Transmenu powered by JoomlArt.com - Mambo Joomla Professional Templates Club

Whole hull is covered with copper sheets. Last plates were really tough, especially around the stern where each single plate had to have oval shape. Actually stern plates except gluing to the hull I also soldered together and then filed off the solder.

Unfortunately I do not have any picture from that stage of construction, I was more concentrated on the model that on shooting pictures. I am very, very pleased with my "copper" hull. One concern though - size of rivets - on the copper they look pretty fine, but they will be not so nicely visible under paint coat. Well, too late. We will see.

Next step is cut out and attach 2 parallel strakes (or wales or bends) which run entirely around the ship. I cut them out from the same wood stuff (pine) I used for entire hull. I managed to cut out nice and neat 1x1mm strakes. Here I must say that if you do not have proper saw and blade, to cut something that thin will be quite difficult. I used the smaller Proxxon circular saw with their HSS disc - very cool stuff, it can really cut out miracles. Such thin strake you can bend like paper, so it was not really big deal to glue it to the hull. More problematic was to glue it on proper place and then take care of any excess of glue...

Cap rails are made of same pine, cut out planks 3x1mm and bent wider side. Those ones had to stay in the jig overnight to keep the shape. Here you have some results, already after first undercoating

Undercoat

Above you see already white hull, well I started preparations for painting. Before you use proper paints you have to get rid of this expensive shiny coppery coat. For base layer(s) I used simple "all-purpose" white matt acryl undercoat paint I bought at OBI for €8 or €9. 750ml tin will last me for 10 years probably :-) it is very thick, so to paint with airbrush you need to thin it with water and with ratio like 1:1 at least. The paint is not perfect, you need to paint/spit quite few times to properly cover the surface, but I have time and do not want to spend around €10 for small spays that last for 2-3 sessions... using this you only have to take care of more cleaning.

I am airbrush total beginner, so it took me ages to paint the hull to the stage when I was happy. I had bruises everywhere at the beginning, or I could not cover copper etc. You can try many techniques but in any case you will loose lots of paint and nerves and time at the beginning. My rivets got a bit hidden under paint is that I over painted it.

  On deck

The hull is on the stand in correct position and now I can start to work on details. Some hate it and some love it. I love it. I love to see like with time there are more and more details popping up on the deck.

I decided to work on the deck’s planking. From time’s perspective I am not sure if that was right sequence, but anyway. I marked the position of future house deck and hatches and started my first ever real wood deck planking. I read so many articles about that and seemed so easy… and it is not so bad after all :-) only time consuming. But results are amazing. I have no idea what type of wood I used as I used piece of timber from some old furniture I found on the street – people throw away tons of decent modelling materials. I only know it was not beech wood which is common as furniture material. Besides I already got to know few types of wood, but still have to learn a lot in that area. Between each plank I was putting stripe of black paper to simulate caulking. At the beginning of my planking I was made number of wholes and even put few bamboo nails into each plank, but they were too big, and it would not look right… so I removed them.

Stanchions - relatively easy but time consuming part when you have to make sure that each single one fits correctly to bulwark and deck. I made them from 1 mm beechwood stuff. So in the middle of November ZENIT looks like this: