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Aegean Adventures - YS Masterpieces 1/700 Georgios Averof


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The Georgios Averof was a Pisa-class armoured cruiser that the Italian government decided it didn't quite have the need/money for. Luckily for the maker and ship Greece decided that they did however. The ship in return performed extremely well in the Balkan wars, where she almost single handedly chased off the Turkish navy in two battles, securing Greek naval domination in the Aegean sea. She was eventually decommissioned in 1952, restored as a museum ship in 1984, and then restored to sea-going condition in 2017. Today she sits as a museum ship outside of Athens, the last armoured cruiser in the world.

 

Having been on board the armoured cruiser Georgios Averof when I was in Athens a while back I thought I'd build a kit of her, and luckily there's a Greek maker with a pretty nifty looking (if not terribly cheap) resin kit on the market.

 

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Photoetch included. Castings seem very nice so far, good detailing and all the holes on top appear to be for putting stuff in rather than bubbles.

 

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Some bubbles, a few extra resin blobs and some bubbles underneath. And most importantly this, well, blob of material that just has to go. :wicked: Time for some sanding then...

 

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Well, yes, I may be one of those waterline people. Luckily I could use a bench sander at work, and make a support/holder out of some scrap wood and oldish kneadatite. (Apparently it's still mostly viable after, uhm, two decades?)

And to return to the casting and detailing here, some of this stuff is ridiculously thin.

 

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Getting these overhanging bits out of the mould has to be quite the experience.

 

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Work so far has mostly consisted of looking at the manual, looking at the parts, looking back to the manual, and then scratching my head as I try to figure out how to bets go about everything. I got the turrets together though (the odds of those PE guns staying there throughout the build seems rather slim) and chopped the funnels off their block to see where things may be heading though.

 

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Then I went for a bit of fiddling with the boats, one of the leats interesting parts IMO so best sorted early. Rudders and, when appropriate, propellers are being left off until the very last moment, because dear gods those bits will be fragile.

 

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Yep, every oar is its own bit of PE.

Some more thinking and something of a plan has formed. most of the kit and the PE looks like ti can be assembled before painting, so I'll go with that. Masking off the deck on the other hand will probably take a lot of handling of things, which'd doom a lot of the PE if attached. And as such I'll airbrush and mask that now.

 

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So now to try and balance the fiddliness of masking around the small details with the making-a-mess-risk of leaving things to be hand painted.

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On 26/03/2019 at 20:52, Courageous said:

Thought that this was a waterline job :police:?

So, boat race diorama... maybe some other time.

 

Still, things are fiddly enough as I'm currently mostly sticking on various small bits to the main hull. Or onto each other. And then bending other tiny bits around all that, and...

 

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Of course, when it then became time to stick that onto the main affair the stretched sprue supporting pillars turned out to be very much in the way of a pair of large ventilators, and thus had to be very gently ripped off again. I also got the searchlight platform a touch too low to clear the ventilator perfectly (the best thing I could think of to determine at which height exactly it should sit was to estimate it from the ladders) but as the amount of sulphuric language involved in prying that loose and then re-attaching just about everythign would probably lead to  a few cops in full riot gear knocking on my door and so I let that slide.

 

A touch of painting, masking, and attachment of other little bits have also happened. I found the first bubble that needed filling on top of a ventilator while I was at it.

 

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So the PE work went on. Including things like trying to match these platforms with this railing.

 

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I  the end I chopped off a small part for each long side, put a pillar in each other outer corners, and then tried to glue a small bit of brass across at the top at the outer end. Hopefully no one will look at that bit all too closely...

Then it was time for the masts and, well, here's the bits (with em having doodled a bit as part of the identification process).

 

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The flank parts on the left block are just there to protect the rest, good thinking I'd say. And here's how I'm supposed to identify them.

 

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So Π2 and E2 are on one block, and then E1, E3, and Π 1, 3 and 4 are on one block. Some reading of the instruction texts told me E4, E5 and Π5 were supposed to be stretched sprue. Π1 was the only part with significant side detail, so that one was kinda easy to identify. For the rest I just ordered them by length and hoped for the best, though looking at Π1 this pattern wouldn't have worked there... As for E2 and Π2 I thought I'd use the distance between the legs at the open end to identify them. But if you look closely at the actual parts you'll see two flat pieces stuck to one of them. The next page in the instructions eventually tells us that the rear masts legs have searchlight platforms on them, so that bit is for the rear mast. Had I followed my plan to have the bit with the greater leg spread in the manual be the part with greater spread in reality, well, I'd have gotten it the other way around. And possible cleaned off the platforms thinking they were some odd kind of casting artefact. So yeah, that took some time to sort out. As for actually building the masts the manual has you build them and then attach, but with basically nothing on them guiding you as to what angles the support legs come in at I started with adding the bottom mast and the support legs to the hull, and then built upwards. Thinsg ended up a bit crooked here and there, but at least I could get everythign to attach to the deck in the right post code this way.

 

And with that it's time for paint.

 

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