Yo Jba,

I am on the first row mate...let the blog begin!!

Greetz Nico

Claude, I will explain what I did a bit below, not Champolion anymore!

Thanks Alex!

And Domi too! I hope this one will be a success.

hey Soeren, is this you who did that Soviet retro futruist diorama a few years back on Modelgeek, that was a great

one!

karol, those are *still* the days, look there http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qNgi28Truw&feature=channel I truly

love those US bands that are able to breathe the sugar that lies naturally in the atmosphere!

Charles I won't be doing much mystery about what i will model, the point in the build will definitely be elsewhere

Andrzej, looking closely, quite a few Polish things: beginning with the rather kitschy and soviet era Krystof

Klenczon, then doom folk bands like Atman and Magic Carpathians, ultra doom folk demented dude Smolken's Dead Raven

Choir and Wolfmanger projects, then the unmissable and quite well known Zbignew Preisner with me being an absolut fan

of the music he did for kieslowski's "Thou shallt not kill" etc..

Thank you Nico!

Carlos you are right:! if irt's not entertaining it's nothing aha!!

Speaking of which let's be entertaining will ya?

Concerning boat modeling, here are some thoughts about the navies by country and easeness of finding refernec after

basically 5 years doing this:

USA: you pay okay you get okay when it comes to plans with sadly fewer things on the pre -14 era, many books covering

every period still, great amiunt of pics available, great forum community.

Germany: you get sick by the amount of stuff on WW2 but for earlier period it's sure harder to find anything worth

when it comes to plans or reference, especially for pre-14 era. Some plans are on sell, but few books with pics

usable for the modeler - The reference collection you mostly have to do by yourself collecting photo postcards on

ebay. the dreadnought project website is a great ressource and furthermore the community is okay.

France: the Service Historique opened their plan collections for a short time and it the began to be the greatest

country on earth when it comes to availability! thousands of plans of extremely great quality for free.. But then

they closed down.
And then NO books with pictures -or those from marine Edition who seem to have been done by a 5 years old kid with an

eye problem with very few pics. NO online community. French boat modeling forums are the Gobi desert, the people being there not usually knoing much while people who know and own the pics probably not even knowing about internet. So.. plans yes, but pictures no.. and no help.

Russia, THE great country for boat modelling. They have great books on almost every boat of every period of Russian history, then You see the word "copyright" doesn't exist for them, and the online

community is okay, passionate and post everything they have.. Still my prefered [auto-censored]ry for modeling.

Spain and Italy..Gobi desert?!!!! If anybody knows how I can get some stuff about the lepanto and Italia class in

Italy and all the Spanish predreads that were butchered by the USA in 1899, please post any info my way!!

Japan? nothing before the 30's apparently (?)

All the countries are covered? ah no..
Stays Britain.
THE maritime state par excellence..
you would think you can find easely what you want but errrr, no.
if you search a bit deeper than HMS Hood or the like there is nothing.. plans are available at some national thing in

Greenwhich but like says one friend "you have to sell body parts to be able to buy them"
the online community is uuuhh.. a bit like the french one perhaps?

okay here is my story:
remember The Womb? I think it is my best diorama, there is a dry cinism about it and a sense of colour that tells me i am finally getting somewhere. BUT I don't like having to look at it, it's just too terrible, it's currently in one corner of the garden shed and i will probably dump it on ebay in 5 years time.
So i thought I needed to do something like the Womb but more my way you see, more ambient and detached. Something with a turret too. So it was years that I considered doing a diorama with one plane turret sticking out of the water but i thought that would look sort of stupid and artifical. And then a few weeks ago i fell on some Telford report ona ship forum showing a model of this:

you see? those turrets at the back of the boat? plane turrets of the most peculiar form as they are looking like some lightbulb.
So this boat nicknamed the "whaleboat" because of the dome shaped rear, was used by the British to get downed pilots in the Channel, and generations of modelers built the Airfix model with *basically no reference except an article with 5 poor quality pictures in an Airfix mag from the late 70's*
Asking questions in forums I was quickly prompted with this article alongside a set of bad quality plans done by "the great specialist of British MTBs one Mr Pritchard..
Then I was given a list of 5 absolutely unfindable books about those boats.. Looking online, I found 3 extra photos, and .. that was all.
So here I was starting my build with basically no reference about a British WW2 boat that is well known to modelers.. amazing, truly amazing. Britain i used to know you better.

