Flankerman Posted October 31, 2020 Share Posted October 31, 2020 https://www.britmodeller.com/forums/index.php?/profile/31456-maartenschonfeld/ Belgian modeller Maarten is converting the MikroMir 1/350 scale HMS Resolution SSBN kit into a Churchill Class SSN. As he has no means of posting WIP photos on Britmodeller, I offered to post them for him.... Over to you Maarten........ Ken 10 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Terry1954 Posted October 31, 2020 Share Posted October 31, 2020 Nice start and an interesting conversion. There you go @Courageous, must make you feel quite at home! Terry 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Courageous Posted November 1, 2020 Share Posted November 1, 2020 Fantastic! Thanks for the pointer @Terry1954, no excuses now. Next hole 'Dreadnought (S101). Albeit a bit early, note the 'red' draft marks. Will definiately follow. Stuart 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flankerman Posted November 20, 2020 Author Share Posted November 20, 2020 Some more photos from Maarten..... Over to you Maarten.... it's looking great so far...... Ken 7 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Courageous Posted November 20, 2020 Share Posted November 20, 2020 Impressive work from Maarten, thanks for posting Ken. Looks like doing my boat is now on the cards, better get myself another 1/350 Reso'. Stuart 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maarten.schonfeld Posted November 22, 2020 Share Posted November 22, 2020 (edited) On 21/11/2020 at 00:05, Courageous said: Impressive work from Maarten, thanks for posting Ken. Looks like doing my boat is now on the cards, better get myself another 1/350 Reso'. Stuart Ken, thank you for all the help uploading these photo's! Let me try to add the narrative to what can be seen. Thank you for the compliments Stuart! I can understand this topic attracts your interest very much. For me the upcoming anniversary of the Falklands War triggered someone in my IPMS Netherlands branch to propose a group build, and being one of the ship guys I volunteered trying my hand at a HMS Conqueror model - in 1:350, my favourite scale. It's really by the generous help from Chas Cooke, the founder and honorary chairman of the HMS Courageous Association - do you happen to know him? - that I can pull this off. Officially there is NO documentation on any of the Valiant/Churchill class boats, but the picture gallery on the Association's website proved to be an excellent starting point! And piece by piece I'm getting official drawings, trying to puzzle it all together to get a complete view on what the class have looked like. And checking this with the Google Earth glimpses one can get peeping into the Devonport storage basin. That is also one of the catches: I have already found out they 'mutilated' the boats to minimalize the cost of maintenance like: cropping the aft stabilizers and diving planes, so that the boats can be moored next to a quay or to eachother. Also, streamline covers in the side of the hull have been removed to prevent accumulation of dirt and hence corrosion. And the rear end of the fin has been removed as well, and so have the forward diving planes. In this quest, mails are flying back and forth between Chas and me to quench my inquisitive questions, involve other subariner colleagues of him, including the boat's senior officers. My appreciation is very great of course! My conversion started out by just removing a center section of 122 mm from the Resolution hull, resulting in an elegant shape from stem to stern. Finding out a little later that the hull of the boat was really cilindrical between frames 37- 77. Still having the cilindrical middle part, I did two more cuts and now the shape starts looking like it should. Next was building up the centre part of the upper casing, by two square rods . 125" (3.2 mm) from Evergreen, filing it into the elegant curve. On to the fore deck, which naturally is too broad as well: cutting away the excess, and blanking in with triangles of card. Then, measuring from Google Earth the width of the upper casing where the prominent rim meets the cilindrical hull: the width of the side panel appear to be exactly 10 mm in scale. I cut these from .075" card, adding the elegant curves at the rear end. So this basically is the conversion of the hull, the rest is cleaning up and adding details. A side photo of the aft rudder (with prominent red depth markings, providing excellent reference for scale!) helped me to reduce the Resolution's item, the other rudder and dive planes were a bit problemateic, I made these too small initially (as on the photo's above). Now that I have good drawings I made corrections already. On to the forward dive planes: establishing the exact location is the key point here. There are no side view drawings of the fin unfortunately, the fore-aft length however can be found on the plan view. Today or tomorrow one of the colleagues in Devonport will attempt to measure the height of the fin above the deck: I have already made a first attempt to it. I trust my eyeballing estimate is not very far off anyway. Let me pause here for a while, I will come back when I have updates to my build! Maarten Edited November 22, 2020 by maarten.schonfeld correct typo 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Courageous Posted November 22, 2020 Share Posted November 22, 2020 5 hours ago, maarten.schonfeld said: I can understand this topic attracts your interest very much. Indeed Maarten. Nice to hear of your detail research, so I'll bookmark this buildl. As far as your contact, Chas Cooke, can't say that I know the man but it has been some 35+ since I left