The ship is finally painted and ready for gaming.
Here you see SS Bellota as part of a little convoy , for size comparison :
The other ships are by warlord games.
More pictures about the build 1 2 3 4 5 If you start looking at the links from No 5 downwards you can see the complete build of the Steamer from plan to finish.
Here is the first cast of the Hunt Typ II Destroyer Escort in 1/300 for cruel seas! It came out rather lovely don’t you think?
The main parts
Hope you like it as much as I do. By the way one of the small squares on the cutting mat equals 1 cm . The ship is round about 28 cm long!
I build the boxes for doing the moulds of the Hunt Typ II Destroyer for cruel Seas.
I cut the base out of extruded polystyrene and glue the pieces to be moulded on them with hot glue. then I build a box out of lego around it. The bottom and the walls are fixed with brown tape ( the one you use for packing parcels for the post). Then I spray the inside with mould release agent. Before casting I place the boxes on greased paper for protection of my worksurface.
I pures in the silicone last night . So will have to do the second side of this mould:
The others are single piece moulds.
Will cast the first ship today if all goes to plan.
Here are the pictures of the finished Hunt Typ II DE for Cruel Seas. The only thing missing is the anchors and anchor chain. Then a coat of PVA and mouldmaking can start.
It will take until next week to do the moulds and the first casts as i will be at Salute next weekend so no more modeling for a wile. I will post pictures of Salute next week!
Here are a few pictures of the work I did lately on the Hunt class destroyer escort. The superstructure is nearly completed now. But there are enough things to do like putting on all the detail wich is printed on the card but will be lost when casting. So all the dogs and vents have to be glued on again etc. furthermore the main armament has to be build the AA armament will be from Warlord.
More to come….
I painted up some more boats for cruel seas. First up a trawler:
And two Dog Boats ( Fairmile D):
The first one is a standard Warlord one .
The second is changed by reducing the torpedo armament and increasing the gun armament:
Haven’t used them in a game yet . So can’t say if the increased guns are worth it. The models are all from Warlord . Some of the weapons on the second Dog boat are scratch build.
So this weekend saw the Bellota finished in both versions. I added the missing live boats and davids and the masts and rigging. Only thing to add now is some crew and paint .
Here is the ballast version of the ship:
and the loaded version:
as you can see by adding different vent layouts you can create slightly different versions of the ship.
And both together in one picture. The Warlord trawler for size comparison. Next will be different funnels, the tanker and liner versions.
I started with the deckhouses and superstructure:
As you can see I always did a sandwich of extruded polystyrene and card to make it as sturdy as possible. The bridge superstructure and the gun platforms will be done as separate pieces to get rid of the rather large undercuts which would be impossible to cast.
More to follow shortly.
The Royal Navy had identified the need for two types of destroyer: larger vessels with heavy gun and torpedo armaments for fleet work and another type for escort duties. Although old fleet destroyers could be allocated to escort work, they were unsuitable for the task and new construction replaced them. Fleet destroyers were designed for speed and their machinery was inefficient at convoy speeds, reducing their range. Their shape made them poor sea boats at low speed, also exacerbated by additional equipment on the superstructure. Modifications were needed to ease these problems.
The escort vessels forsook the heavy armament and some of the speed of the fleet type to reduce unit cost and better suit mass production and the conditions. This new “fast escort vessel” was later classified as an “escort destroyer”.
Eighty-six Hunts were completed, of which 72 were commissioned into the Royal Navy and the remaining 14 were transferred to allied navies;
| General characteristics Type II | |
|---|---|
| Displacement: |
|
| Length: | 85.3 m (279 ft 10 in |
| Beam: | 9.6 m (31 ft 6 in) |
| Draught: | 2.51 m (8 ft 3 in) |
| Propulsion: |
|
| Speed: |
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| Range: | 3,600 nmi (6,700 km) at 14 kn (26 km/h) |
| Complement: | 164 |
| Armament: |
|
Eighteen were ordered on 4 September 1940 and two more (Lauderdale and Ledbury) on the following day. Three of these were completed to the Type I specification – Blankney, Blencathra and Brocklesby. A final batch of sixteen were ordered on 20 December 1939. ( from Wikipedia)
This time I wanted to try a , may be easier, different way. I got a paper craft model of the Hunt Typ II (ORP Slazak) from JSC in 1/400
The model also comprises an English G class Destroyer and a small coaster/fishing vessel
As the model is in 1/400 I had to increase the size of the parts by about 30%. After doing that with a photocopying machine I started building the model like explained in the assembly instructions. The only difference being to fill all the hollow spaces with extruded polystyrene to make it sturdy enough for casting.
The next step was filling and sanding to get a rough hull, the hull of the Warlord vosper is for size comparison, The Hunt is rather large in 1/300 ( about 28 cm)
Next the paper hull sides were glued in , before that I punched out all the bulleyes to get them 3d for casting.
That is how far I got up to today. What do you think?
Here is the loaded version of the Steamer Bellota:
And a few more pictures:
and next to the empty one:
And again for size comparison with the Warlord tanker:
Next will be the tanker and passenger liner versions.
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