Scratch built parts for WW II ships

where are you located 1st?

This stuff is readily available in Hobby Shops, where I tend to buy it because I usually need to "eyeball" the sizes a little, but this site will give you a good idea of what's available. There are some other suppliers too, but this company is kind of the standard.

As you get into it, you'll realize that the world is full of styrene, and there's no reason you can't make stuff out of a lot of your garbage.

Good luck, have fun.

Northeastern Pennsylvania (Bloomsburg PA.) in the USA

To make things even more complicated, there are resin aftermarket acessories, like the turrets and guns for Iowa class battleships.  Also I believe I have seen in the past some brass gun barrels.

I do not like working with the thin styrene rod- I generally use brass for any part less than 1/16 inch in diameter.  Yeah, you can get fine styrene rod but it is difficult to work with. 

Many kits have masts and yards way too thick when molded in styrene.  Many of us replace these with scratch built versions.  Again, as I say, I prefer brass, but some may use styrene. K&S is the source for the fine brass rod and tubing.  One can taper ends of masts and spars by chucking them in Dremel and touching ends with a fine file.

I am in the midst of scratchbuilding  a 1:80 scale C3 freighter model - essentially a huge version of  Revell's Hawaiian Pilot. I have built several large scale models, and for these I made soldered brass wire railings and stanchions.

However, the C3 is loaded with railings and to try something different I chose to use .040 evergreen rod for the verticals and .030 rod for the horizontal. They are glued up with drops of CA over drawings covered with wax paper and while not perfectly to scale and design are coming out just fine for the level of detail I desire and am capable of achieving with available tools, resources and time. Once added to the model the strengh is adequate but certainly not that of brass .. Soldering thin wire and the necessary cleanup are really tedious, and plastic with glue is just much easier.

Another reason I chose to use plastic rod is that most of the railings on C3 model are white, so I'm dispensing with painting. Priming & painting plastic rod is no problem however 

PS to satisfy my needs I have bought large sheets of styrene at a local supply house in the past - much cheaper than buying evergreen packs. Have not investigated buying rod in bulk  . Also the comment about the world being filled with styrene is true. Dumpster diving has yielded a lot of material to me

Aaron Alpert

For small scale like you are doing, JJ, a good source of rod is a nice quality nylon paint brush. I have one with 3" bristles, cost me about $ 15 but it has provided me with years of little plastic rods for everything from ship rigging to biplane flying wire. It's not all round, and it's at least three sizes, but it provides a nice supply of short little chunks.

And Don is quite correct. A supply of brass wire from K and S in 0.010 and 0.020 is handy. Stay away from steel wire such as "piano wire". It will rust on you, ruining your model, plus it will eat up your tools.

Last little tip- in the smaller scales getting thin enough plastic sheet becomes a problem, as Evergreen etc. don't get thinner than 0,010 I think. And paper really won't do, it's too rough and hard to paint. I discovered clear plastic report covers at the stationers, in fact a session there looking at cheap pens (tubing), covers (sheet) and clips (wire) yields piles of all kinds of goodies.

Thanks for the info Don.  I am going to see what additonal info I can turn up but you and others have given me a good starting ppoint. Thanks again

Thanks for the help. I have used some "guitar" strings that we had lying around and it provided some good material but limited in strength for a vertical mast.

bondoman

Last little tip- in the smaller scales getting thin enough plastic sheet becomes a problem, as Evergreen etc. don't get thinner than 0,010 I think. And paper really won't do, it's too rough and hard to paint. I discovered clear plastic report covers at the stationers, in fact a session there looking at cheap pens (tubing), covers (sheet) and clips (wire) yields piles of all kinds of goodies.

An excellent material, but hard to find, is the old IBM punch card stock.  Even used cards generally still have usable areas on them. It is a very thin card stock and has a plastic coating.  Takes primer and paint very well. If you ever have a chance to pick up any, do so.

I didn't know it was plstic coated. Good idea.

And therein lies a story, please bear with me.

In architecture school, I had one computer graphics course, where we wrote code in basic to generate a three dimensional view of an object that was drawn as a wireframe on a pen plotter. In my case I think it was a car.

So we'd go down to the computer center, wait in line to use a keypunch, put together a card batch, turn in the box of cards to the tech support, and come back the next day to pick up the plot.

Being the modeler that I am, I got the idea that if I were to generate a box of cards with all of the holes punched out, I'd have a lifetime supply of grating material.

So I entered the code and sat back prepared to watch. Basically the machine blew up, the techs came running and I got banned from the computer school.

We had the same computer system at Penn State in the early 70's. After you turned in your cards, the clerk at the service desk would check the clock and calender and let you know when your job would be finished. Toward the end of the quarter that could be several DAYS. My how times have changed. I still remember the sign above the service desk that read "If it worked and there is no fact, extrapolation from fact or other reasonable explanation then it was divine intervention and mankind was not meant to understand the mind of God!"