Some progress to report on the Liberty ship build. The basic ship has been built (went together easily, good fit on all parts, but the instructions weren't that useful, just a single, large, slightly hard-to-follow diagram). It's also mostly painted (super-fiddly job in 1/700 scale), but all I have to show you is two shots from a distance, plus one shot of what lies ahead...
The thing is, with these 1/700 models, and me with fading eyesight in my 60s, I can barely see where the paintbrush is going sometimes, and I often think I've painted a little detail OK, then when I see how things look through the macro lens on my camera I get quite a shock to see how sloppy the paint job is and how much I have missed first time round.
So here's two shots of the Liberty ship "Hellas Liberty" so far.
I was surprised how many items I ditched from the kit. I didn't expect a Liberty ship to carry so many guns, and I didn't attach these. And the kit also came with many sets of life rafts as well, and these didn't get attached, either. I've turned the rear gun mounting into a small cabin, based on the reference photos shown earlier. I'm a pretty hopeless scratch-builder of anything, but it looks the part if you don't examine it too closely. I might improve on the portholes, add a door at the back, maybe some life saver rings in red...
Apart from many hours of touch-up painting of lots of little details and blemishes, the next phase is to get the harbour diorama started. I have two 1/700 scale kits for buildings, factories and a harbourside crane, so I'm going to have a lot of fun building and painting them, then creating a suitable harbourside stretch of water for everything to be presented on. As the building kits are by Hasegawa and Pit Road, I expect them to be every bit as nice as this Liberty ship kit has been to work with.