Buying the HMS Hood? (Tips)

You can incorporate many of the procedures you use in tank building in ship building.  As for colors you can follow the recomendations in the instructions or you can visit the HMS Hood webpage at http://hmshood.com/,   They have everything you need to know about the Hood through its life time. 

The one rule I follow when building a ship model is build up and then out.  You don't want to be reaching through assemble sections to attach another part if you can avoid it.

Good luck,  Marcus

Exercise a little restraint when weathering ships. Remember, you'll be working in 1/350 scale, where 1 millimetre equals 35 cm (a bit over 13 3/4") in full scale

And she was the pride of the Royal Navy so she was pretty well kept up.

very different approach although the techniques apply, than armor. I know from a little experience that a lack of weathering in armor generates critical remarks. The opposite can be true of ships.

As pointed out above, Hood was the flagship of the Royal Navy--she was kept immaculate. A note on naval gun muzzles--naval rifles are generally not sooty, so the muzzles stay clean. Further, after firing the guns, any muzzle soot would be cleans by the crews reinstalling the tompions (plugs inserted in the muzzles to keep the bores free of seawater, rain, and the like).

Even in hard service (like searching for rogue merchant-raiding battleships) surfaces from the main deck upward are accessible by the crew, who ware generously supplied of needle guns, chipping hammers, wire brushes and the like to keep and maintain the ship's paint. Hood had right at 1400 aboard, so, when not as Battle Stations (RN's version of General Quarters), there were several hundred hands available for paint and maintenance,

Now, a black undercoat for shadowing is probably a great idea given the lighter colors RN used in the North Atlantic.

Feel free to pin wash the red underwater hull, as it will add visual interest. And, painting a ship as large as Hood would be a 3 or 4 day evolution for her bottom paint.

No matter how well kept-up a ship is, there will be some rust. The anchor hawses in particular always seem to "bleed" a nice streak of it. In the North Atlantic you are not really likely to be able to touch it up at sea, either.