Ten days in Costa Rica and the coldest winter in memory in the north east have slowed my building. Since I still can’t airbrush a lot (opening the window is NOT an option), I’m still plugging away at other items. I’ve added brass rods through the lower hull that will serve two purposes: to mount the sub to its base, and to provide power into the hull for the lighting.
I also installed the bridge assembly, Continue reading
Slow progress as of late. Honestly it’s just been too damn cold to do any building, so I’ve been focusing more on writing. I’ve forced myself to eek out a little progress on Nautilus ever few days, though, and since most of it has been in the hack/cut/destroy department, I’ve made a little headway.
I’m definitely lighting the model. I picked up some LED tape, which is exactly what it sounds like: adhesive backed tape with an LED approximately every three-eights of an Continue reading
Being a swanky science-fiction-enabled underwater craft, the Nautilus has a Victorian lounge with large bay windows. The scale of the sub is in question, as I stated before, and the lounge area really brings this to light: the desk along the wall has sets of books that are quite large compared to the built-in book case contents. I’m telling myself the ones on the desk are log books, and thus larger, and the ones on the wall are paperbacks for casual reading. That doesn’t explain why a writing desk dwarfs a pipe organ, though. In retrospect, I should’ve scratch built a smaller replacement writing desk. Oh well, next build.
In the previous post I showed the brass ceiling beams that went in looking all Continue reading
The Nautilus from Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” is one of those iconic ships of fiction, up there with the star ship Enterprise and the Millenium Falcon. The Nautilus has been rendered many ways, the most recognizable the Disney version from their movie. This is a new interpretation from artist Greg deSantis, which to me is more in line with the vision in the original novel, and the mid-19th century experimental submarines — especially those of the American Civil War — that Verne would have seen, both in person and depicted in the French press.
The plan with this kit is for a quick build. But, isn’t that always the way at the outset? Several of us in the New Jersey Continue reading
Just finished is the Cylon Basestar from the new Battlestar Galactica television series. A simple design and fun build that really came together with a lot of paint work.
Final photos added to the Model Building section. View by clicking HERE.
Finished this back in January, but it took a while to get the photos shot and processed. Lots of fun building this one. View photos HERE.
I’d planned on the joining of the upper and lower hulls on Chickasaw to be an ordeal, but it wasn’t as bad in some respects as I’d expected, but was worse in other respects. While Chickasaw doesn’t have the full “raft over a lower hull” arrangement of the original Monitor or her follow-on Passaic class ironclads, it does exist. While building the lower hull, I exerted too Continue reading
I finished this one late last summer, but I haven’t been much in a photography mood as of late (I still have two other completions to photograph as well).
Something unusual. Overall a fun little kit, but I have to admit that at times I wasn’t having fun at all with some of the smaller bits and more than once Luzon nearly went sailing across a sea of profanities into the from room’s brick wall.
I’ve got a few more of these Niko resin kits from various eras (Great White Fleet, WWII British, and U.S. Cold War missile cruisers), and I’ll surely build something else from them in the future.
More photos and the full story on the build can be seen HERE.
With power out for nearly a week and subsequent clean-up from Sandy, I haven’t done much modeling lately. Yesterday evening I scheduled time to work on the remaining sheeting for Chickasaw, and today I trimmed and sanded the result. A little filling and sanding is left, but then I believe I can prime the two hull halves, do a final check for blemishes, and then assemble the two and begin scribing.
The sheeting continues, but with the sheet for the main deck, it gets tricky. Holes for the turrets, the pilot house, and the stack have to be cut. Initially I drove myself nuts for a day or two trying to figure out the center of the circles, then realized that the camber of the deck makes the circles not entirely of the perfectly-round variety. An email to Dean, the designer, resulted in a template the the centers marked. I glued that to styrene, and away I went…
