Building my (first) ship model is hard work. Here is a bit of progress..
Gentlemen ...start your photoetch...
A sample of the folding required for the 8 barrel Pom Poms (White Ensign Models). Off to the right are some catwalks and carley float racks. I soldered these as they were going to need to be strong given the load bearing weight of styrene floats.
Folding in action. Really tricky to get the two(2) four barrel gun unit tabs to fit into tiny slots on one side and then to fold down the other side and hope the slots aligned with the tabs. Each Pom Pom took me 45-60 minutes to slice from the fret, deburr, fold, and glue with some coming out better than others. There were six(6) in all.
And here it all is, awaiting to be primed. There are four (4) ammo boxes per Pom Pom (hence 24 in all) and each had two ammo belts so 48 ammo belts had to be folded and then attached without any positive attachment points. Another couple of evenings of my life lost.
And here is the main mast in the right hand side of the photo. Sheesh - this was one of the hardest things I've ever done with my hands. It was always a struggle to decide whether to build up a subassembly off the mast and then attach, worrying that I'd mash it during the mating operation or to add the bits onto the mast as I went. End result was a combination of the two approaches with mixed results. Not everything got aligned as I would have liked.
In the left hand side of the picture, I glued some ledges for the catwalk. No such actual ledges on the real ship but you won't be able to see them once the catwalk is glued on after painting. You also see a template I made to drill out holes for the ?? funnel guys ??. Why I didn't do this before I glued in the funnel to the superstructure I do not know. #74 bit.
And here are the next steps in the whatever-the-hell-they-are. (1) insert 0.015" styrene rod and then clip off and (2) lay down the thinnest stretched sprue I could make in hopefully vertical lines. Not every piece of stretched sprue is the same length - I'm just waiting for the glue to dry before using a super sharp knife to cut them along the line I drew.
I would have used 0.006" steel wire except I couldn't figure out a way to uniformly cut the wire to equivalent lengths using my Xuron wire cutter. What I needed was something like Chopper for steel wire but didn't have anything that would work on 0.006" wire. How do you guys manage to cut wire to unifrom lengths? What kind of jig/cutter do you use?
Lastly, a bit of rigging as I knew this would be next to impossible once the superstructure was glued onto the deck. I managed to knock off one of the yardarms while doing this. The kit didn't include any attachment points or rigging diagram (big surprise) and Hatton's book on Victorious is a little vague in this matter. So, I scratch built a small flag box with four holes to run the fishing line (thread) through after tieing small knots in the yardarm. The picture shows the rigging before it has been tightened and glued (and for gluing, I'm following David Griffith's book suggestion to use Mucilage - a substance that can't be purchased in the US as it was discontinued sometime back in the Clinton era (?) so I ordered it from Canada (and am still waiting).
Not shown is my current endeavor - Six (6) Pom Pom directors - from Northstar Models. These are 1/350th so a bit out of scale but are pretty detailed. I've done one (1) and it took 90 minutes working with incredibly small resin and PE. Illustrious had Mk III directors but Northstar only had Mk I, Mk II and Mk IV so I chose the Mk II.