Re: [GZG-OLC] February Update

Oerjan Ohlson wrote:

>
> Same way as Schoon did the FSE Requin, Jon did the new FT ranges and 
> Tony Francis at Brigade Models does the various SemFed ships: by 
> glueing styrene bits of appropriate shapes together, making sure that 
> there are no cavities inside the model ('cuz if there are, it'll cave 
> in during the mould-making). Railway modelling shops have a lot of 
> styrene strips, tubes etc. in all kinds of interesting shapes which 
> provides nice raw materials, and so do plastic sprues from model kits 
> (eg. the Hydra hull structure was built from parts of a GW plastic 
> sprue). A sharp knife, razor saw and mitre, and a file or sanding 
> paper did the rest of the shaping.
>
> Sounds easy? It really is! (...though a bit time-consuming to put all 
> the small details on - if Paul Copeland used this same technique to 
> create the original FT ranges, I'm frankly amazed that he had the 
> patience to do all the tiny panels everywhere...)

I know all about this one ... the new Dreadnought model that I made over

Xmas took me around 12 hours to detail spread over several evenings. In 
the end I decided to try and approximate how many individual pieces I'd 
used in the model, just for my own satisfaction, and estimated that I'd 
cut and stuck almost 1000 separate parts to make that model.

>
> Well, at least the modelling is easy as long as I stick to straight 
> edges; I'm still trying to figure out how to do decent-looking large 
> curved or double-curved surfaces like the nose of a Komarov or an NAC 
> bridge section <g> I guess there might be a reason why Brigade Models 
> have so few SemFed ship designs with large curved surfaces ;-)

There are two reasons. The first is that, as you point out, curved 
surfaces are diffiicult to get right using styrene construction, 
especially if you're trying to make a symmetrical piece such as the NAC 
bridges. I've had some success by making up a block of styrene by 
laminating sheets together, then carving this roughly into shape using a

knife (carefully - we don't want to cut off any fingers !). I then 
smooth this off, firstly with an electric sander and then by hand using 
fine wet-and-dry paper. This generally involves lots of elbow grease and

filler putty to get the surface smooth.

The second reason I don't use many curved surfaces is that they are 
difficult to detail using the styrene panel method - the tiny pieces of 
10thou plastic card that I use to surface detail won't conform to curved

surfaces (especially compound curves) so you end up with a model that's 
detailed on the flat surfaces but not detailed (or detailed in a 
different style) on the curved surfaces - which to me looks a little 
odd. Paul Copeland obviously found this an issue as well - the NAC 
bridges, for example, are detailed in a different style to the flat
hulls.

Oh, yes - very nice work, by the way :-)

Tony