ID your target and have your lackey look it up in the onboard ID book and read off measurements you can use. You then use the scale superimposed on the periscope viewfinder to work read off the apparent dimension. By dividing the observed dimension and intelligence dimension from the book, you can work out the range to target.

 

 

 

The coincidence type of range finder is far more accurate subject to two conditions - one, the material used for the range finder assembly needs to insensitive to thermal expansion, because the calculated distance to target is a multiple of the distance between the two lenses. If the range finder expands and contracts on hot or cold days, your measured range will be out. Leading on from that, the larger the distance between the lenses, the smaller a multiplication and less sensitive to precision in the angular measurement between the mirrors you are - hence why the primary range finders on capital ships were rather huge!

[Overpin]

The story of the funnels and their surroundings continue, and I have to admit it's been a bit of a nightmare. I decided to not include all funnel rings on the FWD stack as they would be hidden by the superstructure anyway, and I didn't want to deal with more fiddly PE waiting to pop off. While massaging the FWD funnel into place I sadly managed to badly mangle one of lower rings and eventually just scrapped it, it will be mostly hidden by the platform around the funnels anyway.

 

I laid down a coat of primer before tackling the rear funnel and the platform around the pannels, just to get some paint into all the little nooks and crannies that will be hard to reach once everything is assembled.

 

 

The platform turned out to be a rather time consuming endeavor. Doing the rear funnel next wasn't an option because with funnel rings the platform just didn't want plop down into place, and adding it after completing and attaching both funnels would have certainly ended in some mangled PE and salty tears. Using Flyhawk's PE platform involved cutting off the support pillars from the plastic one and some of the structures on top of it and combining them with the PE. I started by removing the pillars and attaching them to the deck instead of the platform since they all had locator pins at the bottom, and I definetly want them in the right place.

 

The Flyhawk PE in itself is very nice, the detail is certainly top notch and everything went together quite smoothly, the same can not be about the damn plastic .

 

 

The support beams on the underside weren't too bad and even Flyhawk's instructions were adequate. It's not the prettiest PE work I'm sure, but the platform itself was bent and my wobbly hands and inexperience with PE resulted in some excessive CA use .

I will add the rest that goes around the support pillars when the platform is in place to get everything to fit and line up nicely.

 

 

Lastly I did some dry fitting and everything so far seems to fit pretty well. I will still have to check with the FWD superstrucure since there are some connecting walkways between it and the platform.

 

 

 

Thanks for viewing, more to follow! 

[Alex SZ1996]

nice to see some progress, looks good

[SallysDad]

This really is beautiful, delicate work.

[Killingholme]

On 5/11/2018 at 11:42 AM, Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies said:

 

You're both right but are describing different types of range finder and thus methods. The big battleship "binocular" type with two view finders use parallax and trigonometry. Knowing the distance between the two views and both triangulating on the same feature (e.g. mainmast) you can read off the angle between the two viewfinders and that's all you need to work out the "height" of your triangle. These are called "coincidence rangefinders" and what the operator sees is a split image.

 

He trains the two views together until they coincide on the target making a complete image - in the example pic he's using the foretopmast as the reference point but you can use anything you can clearly align. Then he reads the range off because the instrument does the trigonometry for you.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coincidence_rangefinder

 

 

On submarines though you don't have that, so you need to ID your target and have your lackey look it up in the onboard ID book and read off measurements you can use. You then use the scale superimposed on the periscope viewfinder to work read off the apparent dimension. By dividing the observed dimension and intelligence dimension from the book, you can work out the range to target.

 

 

 

The coincidence type of range finder is far more accurate subject to two conditions - one, the material used for the range finder assembly needs to insensitive to thermal expansion, because the calculated distance to target is a multiple of the distance between the two lenses. If the range finder expands and contracts on hot or cold days, your measured range will be out. Leading on from that, the larger the distance between the lenses, the smaller a multiplication and less sensitive to precision in the angular measurement between the mirrors you are - hence why the primary range finders on capital ships were rather huge!

 

It's a miracle they hit anything really!

 

For anyone that's interested, everything you need to know (and probably quite a bit more) about the development of fire control can be found on the Dreadnought Project website:

 

http://dreadnoughtproject.org/tfs/index.php/Category:Fire_Control

 

Superb model! Really coming along.