I saw that Mr pritchard designed a set of good sized plans so i set up buying them but alas the deception was huge as i could find straight away some innacuracies -worse even he seems to have been designing them using some huge sized pen akin to the ones you give to kids.
he also included some cross section plans.. for the hull but not for the rounded cabin!!
All the problems induced by this third rate material will sadly show through throughout the build..

In the end I found out what those plans were for: the RC guys who probably figure out that a boat model is accurate as long as it floats.

here are the plans anyhow.. what a waste of paper..



phew what a rant, that's all for today..

Claude, I will explain what I did a bit below, not Champolion anymore!

Thanks Alex!

And Domi too! I hope this one will be a success.

hey Soeren, is this you who did that Soviet retro futruist diorama a few years back on Modelgeek, that was a great one!

Karol, those are *still* the days, look here I truly love those US bands that are able to breathe the sugar that lies naturally in the atmosphere

Charles I won't be doing much mystery about what i will model, the point in the build will definitely be elsewhere

Andrzej, looking closely, quite a few Polish things: beginning with the rather kitschy and soviet era Krystof Klenczon, then doom folk bands like Atman and Magic Carpathians, ultra doom folk demented dude Smolken's Dead Raven Choir and Wolfmanger projects, then the unmissable and quite well known Zbignew Preisner with me being an absolute fan of the music he did for kieslowski's "Thou shallt not kill" etc..

Thank you Nico! it will begin nearly right now

Carlos you are right:! if irt's not entertaining it's nothing aha!!

Speaking of which let's be entertaining will ya?

Concerning boat modelling, here are some thoughts about the navies by country and easiness of finding reference after basically 5 years doing this:

USA: you pay okay you get okay when it comes to plans with sadly fewer things on the pre -14 era, many books covering every period still, great amount of pics available, great forum community.

Germany: you get sick by the amount of stuff on WW2 but for earlier period it's sure harder to find anything worth when it comes to plans or reference, especially for pre-14 era. Some plans are on sell, but few books with pics usable for the modeller - The reference collection you mostly have to do by yourself collecting photo postcards on ebay. the dreadnought project website is a great resource and furthermore the community is okay.

France: the Service Historique opened their plan collections for a short time and it the began to be the greatest country on earth when it comes to availability! thousands of plans of extremely great quality for free.. But then they closed down.
And then NO books with pictures -or those from marine Edition who seem to have been done by a 5 years old kid with an eye problem with very few pics. NO online community. French boat modelling forums are the Gobi desert, the people being there not usually knoing much while people who know and own the pics probably not even knowing about internet. So.. plans yes, but pictures no.. and no help.

Russia, THE great country for boat modelling. They have great books on almost every boat of every period of Russian history, then You see the word "copyright" doesn't exist for them, and the online community is okay, passionate and post everything they have.. Still my preferred country for modelling.

Spain and Italy..Gobi desert?!!!! If anybody knows how I can get some stuff about the lepanto and Italia class in Italy and all the Spanish predreads that were butchered by the USA in 1899, please post any info my way!!

Japan? nothing before the 30's apparently (?)

