hey Charles thanks for this, actually I spent 3 months during the building of my Sokol diorama ONLY trying to do photoetch, and then when I built some "efficient" machines it took me an extra 6 months 2 years ago with many fails to be fluent at it.
Now I can say I *mostly* don't fail anymore, a lot of time went down the drain trying this, but as you know, scratchbuilding my own boats I didn't have the choice if I wanted to get some really great results.
now my aim is to use photoetch the most i could, it really saves me a lot of time -it took me something like 5 weeks only to put out that Womb diorama because most of the tricky parts were already done thanks to this technique.
Thank you Soeren -honestly when what you do is building tanks available in the shops you hardly need to do your own PE! Voyager does the stuff so much times better.
Honestly this is good for scratchbuilding, other than that, I would prefer buying existing frets if I could.
Thanks Nige!
I think i should have make clear that once more I used the absolutely tops plans that are available for free download
here at the french Service Historique.
The plans are of an amazing quality, so much better than what you can find in books!
Now what areas? I really like doing small dioramas, and yet I love modelling Big boats.. the thing is to find the right hotspot on the said boat. On the Spahi I particularly like the sort of very soap box cabin..
I read the other day in a British book "the French got their first decent destroyers when they got some captured German ones after the armistice" really the Spahi doesn't make too serious when you think of what the Brits or the Germans had at the same time -and the Spahi is not even the worse. But i really like losers kind of boats to make them as winner dioramas, hopefully aha!!
Ah thanks Rick, well the layout of the fret is something quite boring to do, you're on a computer and far from modelling, but still I can do this while working on other things job related and pretend this is job actually
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I was particularly lazy with that one as most of the pieces I need for the diorama except the roof of the cabin are on the fret!
Thanks Kenneth friend! you should like that one, *plenty* of birds..
yes Claude and merci -really the point was to do the most of the diorama pieces on the fret
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As for the smell, well you should not work ferric acid in a closed room but it sure smells less bad than epoxy resin!
Well after saving all the bits, it's really important to get rid of all the resin still on the PE bits or you can't solder it at all! I dipped all my bits in some Acetone bath and cleaned them with an old brush
![](../../../i678.photobucket.com/albums/vv150/jbadiorama/06.jpg)
Okay let me present THE bit that i suppose will be the most tricky part, that's the engine to fetch the anchor, I don't really understand how it works -with steam? there should be some gearing somewhere but I can't find where.
oh well, here's the real thing extracted from the plans on the left.
On the right I have already soldered the cylinders on which
I suppose the chain of the anchor goes, It gives the right outline.
![](../../../i678.photobucket.com/albums/vv150/jbadiorama/07.jpg)
then I covered the bits with Magic Sculp and rolled it against some cylinder of the same curve to get some perfect shapes.
Note that the "cylinder" is actually some tops soldering paste that i bought after some recommendations I read on the ML forums.
![](../../../i678.photobucket.com/albums/vv150/jbadiorama/08.jpg)