I have not yet been called home. I’ll be going to St. Paul in mid-April and USS Oregon will come with me and it will be the first project there. I’ll bring Varyag just in case of mishap.
Anyone note the ad for an “Encore Models” rendition of Olympia? Ancient Revell plastic with PE, wooden decks, metal barrels - and all for only 90$. Last year a couple of shops had the old version on back order but no idea when it would be in. Wonder if this group got exclusive rights to the kit. Pacific Coast Models sells mostly Italian aircraft and I think that’s their strategy. They buy the plastic in Eastern Europe and throw in all kinds of after market stuff.
Ya’ll guys need to get back into the dry-docks and get to work on these mutha’s…I’m assembling a fleet of Chinese Heavy Cruisers just in case I can to impose a quarantine on your houses until these sucka’s get done…
Going to take a crack at the 1/225 Glencoe Oregon starting tonight. I’ve looked at a lot of models of the kit online and while some are wonderfully done they all look like white bathtubs. I want a gray battleship coming home from battle like this one: Oregon returning from Cuba after the ceasefire:
I’ve never done a dio so that means I’m going to have to cut the hull in two, reinforce it with sprue and give it a styrene bottom. How I’m going to do this, I’m not quite sure. You may see a Varyag or a Chinese BB instead if there’s a catastrophe.
If I could buy a real one, I’d sacrifice a chicken to Apollo or someone because I really don’t know how this is going to work out. Plastic is pretty thick and so’s my head. May even give a dremel a try. You may see Varyag yet. Although one thing is very evident. There’s only one mast on Oregon - even the real ship junkies give her very little rigging. So if I don’t cut my hand off or I don’t wreck the ship, this might be fun.
me too between finishing up shelf queens for a group build AND to get more practice plus doing stuff for contests i haven’t done anything with my chinese ships. the alanger POTEMKIN is coming along slowly. i think i cleaned up the BORODINO launches well enough they won’t look bad painted dark gray. using dark gray instead of black.
Eric, just get a keyhole saw, razor saw or a pair of diagonal wire cutters and chop off the hull. Then sand back to the paint line I explained. I have only built a couple of water line models that got mounted to a display, but I like acrylic gel the best, followed by plaster. Problem with plaster is that the display only lasts a couple of moves around.
My big hold up on the Ching Yuen battleship is that there are way too many parts, and painting half of them yellow is challenging because they need to be sprayed etc. However I have a plan which is to drill a pin into the bottom of each, stick to a foam panel, and…
Wayne, I build black ships with any of the old Polly Scale railroad (Floquil) colors like Engine Black or Steam Power Black. Any and all attempts to do a true dark gray fall way too light IMO.
Those ships were black, and if they don’t model photo so well, oh well.
Appears that coal burners do live. Knock on wood, but I spent the entire night splitting Oregon’s hull (for which it is not designed) and I think it worked. If so we’re going to have a 1/225 scale Tamiya style “waterline” battleship. In real life it was less than 400’ long so it’s not huge. But bigger than a 700 scale dd, yes.
Perhaps the quandry wasn’t clear. I have never done a dio and haven’t the slightest idea how to proceed and I’m not sure this is the time to try it. (I may change my mind if war is a stern teacher.) I split the hull with a scalpel, a razor blade, a #11 Xacto and a razor saw. It took about three hours plus. Not needed by the wise, but I wasn’t sure anything would work so I wanted to keep to the split as narrow as possible in case I had to return to bathtub mode. Tools below:
If fortune smiles the split worked (I think it did) and we’ll use some styrene to repair the hull and end up with a waterline Oregon. I’ve found a thread that has a bunch of little scratch improvements and I’ll follow them. If the structure works, as I have made it, even with Tom’s PE this is a simple model because there’s so little rigging. I figure if I do a battleship I must suffer. Will try. Just don’t expect to see any waves.
Small progress report. To summarize the artistic challenge that I am facing with limited skills I have a kit that wants to look like this (except in the view of most modelers white):
But I want it to look like this:
I’ve never made a dio, so all I want to do is cut the hull in half and get the deck to fit. (I think I’ve got my hands full with a battleship and a bad dio would cripple the model. So I want is a very large version of a 1/770 scale Tamiya or Fujimi waterline warship.) Here is the first stage:
Because ships are modular you pretty need to have your colors down from the beginning. I want this ship to wear warpaint appropriate for the (at the time) epic battle of Santiago. Nobody is really sure what this color is. Someone on ship modeler refers to a color that would look like RLM02 - a dark greenish gray. Another wants something closer to RLM75 - gray violet. WEM has a color for these ships they call “Slate” and here’s a sample:
Better than no help but is this adjusted for scale? I’ve only got one photo and from past experience (especially with the early Zero) I know that grays can drive you bats. What everyone agrees on is that the color we’re looking for is not the pre-wwii neutral gray. So do we want a neutral gray simply shaded (I doubt this) or are we looking for a dark gray with a tint of blue or green? This is big ship. It’s very close in size to the ICM 1/350 Konig I did last fall. At that size, getting more or less the right color is pretty important. (I’m not worried about the deck: it’s some kind of buff and there will be at least three varieties.) So I’m going to have to work around the smaller stuff or maybe do as much deck as possible until I get a bottle of WEM Slate that I ordered yesterday. So it will join my WEM Navy Blue and Deck Blue as color samples. Outside of washes and some drybrushing, I haven’t worked with enamel paints seriously for fifty years and don’t plan to start.(Personal preference only - if I had a really well ventilated room and spray box I might sing a different tune. Enamels certainly leave a splendid finish.)
One thing I was able to do was reinforce the remaining hull with sprue (I cut off 60% easy) and put on a styrene bottom. Then I gave the beast a pre-shade painting the hull carbon black and the deck a dark reddish brown. So this is where we are now:
Considering the small number of parts involved, progress has been slow. I also don’t have anything to do for a few weeks. That hurts modeling. I find myself reading, socializing and watching movies. My wife will be back in town soon and then modeling becomes a productive activity. Anyway, forward toward Manifest Destiny.
The Oregon was built at the Union Iron Works in San Francisco.
She was also shopped there before sailing to the Atlantic in 1898.
Here’s one of the earliest motion pictures ever, of workers leaving the “Union Iron Works. Here was built the peerless US battleship Oregon” in 1898, by Edison Pictures.
Funny you should bring this up. The real world intruded in the most impolite way and created terrible problems for my modeling. (Among other things my wife was hit in a crosswalk by a truck. No real harm done, but it’s been that kind of summer. I also got talked into writing something big for free - that’s almost worse.) Anyway, we’re back in CA, I have two classes up and running, and have Oregon sitting on the table ready to be re-engaged after a three month lay-off. Below are three photos that show the progress made on the hull. I spent a lot of time getting the right slate gray and because Oregon was beat-up properly before even arriving at Santiago, I gave it a proper salt-weathering. There was also a lot of scratch work involved which I mostly finished. I seriously intend on returning to PE tomorrow. Actually several components are in some state of repair, and hopefully I’ll have something looking more like a ship in not too long. Below is what I have so far.
(Not sure what I did wrong: pics are on next post.)
