Carrier Builders Yard, whats on the Slipway

[Pieter]

"Winter" has arrived in NL. Canadian and Russian members of this board are kindly asked to start rolling on the floor laughing but it does mean my bulk carrier project has stalled as I prime my parts in an unheated space. Tamiya primer is unhappy below 5 degrees centigrade. So back to HMS Glory. When I left here I had just ordered some new decals. They have been applied to the airgroup. I found that I could not make the stripe decals stick to both sides of the wings of my seafuries so on the folded planes I just did the outsides. They do look reasonable now.

The fireflies took some more work. I had to figure out how the wings fold first, decal them and place them on an angle to both the fuselage and the wings. But I'm getting there.

And I am starting the deck layout and glueing down planes.
As I will be rigging the island later this week, does anyone know what signals she would be flying when landing on planes in the early 50s?

[Pieter]

And I used many more decals this week. I will have to resort to superglue in order to convince the decals on my landing Seafury to stay in place but otherwise the airgroup is finished. I have placed them into what I think is a convincing deckpark.

And this is the scene I am trying to set up. Imagine you're a pilot just coming out of your last turn. The previous aircraft is just passing the barriers so they can be raised again, the sun is setting off the port side of the carrier and all you are really focussed on is this guy signalling to you from the batsmans' platform. You think you may be a bit high on the approach...

[Mark McKinnis]

Nice job Pieter!

[Pieter]

Thanks Mark.
It'is time to add the crew. I started by populating the island.

Realized the ship also needs signal men....

And moved backwards to the batsman and his supporters. The figure on the left is the camera guy who made the color footage of HMS Glory, which is a major reference for this build. Its interesting that there is better color footage available online of HMS Glory during the Korean war than of HMS Hermes at the Falklands. I'm still still trying to figure out how to make a batsman's bats in 1/700 though.

This phase of the build is very easy compared to what it used to be. 8 years ago I spent hours and hours adding superglue + baking powder to some flat pieces of PE in order to populate my Victorious.

Now i just add paint to a pre-primed print from Shelf Oddity and put them on the deck. I did 30 figures in 30 minutes yesterday.

[Pieter]

Just a small update after a busy working week.
The carpet monster has taken the type 281 radar at the main mast. This is an extremely fiddly radar so I was not that happy. It did gave me an opportunity to finally test the new Tom's Modelworks set for the Colossus class carriers (all the photo etch on the project so far was from the L'Arsenal kit) and I was not disappointed. It is still hard work but the result looks nice and it has a logical folding sequence, unlike for example the Flyhawk version which I used on my Cleopatra.

I also folded and painted a Flyhawk forklift and I finally added my little Clarkat tractors which I built about a year ago.

clarkatscolor1.JPG (42.78 KiB) Viewed 3376 times

clarkatscolor2.JPG (32.39 KiB) Viewed 3376 times

[Pieter]

Some things happened over the past few days. I was running on the home stretch and as a last thing before spraying a matt varnish cote I attached the rigging.

I took the model out on the balcony for spraying matt varnish and as I was taking in the model gravity took over and changed the project a bit.

So back to the workbench it is.
Rebuilding the mast and rigging using white glue will be part of the work and I am quite happy that I had already primed one of the new PE sets by Tom's so I can replace some of the small antennae and radars.

And then there is the airgroup. The Seafuries were heavily damaged, all of them except one losing landing gear and folded wings. The Fireflies though, who fought me all the way while I was building them, turned out to be very resilient. I think I may have to give up on one or two seafuries but all of the fireflies survived the fall and will be back on board once the other repairs have finished.

[Neptune]

(so this is where you are hiding out)

Sad news, but I'm sure the repair will come out equally nice as the original

[Pieter]

Well, you lot have closed the borders so I'll have to hide somewhere�
The repair is moving along at about an hour a day . I am also taking the opportunity to enhance the seafury cockpits with Kristal Klear (no folded wings in the way this time) and rebuilding the batsman with orange-red paddles.

(so this is where you are hiding out)

Sad news, but I'm sure the repair will come out equally nice as the original

[Neptune]

"my lot" has always wanted to do that, Covid just gave us an excuse

On a more serious note, I'm working more in "your" country than in mine and never had issues to cross the borders up till now. You do have to travel with a pile of documents for your authorities and mine .

Good to see my government (well, one of my governments ) at least gave you some time to work on this splendid model, then they did at least something good.

[MartinJQuinn]

I took the model out on the balcony for spraying matt varnish and as I was taking in the model gravity took over and changed the project a bit.

That sucks, but looks like you're on the road to recovery.

[Pieter]

Thanks Martin and Roel. The 'disaster' last tuesday has a litttle silver lining. When I started the built I lost the all important part C88 which set the tripod mast in place and keeps it at the right angle. Last year I bought another Colossus with an eye to building it as either Vikrant or Bonaventure (same deck and elevators).

As both ships had lattice masts I could use the C88 from the new kit and wriggle it into place. Now the only thng left to do on the island is rigging and rebuild the radars. I'm working 'inside-out' this time so rigging the mast is happening first.

[Pieter]

The rebuild continues.
I have re-rigged the island and restored the radars. Some new crew members have been added too and the island now has the ladder from the bridge to the flight deck which can be seen in most pictures of HMS Glory.

As I would like the airgroup to stay on board this time I have drilled holes in the tails where the tailwheel should be and put some .2mm wire in. When painted they look like a tailwheel in '700.

And by simply drilling a hole in the flight deck the can be pushed in using a drop of white glue.

As everything is in matt finish now I could finally get out the Kristal Klear and blister pack plastic in order to glaze the cockpits and fit some folded plastic over the open canopies. Doing the cockpits is the litle ritual that means I have finished another carrier. Will try and take some more picture for the finished projects section tomorrow.

[gtbred]

lot of work on that build for sure.

[Pieter]

But worth the effort I think. I do know that if I'm ever doing my Fujimi Eagle she will not be having suez stripes for her airgroup.

lot of work on that build for sure.

[roym]

Hi all, if anyone is interested I've scratched some corrections to the Italeri CVN-76 and 77 kits, mostly the islands. I can't post photos here but here's a link to my Scalemates album.

https://www.scalemates.com/profiles/mat ... lbum=78723

[Pieter]

Nice work.

[Strategos Augustus]

[Pieter]

So as John is no longer with us I will share pictures of my current carrier project and hope others will do so too. Mine is a long lasting effort to build Atlantics' HMS Ark Royal up to the standard of my HMS Glory. I am currently waiting for my new 'yellow gear' and crash crane to arrive from the UK but I took the ship out of its box for some pictures today and have been documenting my progess every once in a while. The kit is a very nice starting point but once one is adding things it gets out of hand quite quickly.
The catwalks on the hull have no detail whatsoever so this was the first area to be tackled.

Then the island needed the same treatment. Flyco was fully rebuild and the bridge has open windows, the rest looks good.
Will start adding the PE masts and radars once all of this had been painted.

And I did the painting, dealing and weathering of the flight deck in one session. As I am thinking of doing another landing scene most effort was spent on the port side. As a number of reviewers have alreading pointed out you need two decal sets to get the catapults right.

A start was made with the excellent PE set.

And I did a little work on the airgroup. The Intruder will be a visitor from USS Forrestal.

[gtbred]

Have something next week.

[pascalemod]

Beautiful work Martin!

Mark

Thanks Mark!

Hornet_122020b.jpg

Hornet_122020c.jpg

So this is perfect Hornet paint job. Any tips on how you achieved this exact color match to the photos Ive seen? truly wonderful. Very rare I see a ship and go "spot on" for the color but here it is just really execellent.