So that was some three weeks worth of "work" then, the 4 first meters of that small ship are finally completed. I have no real time to feed t-hat blog properly, so here are some of the steps I used in order to build all the accessories. few text, loads of pictures.

So this starts with homemade photoetch. I only had a few bits of brass left -and then my French online mail order is sluggish to get the stuff delivered, so I had to rely a lot on some of the leftovers from previous dioramas I carefuly store. Anyway, I could still do some of the 47 mm Hotchkiss parts as well as air intake stuff etc.

photo etch homemade

First that air intake. I hate building air intakes, this is very difficult because you have to work out a master in plastc and Magic Sculp, then you have to vacuform it (with the heat of a candle!) and then you have to join and fill the two halves..

Air intake scratchbuilt

here is a bit of soldering, those are the two supports for the side lights. I don't think i will place them on the boat because their shape somewhat hides the gun, and then I have  a reference picture where those had been removed solder

half dried Magic Sculp, evergreen tubing, breech sculpting and trimming, sanding etc, here are some parts of the Hotchkiss 47mm gun parts of the Hotchkiss 47mm gun

Hotchkiss 47mm gun completed! Hotchkiss 47mm gun

Here are all the parts done! Now it's time for gluing those parts for the 1/35 russain PT boat

And here is the thing.. I will post some better pictures showing it primed soonish!

That's the hull completed, I post it at the top because it looks nicer on the RSS feed.

A Russian PT Boat scratchbuilding

Actually there's still a long way from my last post to that hald baked result.

First let's fill the hull with some car repairing mastic. of course to minimize the amount used I put some plastic sheets near the sides

filling the hull

Of course what's good with this kind of mastic is that it can be filled very easely.

Now this particlaur boat got a not so nice accounter near the conning tower. So i cut out the plastic, glued some lead foil (harder and harder to find) and filled the joints with Tamiya grey mastic.

holes in the hull

Now these steel boats got countless rivets as obvious on soem details pictures I was sent. No way i am going to drill a hole for each and put a brass rivet inside. Fortunately, those were rather small and Aires put out some resin rivets on decals. And those were ideal for this build so here my rivet covered hull..

Aires resin rivets

Now I will have some work to do on all the "details" like air intakes, trapdoors, stanchions, the 47mm gun etc etc, quite some work!

Hard to realize but I had some sort of diorama burnout right after SMC Eindhoven. I had to work way too much just prior to the event, and certainly needed the rest.

Whatever, after this kind of things I usually ned to get back to the basis. Why not scratchbuilding (again) a Russian 1900 ear PT boat?

So i found that very special one built in Finland (then a part of Russia) in order for the navy to place them on battleships like the Orel or the cruiser Retzivan (that I already modelled on the Tsushima diorama).

I needed as always a lot of reference to get started and I thank my friends Kronma and Cerberus JF to have filled me with great reference.

As alsways it started by drawing the cross sectiopns of the ship on a graphic software, printing them down to paper..

Russian PT Boat crossections printed

Then I glew those on some 1mm plastic card and proceeded to cut them, and assemble them like I show below.

assembly of the Russian 1900 PT boat

hey, notice something. i went a bit fast here! What about the turret on the lower left of the picture? now that was the difficul part..

first notice that i hollowed the top of the boat so that i can place that turret afterwards.

Then what I did is that I put a small sheet of paper in place and managed to draw the shape of the final turret that way :

the shape of the PT boat turret

Of course I neede tons of adjustements and tricly finger placing before getting that. Notice the crosses which are the position of the portholes.

Then  I glued that bit of paper on some plastic and cut the shape out, and used my (great) Czech punch and die to hollow the portholes

hollowing the portholes

Then I assembled everything, trying to leave the less gaps possible, glued everything in place with some Tenax like  glue, and added a roof with Magic Sculp covered plastic sheet.

Okay, I don't feel like I make it plain here; but such a work is twofolds -really it is ultra fast as all the plastic work was done in less than 2 hours, but then it was a really tricky work to do because what you must look after is leaving the less gap possible when you assemble the turret and you must get the shape right which I *mostly* did.

You still noticed that there is a big Tenax  trace on the turret with some embedded fingerprints that is going to be hard to correct with Mr Surfacer.

Oh well..

the shape of those torpedoes was okay really, but I soon discovered I would probably be unable to drill some evenly spaced holes at the 2/3 of the length of the thing.

But well I had foressen this and prepared some PE ring (soldered of course) beforehand. So I had to destry the shape in order to insert those metal rings.. Whitehead Torpedoesand then to cover the parts with a fresh layer of Magic Sculp. I let dry and then sanded again.. Whitehead Torpedoes

Then I drilled a few holes around the tail of each of my 3 torpedoes and proceeded to glue each and every blade of the propeller.

Finally I glued in place all the tail bits.. Now I have to sand an extra bit where the superglue overflowed -and I also have to add quite a few details

One good thing when being around for a bit of time is that you get great help when asking for some very precise stuff. So here is a gentleman that scanned me some very old plans for Whitehead Torpedoes as they were built in Fiume -ex Austria Hungary. Well thanks once more because they're almost finished by now, and reasonably accurate.

Whitehead Torpedoes

The first thing I had to do was to cut some aluminium and brass tubes at the right dimension using this kind of plan

the right size for tubing

Then actually cut the tubes. i filled them with Green Stuff so that every element would be at the center of it's parent.

cutting tubing

Let's cover those assemblings with Magic Sculp, wait for a few days and then sand until the shape is perfect. Now those early torpedoes look so much better than later types.

the shape of whitehead torpedoesTime to sort of draw some lines all around the tail of the torpedo, so to do that, I embed it in my Punch and Die set and turn the shape until I have some sort of line all around.