Uh Oh! The old man is on about something Again

General Discussion General Modeling Discussion
1

Hi There!

I will make this as upbeat as I can. It concerns, what to some is their downfall. What might that be? Well, it’s P.E. You can get P.E. for just about anything. And yes, Metal Earth Models is just another version of it!

My problem stems from probably what I prefer to build. Mainly Civilian ships. As you all know I do have Many of the well known military and civilian ships made in Paper( Card) in my collection. Now, here’s where my complaint comes in.

When you build a Card Model ship you almost have nothing in P.E. to finish it out! This is aggravating. Try and buy 1/200 generic P.E. ladders( Stairs) and Rails for Civilian vessels! One company lists them and when you get them, they are 1/192. What’s with that? Why not just make the 1/200 sets and get it over with?

There is a larger market for Card model Ships than you think. And many of the vessels would be show stoppers with the right size P.E. to put on them. Sure I can, or could get Generic Civilian stuff from time to time. But it’s always been sort of a Witch Hunt for the stuff.

Now many Card ships are 1/250, some are 1/400 or somewhere in between. I don’t advocate making every size that ships of a non fighting nature come in. But a couple of nice complete sets with the right set of Stairs and Rails would be nice!

Many Civilian ships( Especially Passenger Ships) have higher than normal Deckhouses. Why? To create the illusion of Richness and Granduer. “My Gosh would you look at those high ceilings in the public places on board?” “Impressive.” Well, on the outside this translates to longer, wider Stairs in the passenger area. No such luck. I’ve tried them all. Gold Medal, Trumpeter, Toms, even some Chinese company I cannot pronounce! and the list goes on. The laser etched Stairs and Ladders and Rails you can get from some providers just don’t cut the mustard for accuracy or realism.

My gripe is that there seems to be a wallet Block with these companies when making 1/200 scale stuff. If it ain’t warships it ain’t important enough to bother with.

C’mon guys, lets see some nice generic stuff for civilian in 1/350, 1/400 ,1/700 and 1/250. Oh, and don’t forget 1/200 Okay? You only need to do one or two limited sets to find out you will have a market that you’ve missed out on it all this time.

2

Well I’m not inclined to do your research old man, but you know that 1/200 is a metric scale. Try finding a PE maker in a metric country. We tend to stick with the same sources, those we see that cater to our insane measuring system.

Bill

3

With your background in paper models, you’ve probably come across these before, but Bill’s right…you generally need to go European for that stuff.

Great place to start is the Polish firm GPM: lots of p/e in popular paper-ship scales!

https://sklep.gpm.pl/en/accessories/photo-etched/equipment

‘Relinge’ are railings (includes ladders and gangways):

https://sklep.gpm.pl/en/accessories/relinge/photo-etched

They also carry stuff in laser-cut card.

4

I looked at Megahobby. They have lots of stuff for the big Titanic model, plus things from Eduard, White Ensign and others.

Tom’s sells a 1/200 railing set for Yamato. They are very simple two bar rails.

Bill

5

Yeah, remember, there are only two kinds of countries in the world, those who use the metric system and those who have put a man on the moon!!

6

Hey: Phbbbbt!

Taint my fault I got fed up with war stuff and Titanics. War stuff.The time in Nam certainly helped in that! I didn’t know about some sites someone mentioned so I will check it out.1/200? I didn’t think about Metric versus SAE. Still wish an American site would do them. My 1/96 stuff from Providers here is so Killer!

7

good one. I have to remember that.

8

Re Photo etch for ship models, there is a company named Aber who make ships railings etc in 1/400th scale.

Yoo Yah Deep Sea, I admire your patriotism, but the ‘metric’ countries you appear to dismiss invented television (look up Logie Baird), DVD and CD (look up Philips), computers (look up Professor Turin), invented the World Wide Web and cracked DNA sequencing at Cambridge (England not Harvard), the jet engine (look up Frank Whittle), steel (look up Bessemer Converter), penicillin (look up Alexander Fleming), the electric inventions of Faraday, the marine chronometer (look up Harrison), the motor car (look up Daimler Benz), radar (look up Marconi), the steam engine (look up George Watt), the telescope (look up Galileo) even the telephone by a Scotsman living in America (look up Alexander Graham Bell). To top all this includes the language you are using, English!

Incidentally, putting a man on the moon would have drawn upon the building blocks developed from many of the above discoveries.

9

There is some generic PE- railings and stuff, for 192 scale (architecture scale). That is close enough to use on 1:200. There is even some 1:96 for small craft.

