Dollhouses

Dismayed by the thought of making a couple of hundred rigols, I switched attention for a few weeks to the business of the exposed interior spaces. You can search high and low for photos of the hull openings on both port and starboard sides where the ship’s boats were stowed, the ship’s refuse was dumped, and where the air vents into the hangar deck were placed.  You’ll find nothing as these spaces were in shadows to the camera and from the distance and angle of the camera, no detail emerges.

The Heller kit is completely silent on this topic, presenting the modeller with slab sided open boxes.  Fortunately, I had two resources – the Hatton book of HMS Victorious plans and photos from the HMS Indomitable builder’s model.  Hatton has scale 1/250 and in some cases, 1/100 drawings (mostly plan views, a few profiles) of these compartments.

Boy, were they filled with detail, most of which was unavailable in photo etch or resin in 1/400 scale.  So, I set about scratch building winches, lockers, boat launching rails, and other geegaws.  I ordered a bunch of 1/350 and 1/700 accessories (vents, bollards, fairleads, life rafts) from various after-market suppliers. Some of these I shaved down to 1/400 scale; others I left as is.  But mostly, I ordered a lot of strip and rod styrene in every dimension from 0.01″ to 0.250″ strips and 0.01″ to 0.08″ diameter.

Using the plans from Hatton, I scaled down the 1/250 measurements to 1/400, marked the styrene, and cut with the chopper.  Somewhere along the way, while looking for images of winches, I discovered this website On the Slipway, by Evert-Jan Foeth. He documented an incredible build of HMS Hood in 1/350.  I want to quote from his ‘about me’ page:

As you might have noticed, actually finishing the model isn’t that important; I enjoy finding drawings, images and information needed to build all the components of the model. I then need to find out how to actually make all these small parts by learning new construction techniques. I enjoy building parts that are more detailed and precise than most smaller-scale models and I can easily spend more time on a small gun, launch or rangefinder than some people spend on an entire model. The amount of time spent on the model increases drastically, so as a result the entire ship model is slowly going nowhere.

As I read his fabrication endeavors for just the Carley Floats, I sighed that my efforts at mere styrene were like a middle school production of Hamlet up against the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican.

One of the extra challenges was that the kit’s compartments, while they scaled out OK length-wise, they were not deep enough per Hatton.. So in many cases, I had to slice off the back and extend the depth of the box.  What a pain.

Here are some photos of the results. I opted to glue most of the adornments directly into the compartments and deal with the painting issues later (instead of trying to paint individual items and probably losing a few to the blast of the airbrush). The way I figured it, there would be no way to see if the back side of a bollard was painted once the model was assembled as the compartments are just too small to peer into (of course if one had a tiny mirror on a stick….)

Floats, raft, catamaran

Refuse chute, work space, paravane mounts, hawsers, vents, ladders

Paravanes (from L’Arsenal – 1/350)

Winches and completed compartments

More completed compartments, lots of quarterdeck miscellany

I have the cable deck parts also done but this will be the subject of a different post.  Any one 1/400 facsimile is flawed in some way but the sheer number of elements creates a sense of busyness that does a good job overall to the eye.

In some future life, I will get rich making 3D printer versions of 1/400 winches, lifebuoys, bollards, paravanes, etc to that vast market of Heller 1/400 Illustrious modellers – no doubt just as some other kit maker comes out with a superbly detailed 1/350 version thus depriving me of the $50 or so of sales.

UPDATE 2015-06-26

And, sure enough, long after I emplaced the compartments, NorthStar Models has some very nice 1/350 anchors and winches. You can use the anchors on the quarterdeck and the winches all over the place. Too late for me.