- Member since
March 2003
- From: Jacksonville, NC
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My first ship...or what I did over my summer, that bled into fall, and carried into winter
Posted by Wolfp
on Tuesday, February 11, 2014 1:38 PM
Greetings All,
I wanted to share my latest completed project, the 1/350 Trumpeter Graf Spee. I will tell you up front that I am no ship builder, I probably found every inefficient means of construction, and made potentially every rookie mistake in the book. Learning has occurred. I didn't do a whole lot of research on the subject as this project was more of an exercise in best practices for building techniques to be applied on future builds. Needless to say, there was a lot of grunting, groaning, cursing, a near aneurism, and I think an MI at one point. It, however, is done.
The model is from trumpeter, I used a combination of pe from Tom's Model Works and Eduard, the rigging is ez-line, and I created the base myself. The project began in July and was completed in January. Couple of things, I am not too hip on the railings from eduard, I don't think they are brass. It was interesting that they cut the railing so the bends could be made easier around corners. The drawback was they had a tendency to come apart and had to be repaired or replaced. I didn't have any issues with the other pieces from the eduard set. My rigging techniques improved from fore to aft. You'll see where the forward rigging seems to be wrapped unnecessarily around support structure. That's because its wrapped unnecessarily around support structure...heh. It was later in the rigging process that I found the true utility of zip kicker. There are some other basic mistakes as well, very basic. For example, where the two deck halves are joined is a gap...not sure why I didn't notice it, but I didn't until it was too late to correct. oh well, I have learned my lesson. I am not sure why it didn't dawn on me to put pe hatches and window hatches on before building a sub structure. Life would have been so much easier had I done so. Also, I tried pvc glue for my pe, it didn't work. hats off to you guys who can get it to work. I went with superglue across the board. I don't think temps in my house will vary so much as to cause an issue. The one approach I did take, that I believe worked out fantastically, was to think of each sub-section as a separate model kit to be completed as much as possible before pairing with other parts for construction. There is a flag, it is currently on the bench. My first attempts at hanging these failed miserably. I had to go back and address the flag issue by applying it to a piece of foil first and then forming and hanging it. I am not sure why trumpeter decided to use decals for these...much like I cant figure out why clear plastic for the spotter plane (figured out real quick putting together a clear plastic plane is nigh impossible; the parts definitely needs to be primed first). Anyway, here are the pics. Feedback is very welcome.
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