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Trumpeter 1/200 H.M.S. Rodney with Pontos PE


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  • 2 weeks later...
On 9/5/2018 at 2:02 AM, beefy66 said:

Up to your usual great standards on the PE 

looking very neat Warren how are you finding the Pontos stuff to work with 

 

Keith

Hi Keith.

 

The PE itself is very good but the instructions not that great. Lots of stuff takes way too much interpretation and some of the photos are just plain wrong. Also, they seem to have confused the Rodney with the Nelson instructions as some of the pictures show incorrect configurations for the Rodney. A good example is the monts for the secondary armament which have no turret for the Rodney but they show the turret in the instructions.

 

Have been away from the bench a fair bit lately as we have a new puppy and I had to drive to Sydney from Adelaide last weekend. Should get a bit done over the coming weekends.

 

Cheers

Warren

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Got a fair bit done over the past week or so.

 

First I started the multimedia main mast with brass and resin pieces (so far)..

 

20180905_160122.jpg

 

Then the platform for that mast...

 

20180922_120859.jpg

 

and what looks like a little weather station off to the side..

 

20180922_120903.jpg

 

Then the lower half..

 

20180922_121112.jpg

 

Next up was constructing the things that go on the starfish platform, the radar lantern..

 

20180922_134202.jpg

 

and then with the lantern glued in place..

 

20180923_090817.jpg

 

Then I continued with the upper part of the main mast.

 

20180923_142706.jpg

 

Radar still to be installed.

Cheers
Warren

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  • 2 weeks later...

Thanks everyone.  :)

 

OK. Time for a quick update. I have got the following superstructure bits finished..

 

20181007_093939.jpg

 

20181007_094007.jpg

 

And there are other pieces as well but I just didn't get around to photographing them. Then, for the first time in months I fired up the compressor and applied some paint to the metal decks in preparation for applying the wooden deck. I also painted the vents etc that festoon the deck.

 

20181007_121539.jpg

 

Now for a question the the people who know more about RN colours than I will ever need or want to know..  :)

 

As Soverign Colorcoats are too expensive here in Australia (try $6.50 per tin plus postage) and they are enamels, and I have given up on Hataka as I can't seem to get an answer on how to thin them properly (and they don't dry matt) I am looking for rations to mix Gunze or Tamiya acrylics to get the four colours I need;
507C
MS1
MS2
B5

 

Any help would be most appreciated.

 

Cheers
Warren

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I use LifeColor paints, they have a good range of colours, here are the life color paints:

Admiralty Light Grey 507 C [UA633]

Dark Blue Black MS1 [UA634]

MS2 [UA 605]

Dark Blue-Grey B5 [UA636]

 

Hope this helps

 

Graham

Edited by Graham D
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Thanks Graham.

 

I used some Lifecolor paints on my 1/72 Snowberry and eventually found a combination of thinners and retarder that allowed me to use the paints successfully. Still a pain compared to Tamiya.  :)

 

Cheers

Warren

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Greetings from Australia.

I have finally worked out how to successfully spray the Hataka paints I bought for the Wodney. I have been doing that , or working on my old cars, over the past week or so. Looking at pictures of painting is just like watching paint dry to me, ezpecially when the colour grey you are currently usinf is the same colour as the plastic you are painting (well so close it is difficult to tell the difference).

When I start spraying some different colours to build up the camo pattern I will start posting pictures again. Sound fair?

Cheers
Warren

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Thanks Beefy.  :)

 

I think I have been pondering this camo scheme for too long. There is a much easier solution than tring to get accurate colours etc and try to paint superstructure in the camo scheme, and that is to paint her as she was when she was following the Bismarck... all over grey..

 

Comments?

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I am wavering again as I found a really good picture of the other side of the vessel. Now I know the pattern just have to pick what colour goes where. Now I just have to make some masks..

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Go with the colour camo! It does really bring ships to life!

 

Don't know if it will help but I've a Vallejo comparison chart somewhere in my files, let me know and I'll send it over.

 

Geoff 

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Hi Warren,

 

It might not be the worst idea to just go with Home Fleet Grey.

 

My corrected paints are not in Australia. Creative have the old colours we inherited from White Ensign Models. As such, you can't buy mine regardless but nevertheless the exercise of correcting these colours has been massively time consuming and extremely expensive for us as a small business. The money we spent on travel expenses alone to visit the things we needed to see was substantial, never mind the manhours I poured into it - if only model paint were lucrative enough to take a wage from!

 

All other model paints labelled as Royal Navy colours are copied from Snyder & Short's chips. John Snyder of Snyder & Short (but it's been run solely by Randy Short for a long time now) worked for White Ensign Models and was the first to attempt RN paints. Everyone else copied them except for AKAN which have some differences and are slightly better than the rest in some areas. AKAN's B5 for instance lacks B5's brilliance, but it's a lot better than the medium greys everyone else is selling - including what's labelled as "B5" in your Hataka set who copied Snyder & Short down to the non-existant "RN Warm White" and non-existant "Late War B55".

 

It may sound anal, but the fundamental problem you are going to have in simply figuring out "which colour goes where" is that all (except ours, which I can't sell you anyway) are a train-crash of inaccuracies of varying severity. Some like B5 and B6 are simply nothing like the real colours, but almost all of them have tonal problems meaning the colours are darker than the ones they're supposed to be lighter than or lighter than the ones they're supposed to be darker than. At very best, what you'll end up with will look a bit weird. At worst, you'll kick the model across the room trying to reconcile the irreconcilable when looking at B&W photos trying to work out what the hell is going on.

