Conversion Airfix 1/600 HMS Warspite to HMS Queen Elizabeth 1941 ish

[Shockwave Rider]

OK folks, I'm going to compress about two months, on and off, blood, sweat and tears into one photo.

 

 

One nice aspect of scratch building is if you screw up a part, you simply redo it without too much trauma. The caveat is only if you haven't put too much effort into a complex part nearing completion.

 

The basic reason why I had so many attempts at getting this piece correct is lack of experience. As I tackled shield again and again and again, and eyed the rubbish bin as a permanent home for the kit, I got to understand the material and how to manipulate it.  Filler was used to build up bits, shape bits, hold bits together, etc.  I also stuck small, ultra thin pieces of plastic card to various parts of the shields in a desperate attempt to get roughly the correct shape.  Inexperience saw me sanding too much off the height of the shields, forcing me to build them up again. I even contemplated starting this bit from scratch again.

 

Anyway, I stuck with it and ploughed on, when I had something that looked about right, if you didn't examine it too closely.

 

Moving on. With the outboard shields up and angled correctly ( 🙂 ), it was time to add the inner walls. I started with the starboard, attempting to glue into place a single piece of card that I had folded. After applying cement and beginning to position the thing, it only went and broke at the fold.

 

Had I been an experienced scratch builder, I would have chucked the part and started again. As it was, I persevered, and fought with the part to get it into place.  The result was a messy join, that curved and leaned, requiring a lot of clean up work.

 

 

What I should have done is what I then did with the port side. First, start with the little bit.

 

 

Then glue in the big bit.

 

Now it was a relatively simple task to add the remaining parts of the shield

 

There then followed yet more sanding, shaping, building up, sanding down, bending of parts, wailing and gnashing of teeth, more filler, etc until I got fed up. No more, life's too short. I fetched up with this.

 

 

There's still a bit of clean up, which will be very easy to do.

 

 

It's no where near perfect, but you know what? It'll do.

 

Now on to fitting the thing to the hanger.  This was a little tricky. The hanger had to be persuaded (i.e. forced) to sit correctly on the deck. The aft section (i.e. hanger doors bit) were bent inwards by about 1mm from the deck's edge. It was simplicity to add some shimmies to the deck to hold the piece in place. Here is a dry fit of the hanger to the deck, with the forward deck to make sure everything fitted correctly.

 

 

The eagle eyed amongst you may notice that I have moved the small bridge connecting these two parts onto the forward structure. I originally had it on the hanger structure. I did this change as the forward structure was a known position, it had inbuilt guides (shimmies) on the deck to correctly locate it. The hanger superstructure had vague positioning due to my vague scratch building skills.

 

I could now glue the pompom deck to the hanger, and then drop the whole lot onto the deck to make sure it all fitted correctly i.e. I could manipulate the pompom deck whilst the cement was still wet to make sure the whole lot fitted.

 

 

 

 

This whole assembly is not stuck to the deck.  I still need to do work on the hull, which will require a lot of rough handling. I ain't about to risk breaking this assembly by gluing it into place.