Well, I have glued the majority of the bow section together. Three things stand out: 1. This is a lot more difficult to do. 2. I somehow cut rib "3" about 1/8" too short. (3 is my first rib as 1 is to small to notice and 2 is mostly part of the impenetrable bow area) 3. if I un-clamp the keel from the straight edge, there is an ever so slight bow around ribs 4 to 6. It is a hair less than 1/32" of an inch, as I 'just can't slide a small piece of 1/32" ply under it. I think i will spray down the subdeck with some H2O and leave the keel clamped overnight to see if that will do the trick.
I have a framed hull. So far everything appears to be very straight. I am still not sure how I screwed up rib "3", but I will start woring to get it properly attached tonight. In the meantime, a celbratory indulgance of an adult beverage is in order! How she looks right now:
Tonight I re-enforced the bow section keel in the hope that I could get rid of the slight hogging. I got it to about 1/64" so I will consider that as good as it gets. Afterwards I fixed my rib 3 issue and added balsa to my bow. A few hours of sanding later I have the contours done to rib 8. Tomorrow I do the stern and finish tweaking the rest of the rib contours. If I have time I will finish tabbing out the stringer for the top of the impenetrable area.
looks like your off to a great start, should be interesting when she is in the water along with the Ohio and the Hindenburg, kinda makes me want to think about doing a Soryuz over a Yamato this summer, get those four huge hypos out of the way. Let me know if you need anything for that big Frenchie.
Matt, I think you should do the Sovetsky Soyuz. I would love to see all four of those hypos on the water. In addition, I do not think anyone has done a Soyuz in any format--I could be mistaken though. Intelligence estimates indicate that Lee might be running his Yamato this year. It would be great to have all of those big-boys slugging it out. I would love to see a last man standing battle with the big ships. Back on topic, I have done the stern coutours and have started working on the stringers. I figured I would hold off on the final rib contours until I have everything else in place so I only have to sand once. I need to get a 45 degree triangle to mark out the stern section though. I think I will guestimate that area, leave extra material, then mark along the 45 degree point and then cut with an exacto. I can then lay in the stringer from the inside. In theory, at least. Thanks for the offer to help, but I think I am doing good. Weapons and prop arrangements have been made. I just need motors, shafts, pump, esc, firing boards, and some more noodle wire in 20 guage. Pump, ESC, and wire will be ordered from Strike on Wednesday. For the Motors, I think I will see if I can get ahold of a couple of the super efficient 550s Mikey found. For the shafts, I have plenty of tubing and Mark found a source for flanged bushings. I have three molded Richelieu turrets, but they are a little soft on the edges. I want to see if I can make some. Maybe pay Mark to mill out the primaries and secondaries? Hm, I have an email to send.
Hypothetical as far as Treaty is concerned. I think to qualify as a hypo they had to be ordered but not in commission--not exacly sure, so I just go by the ship list
I finished adding the stringer except for the last two ribs to the stern--about the rudder back. I am going to leave the stern alone until the next build session to see if I can get sone more experienced builders to make suggestions. I started adding 1/32" ply to the bottom of the hull and got a little bit too ambitous with my first piece in the center section. I should have stopped two ribs in on both sides. I managed to cut out one rib's worth at the bow and stern. I also discovered 5ft2 is not enough 1/32" ply. I have about 1ft2 of 1/64" for the really nasty curves. I am walking away from sheeting the bottom for a while to keep my sanity. I think the guys who use balsa have it right. I took a break and started work on a turret plug for my mains. Want to see if I can make one good enough to cast, so I think I will work on that for the next few days. EDIT: for clarity and spealing, spellink, spelling.
It looks like I will have to remove two more ribs worth of the 1/32" ply--bow and stern. Late-night-get-it-done-itus struck. I stepped back last night to work on the turrets. Since the plans I have did not make sense for a couple of the edges, I went to a properly re-scaled set of plans I had electronically from the French Museum of Naval History website of the Richelieu after the 1943 refit. Interesting fact: file RICHELI1940PL3933.tif contains an error on turret A (which is what I copied and pasted into a new turret image file). The stern slanted facet on the turret from the top view meets different points on the port and starboard side. The port side is correct. I discovered this after cutting out the bottom, top back, and side panels and tried a dry fit. No boat time tonight, it is one week before tax day, so I have procrastinated long enough. On another note, after spending my lunch hour looking at brushless ESCs, I decided that I will hold off going that route for this boat. I kept going back and forth comparing cost versus how well MikeM's Richelieu performed at TreatyCon last year. In the end the cost aspect won out.