 

This image below contains the 1942 paint colours (excluding Mountbatten Pink and the Western Approaches Light Blue and Light Green which are not relevant to Rodney) ordered from darkest at the top to lightest at the bottom - this is in accordance with primary source documented evidence:

0fe0261e-2171-42c6-9d08-174ecb548ebd.png

 

Our research group can generate scores if not hundreds of emails to each other and dozens of photographs, not to mention sometimes empassioned debate and exasperation trying to nail down the scheme of a single ship. By way of example, here's Rodney as a work in progress. For the record, I don't think either of these is correct and we're not sure we've got the right colour palette on either. We're working from more B&W images than I can count, a good handful of contemporary paintings and some washed out colour cinefilm from OP Pedestal, which although far from clear is better than we have for most ships. I started turning grey in my early twenties. I'm 37 now. I swear I'm going to look like Gandalf The White by the time I'm 40 if I keep working on ship camouflage!

 

a9c03ebd-de72-44f7-afe8-442fa5faf567.png

 

In a nutshell, it's difficult working out paint schemes when you do know what the colours actually looked like. It'll be a very frustrating exercise trying to do it with paints which are neither the correct hue nor tone (relative to each other, never mind in absolute terms).

 

e5ad2b7b-a866-4175-a77d-3a8998ddb977.jpg

 

2830c3c6-86aa-43b9-8ccd-b77ac37a43ec.jpg

 

resized_2e1f1977-2a3a-4ad9-9c0b-ba9ecf36

 

Rodney was painted in overall Home Fleet Grey (Admiralty Pattern 507A) in 1941 for the Bismarck chase.

 

 

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This took some calculation. I should have prepared better earlier... I have converted both sets of colours to true greyscale but retaining the exact Light Reflectance Values of each. This perhaps explains the tonal problems with all Snyder & Short copies better than words. Note how the documented numbers of the left go from smallest to largest and our new paints likewise graduate from darkest to lightest, whilst the Snyder & Short ones jump back and forth. Anyone trying to make sense of B&W images with the shades on the left is on a hiding to nothing due to this. That's why there are so many versions of colour schemes around and each of them is contradicted by some real piece of evidence - the jigsaw pieces just don't fit together:

 

1059094e-1fe6-4dd0-8720-6d7ea67e8327.png

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You REALLY need a reliable distributor in Australia. 

Why is it I can get paint shipped from the USA but not from you guys? Or is it the idiotic Royal Post regs? I tried through Ebay and they wanted $35 for two tins of paint!! BWHAHAHAHAHA!! Fail!!

Is Britain so full of terrorists nowadays they think 2 tiny tins of paint are going to bring an aircraft down? I worked on aircraft for a long time and the only way this could happen would be if there was a big bomb to ignite the tins tiny first... And when they are tightly sealed tins how can they cause a problem anyway. as I said idiotic.

This is going to take a bit longer to work out as if I do the Rodney in the plain 507A colour the Nelson is going to look too much like it in its late war scheme.

Would it be possible to get a diagram of the right hand side of the ship? Hard to judge patterns etc when you are not looking directly at the ship's side in all the photos I have seen. Your diagrams are very good.

I need a Bex and a lie down (if you could still get Bex!) 

Edited by warreni
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It's one of the old classics Warren. International rules are agreed to then most countries are a bit slack on it thereafter. I agree with you though. Nail polish with a lower flashpoint and sold in glass jars is ok to send by post. Highly flammable lacquer paints are sent too because they have the word "acrylic" written on and the regulators haven't yet worked out that there are some fairly unsubtle differences in flammability between water based acrylics and lacquers with MEK in them that you could run a Me163 rocket engine on.

 

I need to catch up with Creative actually. And perhaps within 2 weeks I'll have a result on a new postal contract which, if we then pay for the IATA course for Gill, we can send a bit cheaper overseas...

 

I will work on the panel maps for the port side tonight or tomorrow night.

 

In Home Fleet Grey it will look quite dark. The late war Eastern Fleet / Pacific scheme was G45 Light Grey (i.e. 507C) with a B20 blue panel.

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Warren - Some fabulous PE work there - that starfish platform is a thing of wonder.

You can't finish her in 507A and miss all that wonderful colour:o

Whatever colours you go for - with such contradictory evidence  in abundance - no-one can criticise.

I'm fast becoming a huge fan of The Sovereign Colourcoats (Sorry!:blush:)  

To my mind Jamie and his team have brought a rationality to the whole subject which is compelling.

Loving this build

Rob

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi Warren,


Hope this helps:

 

30a8a8eb-5ece-425d-a0ca-7b31ce7bb232.png

 

Please note that despite a tendency for MS4 to appear warm and sandy, it is close to perfectly neutral grey. It is the juxtaposition of B5 (a strong blue) and 507C (a distinctly bluish grey) which makes MS4 give this impression. I say this to avoid temptation to replicate a perceived brownishness in it, or the results will look "loud" to say the least!

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Finally!!  Thanks heaps for that Jamie. I haven't touched the kit in a few weeks now pondering on what to do. I did make up a few masks a week or so ago then cut some of them out yesterday but these colours clarify things very well.

 

Will have to take the picture to work, scale it up to 1/200 size and do some more masks.

 

Any more news of colourcoats in Australia?

 

Thanks again!

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