All the countries are covered? ah no..
Stays Britain.
THE maritime state par excellence..
you would think you can find easily what you want but errrr, no.
if you search a bit deeper than HMS Hood or the like there is nothing.. plans are available at some national thing in Greenwhich but like says one friend "you have to sell body parts to be able to buy them"
the online community is uuuhh.. a bit like the French one perhaps?

okay here is my story: my worse so far concerning finding reference.
remember The Womb? I think it is my best diorama, there is a dry cynicism about it and a sense of colour that tells me i am finally getting somewhere. BUT I don't like having to look at it, it's just too terrible, it's currently in one corner of the garden shed and i will probably dump it on ebay in 5 years time.
So i thought I needed to do something like the Womb but more my way you see, more ambient and detached. Something with a turret too. So it was years that I considered doing a diorama with one plane turret sticking out of the water but i thought that would look sort of stupid and artifical. And then a few weeks ago i fell on some Telford report on a ship forum showing a model of this:

you see? those turrets at the back of the boat? plane turrets of the most peculiar form as they are looking like some light bulb.
So this boat nicknamed the "whaleboat" because of the dome shaped rear, was used by the British to get downed pilots in the Channel, and generations of modellers built the Airfix model with *basically no reference except an article with 5 poor quality pictures in an Airfix mag from the late 70's*
Asking questions in forums I was quickly prompted with this article alongside a set of bad quality plans done by "the great specialist of British MTBs one Mr Pritchard..
Then I was given a list of 5 absolutely unfindable books about those boats.. Looking online, I found 3 extra photos, and .. that was all.
So here I was starting my build with basically no reference about a British WW2 boat that is well known to modellers.. amazing, truly amazing. Britain i used to know you better.

I saw that Mr Pritchard designed a set of good sized plans so i set up buying them but alas the deception was huge as i could find straight away some innacuracies -worse even he seems to have been designing them using some huge sized pen akin to the ones you give to kids.
he also included some cross section plans.. for the hull but not for the rounded cabin!!
All the problems induced by this third rate material will sadly show through throughout the build..

In the end I found out what those plans were for: the RC guys who probably figure out that a boat model is accurate as long as it floats.

here are the plans anyhow.. what a waste of paper..



phew what a rant, that's all for today..

That looks interesting so far!

hey Soeren, is this you who did that Soviet retro futruist diorama a few years back on Modelgeek, that was a great one!
No this was not my dio. I should search for this one. ;-)

My actual build is not a futuristic one... it were real landings of unmanned landers, who took some photos and made experiments. I build some of them, including some scratched parts and bases.

greetings...
Soeren

Hi JBA another one to watch with interest
Cheers
Libor

My Grandfather (who was also called Ken) was coxswain of one of these launches during WW2. Sadly he died a few months ago. He never spoke about his experiances. I am hoping that I will inherit his photos and memorabilia. Some years ago I did manage to have a conversation with an ASR sea-plane crewman at Tangmere aviation museum, but he became very emotional very quickly, which is why I guess my Grampa never spoke about it.

I will be following your build with interest.

PS, I'm absolutely certain that one of these launches was restored within the past 10 or so years. I seem to remember it was at Southampton docks, or it may have been Portsmouth.

Greetings Jba I’m really keen to see this and also struggling for words or to properly fathom your diorama idea still Nice job on the PE though my friend.

Jaymes.

Hey Soeren, I tried looking in your gallery yesterday and could only make out a big Russian gun actually, so I thought you meant that -and my thought as I remember the retro futurist diorama was done by no other than Jan/Mr Mox!
Your build looks really interesting and I will try to investigate -better that is

Libor, here I see you again, i still keep on looking at your big dio as you know

Ken I am happy to hearabout your story. I guess that's a common point with all vets I have been meeting, when I asked about Algeria war, my wife's father usually begins to mumble and staring at the wall -and that's only the most recent about experiences of this kind.
Ah. Not sure this is one of these launches that is being restored, maybe of a later type? I have been asking absolutely everywhere for pics and I think i would have fall on this at one point.. but any details welcomed

hey Jaymes friend! doing the PE plan is very time consuming but not that hard when you master 1 or 2 basics of vector graphics.

