I need some 1/700 details...Please help me

jtilley wrote:

Folks, maybe you can't find the particular ship or the particular fitting you want, but give some thought to how lucky you are.  This is a great time to be a ship modeler.

I agree with that. In fact I just do not agree that this is a great time to be a ship modeler, but I think this is a great time period. No matter what your intertest are (and mine are many), you can find information, groups or fourms on the subject.

Thanks to everybody for all the replies. You have really helped me out. I have not started on my Aircraft carrier yet, in fact I just ordered it and it will be here on Tuesday. Besides the deck hands and helicopters I still need to order some stuff to strach build something that I know I can find in scale.

Just so everybody knows what I am doing, I am going to build the USS Lake Champlain when it picked up the Gemini 5 astronouts after splash down. My father-in-law was a corpman on the Lake Champlain during that time, and he meet Cooper and Conrad. That was some of his best times he had in his whole 20 years in the Navy. So I want to build this for him.

Well anyways wish me luck, because I have never scratch builded anything before. But I believe I will not have a problem with it. I have found a picture of the size of the capsule. Oh well thanks again to everybody

A slight variation on the "fattening" theme is to mix acrylic paint (e.g., PolyScale) in with the white glue.  The resulting mixture is considerably stiffer, thus easier to build up.  Remember that as the glue dries it becomes transparent.  A drop of dark blue paint mixed with a drop of Elmer's, for instance, will produce a pale blue, but it will darken as it dries.

I hope a borderline-senile Olde Phogey can be forgiven for offering a general observation about this thread.  I can remember when the products available to the plastic warship modeler consisted of a few dozen kits, on "fit the box" scales, from Revell, Lindberg, Aurora, Airfix, and Renwall.  They only covered the most famous vessels (frequently more than once; every company had to have a Missouri), and skipped many important subjects completely.  (For quite a few decades the only Japanese warship kit available in the U.S. was the Aurora Yamato, which, in terms of scale fidelity, can most gently be described as a joke.)  The aftermarket parts available consisted of some "white metal" (i.e., lead alloy) castings from firms like Marine Models, Boucher, and H&R - all of them on scales far larger than that of any plastic kit - and a spool of thread from the drugstore for rigging.  We consoled ourselves with the observation that if a real ship was far enough away to look like it was on 1/500 scale, we wouldn't be able to see the guardrails anyway, so we didn't really want such things on our models.  So we said. 

Now we have plastic and resin kits on standardized scales, representing virtually all the important warship classes - and some decidedly offbeat prototypes as well.  (I haven't counted, but I suspect the number of 1/700 kits, including those from cottage industries, is over a thousand by now.)  I have a book from the late seventies that describes radar screens as "unmodelable" on 1/700 scale.  Now we can buy 1/700 photo-etched reproductions of almost all the radar screens ever used by major navies.  We have 1/700 watertight doors with retaining clips arranged in different patterns.  And we have websites, where we hold perfectly serious discussions of how best to represent human beings on 1/700 scale.

Folks, maybe you can't find the particular ship or the particular fitting you want, but give some thought to how lucky you are.  This is a great time to be a ship modeler.

I agree with Ed, it does NOT take much white glue on 1/700 sailors. I had better luck using either Elmer's wood glue - it was thicker - or letting regular white glue sit for a few minutes before delicately brushing each figure.

And try White Ensign Models for 1/700 helicopters and aircraft and the tiny PE bits that go with them; good stuff at a reasonable price.

adws_also wrote:

Do I put glue all the way around or just on the side that I will use as the front?

You want htem to get thicker - not wider.   A swipe of white glue fore & aft will deposit enough glue to bulk these fellers up.  

One tenth of an inch in 1:700 scale is 70 inches (i.e. just shy of 6 feet).   One hundredth of an inch  in 1:700 is 7 inches.   How big are you front to back?  If you can triple or quadruple the thickness of the PE with white glue then you are likely in business or be close enough that no one will really care.

ok that sounds good, but just a couple questions. Do I put glue all the way around or just on the side that I will use as the front? And how much glue do I use?

adws_also wrote:

Do the crew look flat? I mean do you have to shape the PE to be round more like the human body, or do you just leave them flat? I am just wondering if being PE parts if they look real or not?

Paint them with some white glue while they are still on the fret - when dry paint with colors.   The white glue bulks them up a bit.  If you just take the shortcut of only color painting them they do look rather flat.

EdGrune wrote:

In 1:700 scale PE is the best you can do.

Do the crew look flat? I mean do you have to shape the PE to be round more like the human body, or do you just leave them flat? I am just wondering if being PE parts if they look real or not?

JAG Collective makes some resin & brass CH-46s in 1:700 scale

Toms Modelworks, Gold Medal Models and White Ensign Models all make PE crew in 1:700 scale.  In 1:700 scale PE is the best you can do.   There are some cast resin in 1:350 scale - but they are 2x too big for your application.

You can order any of these items directly from the manufacturer - no need to go through a supplier middleman (save a buck and more on the agravation scale)