June 26 2009 | Working with gravity

Whenever those chains were concerned, the only way to get waway with fixing/ Soldering  them was through gravity. This is why I got the hull topsy turvy lmore than once in order to fix all those

June 27 2009 | Merde happens

Okay, now this will be shown in one single pictures, but it took me 3 days to fix.

I explain: I realized i didn't have the place on the top to fix both the hinges of the portholes, then the sort of metal circle, and then at the top, the sort of taps that hold the chains. i had to add a bit of extra height to the hull if i wanted to succeed something visually acceptable.

So i had no choixe than wiping away all the stuff previously glued the most careful I could, then to sand carefully, add a plasticard sheet, glue it, and finally mastic it.

Now how could this happen? Well Something i ddn't really know before is that Service Historique's plans are just not that precise in places and I was stupid enough to calculate a lot of stuff using those instead of some photographic reference that I got later anyway.

Oh dear, I lost 3 days of work.

June 28 2009 | Welding the portholes

Metal gegen Metal. You can't glue this, so you weld this. My croc thing, some Carrs welding liquid and a swift movement of the hand and those 2 were fixed in no time

June 30 2009 | The portholes are finaly done!

It was about time but all the portholes are not done, welded, glued etc.

Time to go and work on the crane.

July 01 2009 | The little supports below the portholes

I had some tiny bits of p^hotoetch pierced with a small hole on mùy frets precisely for this. So i first tried to insert those Grandt line tap like screws in the holes, and then glued them beneath each portholes, 20 in all!

July 07 2009 | Coming in september -the womb

This work on the Masséna is so demanding that I will probably once more switch to another side project by the beginning of september, it will be called "The Womb", and should be a rather very technical quickie.

Indeed there are some things i want to do that I didn't figure out yet how to do.

Oh well, here is the poster. mail for a big version ;)

July 08 2009 | The door to the hull

back to Seddul-Bahr and my own Masséna in the meantime.

If you remember well, I did some complicated door some 8 months ago. Well, some new evidence prove that this dorr was an internal one. So i had to do another more modest one which i did using some of my Photoetch leftover. looks like it's even accurate, excpt the thickness of the locker

July 09 2009 | Texturing the turret hole

this part will mostly be situated below sea level, a bit like the bunker on Galilée. So i have been texturing this bit so that it would really looked damaged.

In addition, this part was particlrly badly done, and further damaged by my usual rough handling of my dioramas -so a bit of extra rust can't damage the stuff!