But then I told I would decipher the plan..
Obviously the 2 windows are the front ones. The 2 big sort of round shapes are the commander's cupola. the polygonal shape at the bottom right is the side of the cabin.
Then you have some plain shapes with roughly oval shapes cut and a square shape with a big round in it: I feel unable to cut such shapes perfectly in plastic, so my plan is simple, I cut a rough square in the plastic, fit those parts with green stuff and get the joints done with Tamiya filler. The rest is basically hinges, windows circling, lights bases, aerial support etc.
of interest is the sort of round circling with dents on it, those are for the complex aerial, same thing with the "tear shaped" part witch is going to fit above the turret.
a lot of hinges and small rounds are also there to occupy the space -the acid gets reusable more the less metal it has to eat!

Small reminder of the whole insulating process -those are old pics actually:

1/ i print the drawing -I have a b&w HP printer, a cheap one.
2/ I cut the 2 halves and glue them

3/ 2,30 mn each side under my insulating machine (homemade so quite crude indeed!)

4/ then in the developing bath.. you can see the drawing being made..


Anyway, Merde happens straight away. I begin to get short in insulated metal and will have to re order it (from Britain actually) and I used some left over part from another diorama and look at what I got when I got it insulated? this is right okay, but there is a big round shape that is eating all the details at the middle!
This means those special parts simply will be eaten. Gulp, that's a good thing I usually do twice the number of pieces I need..

Great work again... it's a pity that a disaster struck your PE parts... What caused it? I’d guess that the plate was laying on some round rough surface that damaged the photo-sensitive layer.

BTW: How old is that little fellow sitting on RC (what a shame) plans?

Interesting pictures of the photo-etching process! Thank you for this explanation and problems!
I also tried to make some parts from this, but I was not sure about the photo-film, exposure and some more things, which are needed for this.

I only asked a company. But as I see, the transparent foil seems a good solution for this.


My space build-log can be found here


My other dio, a german WW2 artillery piece, is stopped at the moment (the gun has lost one of its wheels), but the dio is completed.


greetings...
Soeren

JBA, my friend !
How could I have missed this ! I'll definitely be visiting the site more regularly now that another one of your "cool" builds is in progress again . Cheers !
Kenneth .

I wish you succes my friend, this newly started project of yours will be as stunning as all the former ones. The photo etching looks fantastic (as usual !).

JBA, I'm on a mission now! I'm convinced that I used to see a restored 63ft HSL as I travelled by train along the south coast of England. I found the website of the British Military Powerboat Trust which has a hull awaiting restoration, it might be worth getting in touch with them as they may have more accurate plans. http://www.bmpt.org.uk/boat%20histories/HSL-142/index.htm

Hey Andrzej thanks for the comments: it's indeed either because I put some bottle on it -or that when actually dipping the fret in the revelant whose pot is indeed of the same shape, I rubbed it too much on the bottom! whichever
I don't know what did this.. My son is 32 months!

Hi Soeren, well i indeed plan to do one day a complete photoetch sbs but it's not that hard when you have the right equipment.The film I used is a no-problem as some transparent paper for desktop printer is largely enough! Now I don't say i wouldn't get a better result with a big professional printer.. i should make more friends in the Lyon
area
Nice SBS!! i subscribe to this!


Hi Kenneth friend, always nice to see you around!

Thanks Guy my friend but hmm well, I still somewhat don't see the end of it!

Ken what a great find! ah well, I already have quite a few days in advance now and sadly i think the inaccuracies are already fixed in concrete.. But if you take one or 3 pics of that boat, I'd sure be interested!


So here's my old etching tank -some morning chocolate plastic box, an aquarium pump and heater..

After roughly 20 mn in the mix I got this;.. Rheingold!

yep that's right, there is a whole chunk of the front window lacking.. and some other parts are also badly eaten.


