Tom,
You asked about tools and techniques. Let me start with a quick tour of the workshop (for those of you who just want to see the ship update skip to the end). Let me start my saying that we're renting a house that is probably too small so this garage workshop is literally surrounded by a 4ft wall of boxes of stuff I haven't found a place for yet.
The workbench is simple and cluttered with all kinds of stuff. The two tool boxes on the left are hobby paints, one for vehicles one for ships. Moving around every 2-3 yrs with the Navy has made me containerize everything. Below this workbench are the 10k-12k micro armor vehicles in panzerkeepers.
Here's my poor man's milling machine. Its a dremmel style tool on a drill press stand with a moveable stage clamp. It allows me to set a drill depth and then move the subject around to mill out the material to make recesses. Up thread you can see the foc'sle of the ship where I used this technique. This press is not really designed to do this and the table isn't level in any axis so its hard to get good results - which is the main reason I chickened out of milling down the main deck that I talked about yesterday. Someday I'll find a true milling machine I can afford. Until then this is what I've got.
The next tool I use quite a bit is my combination belt/disc sander. It has done great service in "rough cutting" plastic blanks for ships or whatever. It also gets heavy use removing flash and overflow from my resin casts.
Here is my little bag of tricks. I have knives, drills, snippers clippers, etchers, pryers and pokers that can do just about anything I need for detailing or sculpting.
One other tool that I'll show right now and talk about in the construction update is the chopper below. If you work with styrene plastics for scratchbuilding I thing this is a must have. You can set up the jig and make repetitive cuts and as long as you keed a fresh razor blade in it they will come out perfect everytime. Its a huge time saver.
Okay, enough of the tour for now here's the update.
First thing I needed to do was to start the superstructure. Since I'm going to be resin casting the model I have decided to do the super structure in two pieces to make demolding it easier. The first piece makes up the section from the main deck up to the bridge/bridge wings. This is an easy section since its just a big rectangular block. I use the remnants of the plastic blank from yesterday and I cut out a piece of the proper shape.
This section is too high in profile so about one third will have to be taken off the bottom. When that's done it will be fine sanded and portholes will be drilled in to the surface using a pin vise and drill bit.
Setting that aside for the time being I decided to make the cargo hatches on the main deck. First I gave the entire ship a once over with 220 grit sandpaper to remove the marks from the 80 grit used in the belt sander to rough shape it. Once complete I used the chopper pictured above to cut styrene strips for the cargo hold covers. Since I didn't have strips of the correct size to match the drawings the chopper was the perfect tool. The hatches come in two different sizes so I could measure it set the jig up make my cuts for length and then reset the jig for the proper hatch width and cut the pieces lengthwise.
After the hatches were cut to the proper size I measure the placement of the drawing and then transferred it to the ship deck. Then it was a simple matter of gluing each hatch in the correct position. I say simple but getting the exact position was difficult. even using gel CA glue didn't offer any "work time" once the hatch touched the deck it was stuck. The result? Well the hatches are slightly off when placed next to the drawing but otherwise I don't think you would notice. One the hatches were in place I used an exacto blade to slightly bevel the edges of the hatches to make them look more natural.
You can see the piece of superstructure to the left with the black marker for the part that needs to be removed to lower the profile.
That's it for now more to follow...
Paul
((
