It’s been a while since I last posted about the HMS Warspite, but that doesn’t mean I’ve not been making progress! Well… it does a little bit. I’ve been busy with other things, and it is Summer after all!
First of all, the hull is pretty much fully sanded and ready for paint! I’ve not photographed it again because it still looks exactly like it did before. Before I paint the hull, though, I plan on drilling out the portholes with a 0.6mm, 0.7mm or 0.8mm drill bit. This step will take some time, but I think it’ll be worth it!
I’ve also begun cleaning up and glueing some of the other bits.
Above you can see one of the almost-finished gun turrets. Obviously the gun barrels aren’t in there yet and they’re not painted, but most of the preparation is done.
Below is one of the far from finished machine guns from the side of the ship. They still need a lot of cleaning up and glueing, and then painting, of course.
Now on to the photoetch kit.
I decided to attempt my first assembly of one of the photoetch parts this evening, and I think i’ve made a bit of a mess of it.
In the image below you can see the grey plastic crane arm which came with the original kit and the photoetch equivalent folded and glued by myself.
As you can see from the image below, I’ve made quite a mess of it! First of all, it’s bent at one end because I accidentally crushed part of it (very easily done with metal this thin and flimsy), it’s warped and bent all the way along it because I kept glueing my fingers and the tweezers to it and having to forcefully remove them, and for two reasons, which I’ll come to in a second, a lot of the gaps in the structure are filled in with glue!
So, there are two reasons the gaps are filled with glue… first of all, picking up tiny blobs of superglue on the end of a toothpick and then getting rid of most of it before applying it to the model is actually very difficult. You always get too much glue and if you try to wipe it off, you lose too much of it. Secondly, applying glue to only the edges of the metal and hoping they will stick is pointless – glueing such a small surface area simply doesnt work. You need a small bead of glue running along the inside edge of the structure, but given that this entire structure is only about 4mm wide and 30mm long, that’s almost impossible to achieve!
The only other thing is that part of me things the photoetch actually looks slightly out of place… the crane “body” is that grey plastic triangular part with the “stick” sticking out of it, which can be seen in the first photo of the crane arm above. If you remove the plastic crane arm from it and attach the photoetch crane arm instead, I think it might actually look so fragile compared to the thick, sturdy plastic crane body that i’d be better off with the plastic crane arm!
I’m still undecided on that though… maybe with more photoetch parts they’ll start to fit in more… who knows!