On the top of this, the temperature dropped below 0°C lately and working in the garden shed is getting very hard indeed -not to mention the stuff not setting at all

Hello Jean Bernard.
You as always amaze me with your homemade strange machines. The way you're showing progress and telling the stories behind your dioramas do the rest. It's like an ufo in the small modelling world. A kind of "savant fou" hidden in his garden shed who make wonders and incredible machines.
You're the guy who demonstrate that a good modeller isn't the one who's got the latest kit, the bigger stash and the brand new professional photoetch bender in a huge hobby room.

By the way, good luck for fighting polar temperatures in your garden. 2 kilometers ahead, there's a snow storm over Saint George church.

Thanks Alex, hey minus 5°C this morning.. quite cold to fetch the croissants! Not to mention limited modelling outside opportunities.. My machines are quite crudely designed as I can't "see" anything bigger than 20cm and am bad at handling hard and thick material. But then those come handy!

Anyway, this is already seen job, I have been drawing and printing the cross sections on some paper; you may notice the dome shapes which are for the turret
The rest belongs either for the cabiin or the first part of the "whale" part of the whaleboat


White glue to glue those on plastic

And then cutting them out with a scalpel -that's 1mm thick plastic.

Nice work so far, sorry about the etch - maybe do a before and after dio


.... ahm... dont think it was me - I cant remember doing anything fitting to that discription ?

I have found somebody with a lazercutter, now I just need some software to draw the stuff.

will lurk around and see what you are up to, but would allso like to see something done with your beautifull french wreck

Cheers/Jan

Yo Jba,

I'am always looking at you're home made tools and machines! Mon dieu, quelle usine

Ok, nice "scratch" pe...looking forward to see the build up.

Greetz Nico

Another striking new project JB, it's always interesting to see your DIY photo etch... thats quite an achievement and something thats well beyond me. Hat's off to you!

hey Jan, well I considered doing it back again as I had enoughof the stuff, but except for that window bit all the

rest is here and in sufficient numbers.
Sorry for once more putting the wrong name on some work. oh well I must have confused with the Robot you use as an

avatar
lazercutter, wow..
My Masséna will be finished one day, I want it to be good so i don't rush the work


Thanks Nico, the work starts right there with plastic assembling -just like a normal model in fact..

Jon, it's a matter of having the use of it! I just can't type eduard.cz when I'm building the stuff I build.. thanks

for your comments!

So here I am assembling the plastic rear hull..

A square cut in the upper hull cover, i am going to insert the hole I did out of photoetch in it and fix it with green stuff before filling the whole.
Then I will have to cutting the side from the top as this is a dome shape.

Now, I will have to find a way to do the curve filling

Hi JBA !
GOOD JOB so far !!!! Keeping a close watch as always . Cheers !
Kenneth .

I guess your right JB, you can't just call Aber and say "I'll have one of whatever my imagination feels like today please"

Interesting to see your scratch building on the Hull also. Will you be including any figures in your piece or will it be without like the Womb?

thank you Kenneth friend!

Jon thanks -there will definitely be a figure on that diorama

So here is the way I figure out I could do the rounded part: plastic tubing first! And on both sides too..


Please notice I also cut some rectangular shapes on this side of the hull

let's fill the stuff with Magic Sculp, a wet modeling knife was certainly very useful for that job. of course I had to take a lot of care of not pressing too much the MS because I would have tear the tubing apart.



here I have finished the complete slopey sides as well as fitted the photoetch openings -tied in the inside with some green stuff for instant fixing.

It's coming along well.
I like the technique you used to mimic the round corners, easy solution to what can be a hard problem.

Thanks Scott, indeed that was a good way to go as you can see on that picture below.
of course I sanded thoroughly at least 3 times with extra layers of Tamiya mastic so that no imperfection would be visible. So that's a handy trick but phew.. lots of work afterwards to get something okay.


Same work on the front cabin, with some slopes everywhere ythat i will do on Magic Sculp.


So first having all the stuff glued or fixed together with glue and Green Stuff -its stickiness is very convenient to fix small or difficult stuff like the photoetch windscreen for instance

bye for now