The big thing I want is more PE sailing ship rigging- shrouds and ratlines. There is at least one company doing a few sets, but not enough for all the smaller sailing ships in my stash. I do hand rig the larger 1:96 and 1:72 and such, but for the 1:200 , 1:400 and 1:600 ships, they are so tiny that PE stuff is the only practical way to go. I forget who made the PE for the recent mid-scale HMS Victory, but that sure made the model look great. I don’t mind hand doing the running rigging, but no way I will tie that many ratlines!

10

Myamar & Liberia have put a man on the Moon? [:O]

11

Hello Don

I think that it may be ScaleWarship, a UK company that does a set of Photo Etched Shrouds and Ratlines for the Airfix Victory plus hammock netting etc if that is the kit you are thinking of. They also make ratlines and shrouds for the Revell Vasa and the Imai Cutty Sark, and on top of this a set of photo etched shrouds, ratlines and decking for the tiny Airfix Mary Rose kit.

12

Hate to burst your bubble, but much/most of the engineering for the Apollo program was actually metric.

The readouts and communication were in feet/inches/miles because the astronauts – ex-aviation test pilots – had spent their careers with that standard, which is still used throughout international aviation to this day.

They had enough to worry about without having to learn a whole new system of references.

13

That’s really interesting Greg. Over here in the UK we converted to metric in the early 70’s a few years after the moon landing in 1969, so I naturally thought that the engineering of the Apollo Spacecraft would have been in Imperial rather than Metric. In the early Metrication days most of the engineering drawings I worked to were simply converted from the Imperial, that is until new product designs enabled the Metric system to be utilised properly.

You live and learn something new every day.

It would be very interesting to know why Metric was chosen at the time in the 60’s on the Apollo, so perhaps some ex NASA person would be able to enlighten us.

I got used to metric quite quickly, having been brought up on feet and inches, but the funny thing is old habits die hard. I still visualise 10 or 12 feet better than the metric equivalent, even after all these years!

14

Unless you’re Russian.

15

I certainly don’t qualify as ex-NASA, but it occurs to me to wonder whether it might have someting to do with the numbers of European scientists in our space program from its earliest days. Kind of like the Manhattan Project during the war, where much of the monitoring and instrumentation was at least ‘doubled’ in metric, since so many of contributors came from that background.

Purely as an aside, my father – who went to school on the GI Bill after the war, and became an electrical engineer – said they learned to work in the metric system at the U. of Michigan in the late '40s. He specialized in sports stadium and industrial lighting through much of his career, and said he used one system as much as the other, since a lot of the work involved dealing with non-US clients and suppliers.

Same here, on both counts. Maybe the old man’s influence rubbed off on me, but I’ve always used metric for all my modeling work…just so much more simple and precise using mm instead of 16ths and 32nds…but I also ‘visualize’ in feet!

(I did, however, long ago commit to memory that a km is almost exactly 5/8 of a mile. Comes in very handy, that one.)

Cheers

16

Ahh my dear old mate, Brian. Here was me thinking it was a NAZI scientist and his band of merry men that the U.S. bought in illegally, who put the rocket together that went to the moon. Also you didn’t invent the Spitfire, or penacilin, but you do have a great actress that married into the Royal family…

17

As a cook, recipes can be fun.

“7/8 cup of cheese”?

Why,asks my boss.

“That’s 150 grams”, a sensible message.

18

Greg, funny thing that your Km to miles conversion reminded me of is that although the UK has gone metric since the early 70’s all our road signs are still in miles. Reckon it must have been on cost grounds to convert every road sign in the country that it was left well alone probably.

re the Apollo. Must admit, never thought of Von Braun and his band of German rocket scientists who of course would have been brought up using metric.

Dodgy, we do indeed have an actress married into the Royal family. Apart from a TV drama, ‘Suits’, what else is she known for beforehand? ? Whether she is a great actress is questionable, but certainly not a Hollywood A lister.

19

Now if you are an old computer it’s easier to calculate 7,62mm instead of 1/3 inch, not to mention 5’ 5 3/4’'…

I know it’s natural if you done this all your life long…

But it’s not only about the distance measurements - the whole SI system (m, kg, s and then V, A, W, J, K, Pa and so on) is so beautifully consistent!

Good luck with your measurements and have a nice day

Paweł

20

Hey Don;

I cannot fault your logic, only to say 1/192 IS NOT decent looking on these ships. The ladders are to short for one. And the longest ones just barely cut the mustard.Their angle in so wrong~Well, I won’t go on, anyway, I figured out something else that works.