Tonight, I started roughing out the turret plug, take two. Hopefully this will be finished by Monday. Be advised there are some bad seams--these will be filled in. I am adding the range-finders as from what I can tell the Richelieu, Bart, plus the Alsace class ships had them on all turrets. I will also be adding a lot of detail pieces once I get the final shape down. My goal is 90-95% accurate.
Spent a lot of time building over the weekond. Today , I focused on sheeting the bottom with thin plywood. I am about 85% done with the impenatratable area--only the really nasty parts at the bow and stern are left. I am going to try to drop in my shafts before I finish. Also, I have made some progress on the turret plug. Now just finishing up and perfecting the surface on the main body. Oce that is done, I can move on to the fun stuff: details!
I am almost finished with the turret plug. I just need to finish the rangefinders. They are going to be seperate pieces to make casting easier.
The turrent looks great! I'd be interested in details of the process. You've already provided some good photographs of the plug under construction, but what's the final finish? Just any glossy paint, or something special?
I blocked out the main shape with 1/8" plywood, hand sanding the edges against a flat surface to get as straight of an edge as possible. That is the status as of the first pic. I used gap filling CA to seal all seams on the inside and added 15 minute epoxy up to the low point on the "side" cavities. I then added a two part epoxy putty for the angled part from the sides to the top. After that had set up, a flat file and sanding sticks were used to flatten out that edge. That is the status as of the second pic. The notches in the side are for the rangefinders which were blocked out in balsa. Before adding the two part putty to the angle, I glued in the rough/block range finders and took a razor saw to cut them off flush. You can see the cut off "blocks" in the second pic marked port and starbord. Afterwards, apply putty, sand, prime. Repeat as necessary--usually very often. The primer coat gets everything the same color and make flaws easier to spot. The details were made with Evergreen styrene strip and rod in various sizes and the ladders are Plastruct N scale in ABS. I took care to sand the back of the ladder flush with the rungs so there would not be a gap for mold material to seep into. In the last pic you can see where I didn't get it perfect ant there is a gap in the ladder on the far side of the camera. I will have to address this. As far as the paint, it looks glossy because it is still wet. I used Gunze-Sangyo's Mr. Surfacer 1000 from their Mr. Hobby line of paints. Mr. Surfacer is a self-leveling filling primer available in three different weights: 500, 1000, & 1200. The higher the number, the smaller the filler particles. I used 1000 because I have some in rattlecan. I would have prefered 500, but I only have in jar and it is a pain to mix with the proper thinner and set pressure correctly in an airbrush. You have to use Mr. Color Leveling Thinner to get this stuff to work right and that is ever harder to find than Mr. Surfacer. Mess up the thinner ratio or pressure in relation to temperature and humidity, and is comes out of the airbrush like spiderwebs. Scale plastic/resin modelers usually horde this stuff as it comes from Japan and when the importer has any in stock, it usually sells out quick. One reason it is so popular is that it fills minor flaws like scratches from sanding without obscuring detail like ofther filling primers. There are still several small flaws in the finish and I decided not to go overboard getting the detail 100% as this is for combat and will be cast--casting usually introduces some minor surface flaws. As it stands, this should be about 95% accurate without the rangefinders. The range finders have some very interesting compound curves and I cannot find any really good images, so I am going to get them "close enough".
If things go well, the turret may be available--that's all I got to say about that. Thanks for the feed back all. I used this build thread of a 1/350 plastic Richelieu model and all of the improvements made for reference. The guy doing it is amazing, and he scratchbuilt a lot of the details. I am not going for his level of accuracy, but it is an awesome build none the less: http://www.shipmodels.info/mws_foru...mp;t=75145 Check out page four for the turret. I just noticed I messed up in placement of the "bumps" along the edge....
Plastruct item 90421 for ABS and item 90671 for polystyrene. There are two per package about 3 inches each. Price is US$2-3 per package. They are N scale or about 1/148 to 1/160. The package states 1/200, but this is wrong as far as I can tell.
I am 99.9% finished with the turret. I sanded down the ladders to less than 1/32" so as not to cause any molding problems. I also finished the last little bit of detail at the top of the turret (the red bit is to give the camera somehting to focus on). I built a new rangefinder and gave it a pin/hole alignment check. If it is off once there are two copies, just enlarge the holes a bit--an old resin scale modeler's trick. I then started doing the final finishing work on the rangefinder. The old balsa mock up is behind the new one. The oval bit was done with a needle file and a steady hand. ESC, pump, firing board, and four 10Ah LiFePO4 cells will be shipping from Strike Models soon. Clippard solenoids and volume chambers should arrive next week, my cannons about a week after that.