Courageous. Stuart Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flankerman Posted November 25, 2020 Author Share Posted November 25, 2020 Maarten has sent me 3 new photos - and this short text.... Now it goes faster, I’m refining the details like the shape of the bow, added the forward diving planes, refined the contour of the upper casing in a gentle S-curve, and so forth! Fantastic work Maarten - it really looks the part..... Ken 7 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flankerman Posted November 30, 2020 Author Share Posted November 30, 2020 Some more in-progress photos from Maarten..... he writes...... Three picures with the first paint on. It was my intention to make it look a bit tatty, but, blast, the paint was probably too old, it didn’t work out quite well. OK, I can camouflage it later on, now it looks far too tatty! ☹ But still, it looks very much a Churchill now it’s black. and.... Note: the propeller is a Los Angeles class example, which suffered some battle damage. Works fine as a stand-in until Mikes 3D example arrives! .... and from Mike Fuller who is making these propellers - 7-blade versions.... .... and 9-bladers... Great work as usual guys.... Ken 11 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maarten.schonfeld Posted December 1, 2020 Share Posted December 1, 2020 Thanks you Ken for uploading the pictures! I have slept over it, but I will re-do the offending black paint job. This is much below anyone's standard, even mine... 🙂 So I will get paint remover today and new paint. In the meantime I also created a tiny 'crawler motor', these boats were equipped with an extendable outboard motor below the rear hull, to aid in manoeuvering at very low speed. I had already made the well for that in the hull. It's onl 5.5mm in length, with a three bladed propeller. A picture will appear soon. And good news from the Ukraine: Vladimir from MikroMir acknowledged his interest to kit this boat class too, the lack of drawings being the reason why it has been skipped until now. I will prepare a drawing for him summarizing all information that enabled me to make this conversion. Of course no date has been scheduled for the kit to appear... but there is hope on the horizon 🙂 ! 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Courageous Posted December 1, 2020 Share Posted December 1, 2020 12 hours ago, maarten.schonfeld said: re-do the offending black paint job. With so little reference, this is a very good effort Maarten. The lines look right to me and I will certainly bookmark this thread for my future Courageous build. Glad you're going to have another go at the paintwork. A couple of observations if I may, I think your forward dive planes are little undersize, I reckon they should be about 3 times the size of the inboard fairings. The second observation is your outboard part attached to the starboard aft plane, I can't remember seeing that at all. Stuart Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maarten.schonfeld Posted December 3, 2020 Share Posted December 3, 2020 On 01/12/2020 at 23:10, Courageous said: With so little reference, this is a very good effort Maarten. The lines look right to me and I will certainly bookmark this thread for my future Courageous build. Glad you're going to have another go at the paintwork. A couple of observations if I may, I think your forward dive planes are little undersize, I reckon they should be about 3 times the size of the inboard fairings. The second observation is your outboard part attached to the starboard aft plane, I can't remember seeing that at all. Stuart Hi Stuart, Thank you very much for your feedback, that is extremely valuable in such a project with very scarce references! So let me treat your observations carefully. First the forward dive or hydroplanes: these were taken directly from the official plan I got from Chas Cooke. It is very clear these planes did follow exactly the hull contour below, as not to interfere when mooring. It might be however that my hull is slightly too narrow in that region, so I should add a little sliver to the outboard side then. I will look closely ho to make them look a bit broader. However, as the inboard fairings were voluminous, the dive planes were not triple their size, but more around double. What do you think about that? I will ask Ken to upload a clipping from the drawing I used. As for the aft planes and stabilizers: the drawing shows only the starboard one (unfortunately), but in the thread above there is the image of Valiant trimmed nose down to expose her prop. There you can see her port stabilizer, and you can clearly see the horn into which the diving plane bearing is set. This horn clearly extends outward from the diving plane. In my model however I squared off that horn, but with your remark I think I should make it less pronounced and rounded off. OK? As another note on this: the port stabilizer houses also the spigot probe for the towed sonar array, Chas confirmed that too. As I didn't find any photo of that, I used the Airfix Trafalgar kit as a reference to make a fairing very similarly. If I could get any better reference that would be very welcome! In the photo of Valiant above she clearly didn't have the towed array fitted yet. Maarten 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Courageous Posted December 3, 2020 Share Posted December 3, 2020 3 hours ago, maarten.schonfeld said: Thank you very much for your feedback, Your welcome Maarten but is only feedback. With a beam of 10.1m, your foreplanes should measure 28.8mm across. As for the plane fairing ratio I'd look at photo's: Churchill's foreplane. Courageous's foreplanes, oh the number of times I've stood