woah!!! sheesh! April o9 was my last posting on this.... how precious time flies !!
Aside from unusually fine weather here in the UK, the distractions of business becoming almost all consuming all the time
,( and after work then being just too tired to play...)
the easy option of classic cars and familyin the sunshine ...==> means progress has been somewhat woeful.etc
here endeth my procrastinations
:
High time to post my meagre progress
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I have been working surprisingly hard and long-winded on all the windows,
more precisely vainly trying to make the cast windows look more akin to the real ship.
(The cast windows are , in fairness ..-- all in the right place! )
but many the shapes are most certainly not as per the real ship
and being the Normandie... there are a heck of a lot of windows, garishly black on white showing every slightest error
so the effort to make them look reasonable has been disproportionate , compared to my usual fare of ( easier!) pre-dreadnoughts...
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The hull side windows and portholes on Normandie show a remarkable lack of consistency!
the fwd portholes have no ( in 1/700 !! ) discernible eyebrows
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Normandie 32.jpg [ 2.24 MiB | Viewed 1535 times ]
Lower hull portholes have no discernible eyebrows either
But .... the bottom row
only do have noticeable surround rings !
( when I have finished getting a satisfactory finish on the upper windows.... )
I shall start making porthole rings
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BUT....the windows that have been getting me really exercised ( and depressed ! )
are the 2 x rows in the white sector , below the promenade deck overhang.
On the real ship, the row of 'squashed oval ' windows under the overhang had no eyebrows, the row below did.
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Normandie 004.jpg [ 341.52 KiB | Viewed 1535 times ]
the casting windows looked like this
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window shapes.jpg [ 570.47 KiB | Viewed 1535 times ]
The aft windows in the area below
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normandie stern.jpg [ 442.03 KiB | Viewed 1535 times ]
on the real ship, looking closer show external frames that allowed the port to rotate, as well as some eyebrowless small ovals
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lear_normandie_1936_6.jpg [ 160.94 KiB | Viewed 1535 times ]
on the casting they looked like this ( spacing and position OK but...)
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So as to create a repeatable oval, I shaped up a piece of fuse wire to be able to make oval rings of very fine stainless steel wire
to create a ( fairly!) repeatable oval shape for the opening windows
( The stainless wire does not look that fine in the photos!!!! )
they are of course quite a bit over-scale when viewed 12 times life size...
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I used a Rotring pen
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to be able to black up the apertures controllably, repeated dipping would create an ink- pool that would end up quite oval ..( sometimes !!!)
repeated re-touching up with white paint started unifying the shapes
I have spent many hours paring away both ink and white paint --and am still doing so for many more hours
( however much work left to do! )
The eyebrows are over-scale of course, but I wanted to differentiate between the upper and lower rows of oval windows,
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P1050640.jpg [ 335.54 KiB | Viewed 1535 times ]
The intermittent section of oblong windows in the upper row were cast correctly as oblong on the 3D model--but of course were riven with 3-D steps lines
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window shapes.jpg [ 570.47 KiB | Viewed 1535 times ]
Having sanded these off, the definition of the cast aperture was still not sharp enough to ink in black successfully or satisfactorily ,
jagged edges and a general lack of crispness and sharpness was frustrating. !
==> after much frustration I filled the apertures with white paint within about 0.1 mm and laid into them 1/16 inch x 0.5 mm wide strips of black tape,
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P1050641.jpg [ 792.87 KiB | Viewed 1535 times ]
cutting these SQUARE was not ever so easy...(!!! )
I devised an aid, using a plastic ruler with 1/ 16 demarcations and cut inboard of the black lines with the scalpel blade to give a fair chance at getting them square
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P1240570.jpg [ 642.83 KiB | Viewed 1535 times ]
whilst it not quite perfect alas, at least the edges are crisp
Having viewed the large photos posted above , I am of course rather disappointed with my efforts--and will keep trying improve the sharpness of the edges
in mitigation... in period images the windows look fuzzy too...( hahah... 
)
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ok funny joke..-- but the OVERALL effect is not entirely catastrophic
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P1050642.jpg [ 505.37 KiB | Viewed 1535 times ]
back to the bench , .... with the fine brush, the pen and a scalpel to pare away both!
JIM B
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