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Old 01-28-2009, 11:19 PM
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treadhead1952 treadhead1952 is offline
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Location: Las Vegas, NV
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Thanks Guys,

I appreciate the support as I work my way through this, my first paper model kit. After over 40 years of styrene abuse, scratchbuilding and kitbashing, this is testing a lot of the things I have learned over the years. It is also proving to be highly interesting and entertaining.

Since I will be adding the hull bottom plating, the thought occurred to me that I had better build the kit stand for the ship before I get too far into things. Once the hull plates are on and the rudder and props go in place, it would be hard to just lay it on the bench without risking damage. No where in the number lists is there any suggestion to add any thickness to the parts of the stand but I didn't think that it would be very substantial that way.

I cut the parts out with my scissors first, pretty starightforward in that respect. I did note that there seemed to be a forward and after upright parts to the assembly and when I checked all four pieces against each other I found that there was a bit of a problem. The forward parts are actually smaller all the way around than the after parts. As I compared the two front parts of the nameplates to the rear part that was supposed to be a backing, I discovered a similar discrepancy, the backs were smaller all the way around, I didn't know if this was a common situation and was not able to find any information about stands in any of the threads that I had visited before, so I arrived at my own solution.



Folding the main center part was fairly simple, I used a ruler to guide the back of my hobby knife blade along the fold lines on the rear face to create an indentation and then turned the edges up and glued it together, tucking flap "A"'s into slot "B"'s until I had a nifty little wood looking rectangle about a 1/4 inch thick. As careful as I was, I still managed to have a little white paper showing through at the odd corner here and there, but I was not too concerned about it at this stage of the game.

Turning my attention to the end pieces and the name plates I decided to use a sheet of my newly purchased "for real Bristol" vellum 100 pound weight paper to add some thickness and sturdiness to these parts. Gluing them to the sheet using the faces of each part first, I let the glue set then trimmed them all out. Applying the rear parts I paid attention to the way they fit to each other and tried to lay them so that they were centered on the back of the parts. As to the two different sized end pieces, I had made duplicate copies so that I could just use an extra set of the larger end pieces and do a little judicious trimming to form the differently shaped bow part. After trimming the parts from the backing I applied the back of each centering everthing up so that when I cut the mounting holes out as well as the actual resting cradles I wouldn't have any white paper showing through at the edges.

My first attempt at putting the stand together showed that I needed to open the holes up just a little more to allow them to go over the thick part of the stand. Before I started the actual assembly, I used a Brown colored marker pen to run around the edges of the parts, the backs of the nameplates where there was a size difference between those parts and the places on the thick part of the stand where I had a bit of white showing through at the corners and edges.

I did that then using some more Aleen's Tacky Glue ran a bead over the dotted lines where the side parts were supposed to go on the thick part. After getting the parts and the bead to meet up for straight, I added some more glue all the way around the upper and lower sides inside and out to lock the parts in place. Adding the nameplates was simply a matter of centering things up as best I could after gluing the parts mounting surfaces.






Now that I have the stand constructed, I am free to start working on that hull bottom plating. I do have a question, should I actually use the strips on all of the bulkhead formers or just some of them more towards the middle? From what I have seen from cutting some of the plates out, it is obvious that the plates only go up to the edges of the middle horizontal hull longitudinal part, I am assuming to make a clean transisition and not have any humps and bumps under the plates, the strips will have to go up to the same point on the part of the hull that the plates do. I want to make this go as cleanly as possible and not have to use that narrow "fudge" strip that is included in the strips.

Jay Massey
treadhead1952
Las Vegas, NV

Last edited by treadhead1952; 01-28-2009 at 11:22 PM.
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