on them. As for those aft planes, I would've made the startboard plane like that photo of Valiant's port plane. Your port plane with the towed-array fixing looks correct to my old eyes. I'm not saying you should change anything for your build but it focuses my mind on my own Courageous build sometime in the future. Stuart 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flankerman Posted December 4, 2020 Author Share Posted December 4, 2020 20 hours ago, maarten.schonfeld said: I will ask Ken to upload a clipping from the drawing I used. Will do......... Ken 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maarten.schonfeld Posted December 4, 2020 Share Posted December 4, 2020 On 01/12/2020 at 23:10, Courageous said: With so little reference, this is a very good effort Maarten. The lines look right to me and I will certainly bookmark this thread for my future Courageous build. Glad you're going to have another go at the paintwork. A couple of observations if I may, I think your forward dive planes are little undersize, I reckon they should be about 3 times the size of the inboard fairings. The second observation is your outboard part attached to the starboard aft plane, I can't remember seeing that at all. Stuart Thank you for your nice comments, Stuart! I'll take a look again at the dive planes, these were one of the most difficult items. However: according to the drawings the forward planes were made to conform exactly to the hull contour in planform. Remember, at the Dreadnought, Resolutions and many older boats these were made to swing upward when on the surface, as to make them less vulnerable when mooring the boat. so I cannot make them much larger, but I'll see if the inner fairings might be too large. According to my calipers the forward planes have a width of 28.4 mm, so only slightly less than the full beam. This is caused by the hull contour curving towards the bow at that point. At the forward end they are 27.9 mm wide. You can seet that well in the plan view. I will change the SB aft stabilizer to be less pronounced and more rounded, to look more like the Valiant. Maarten 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flankerman Posted December 25, 2020 Author Share Posted December 25, 2020 Two more photos of Maartens conversion......... It looks great Maarten !! Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all.... Ken 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maarten.schonfeld Posted March 31, 2022 Share Posted March 31, 2022 I just received GOOD news from the Ukraine... not so common these days! Their new Valiant/Churchill class submarine in 1/350 scale has been released, based on the drawings I provided them. https://www.hobby.dn.ua/ru/mikromir-mkr-350044-atomnaya-podvodnaya-lodka-hms-conqueror-s48-p-104990.html 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Courageous Posted March 31, 2022 Share Posted March 31, 2022 7 hours ago, maarten.schonfeld said: Their new Valiant/Churchill class submarine in 1/350 scale has been released, Fantastic news if they have, will save me a lot of work. Can't see it on their website? Stuart 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maarten.schonfeld Posted March 31, 2022 Share Posted March 31, 2022 1 hour ago, Courageous said: Fantastic news if they have, will save me a lot of work. Can't see it on their website? Stuart Try their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/mikro.mir.dnepr/photos/4904437416300622 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Courageous Posted April 2, 2022 Share Posted April 2, 2022 On 3/31/2022 at 3:50 PM, maarten.schonfeld said: Try their Facebook I have pre-ordered my kit via ebay. Thanks for your input into this project, you couldn't do the same for a Swiftsure class or even a Dreadnought class... Stuart Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maarten.schonfeld Posted April 2, 2022 Share Posted April 2, 2022 (edited) 9 hours ago, Courageous said: I have pre-ordered my kit via ebay. Thanks for your input into this project, you couldn't do the same for a Swiftsure class or even a Dreadnought class... Stuart Hi Stuart, Your request was already taken in hand! My contact at the Courageous Association received the plans of Dreadnought S101 over a year ago, but due to Covid ther was no opportunity yet to get them scanned. As soon as I have these I will forward them to MikroMir. Wait and see! Swiftsure is somewhat of a not-necessarily-needed: converting the Airfix Trafalgar into a Swiftsure class is very simple, I believe it can be found somewhere here on Britmodeller by 'Flankerman'. So a new kit would be rather a not necessity, I would rather see an Oberon, Porpoise or WW2 S-class in kit form. There you go! Edited April 2, 2022 by maarten.schonfeld 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Courageous Posted April 2, 2022 Share Posted April 2, 2022 1 hour ago, maarten.schonfeld said: I would rather see an Oberon, Porpoise or WW2 S-class in kit form. I have seen Flankerman's Swiftsure build, so yes, it is a simple conversion but if a kit was available... I have a couple of resin Oberon's (one will be a Porpoise) but I haven't done anything with them as yet. A recent message to Starling Models tells me that the WW2 S-Class is being designed as we speak. Stuart Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maarten.schonfeld Posted April 29, 2022 Share Posted April 29, 2022 I noticed there is also an 1/350 resin Oberon class from our friends down-under, OzMods models. http://www.ozmods-kits.com/ship-kits-1350 Price Aus$ 55 plus postage/customs. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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