Many thanks for that Paul!
Well here goes my first attempt at a 'long distance diary'!
Photos 1 and
2 illustrate the tiny size of the
Juweela ceramic bricks. Normally the penny shot does the trick but in this case even that didn’t do the shot justice! In
Photo 2 the same bricks are shown in the palm of my hand!
Before the building work can begin, some of the microscopic things may need a little clean up work, but more on that a little later. The first job was to work out the actual size that the Dispersal Hut would have to be. This was accomplished by freeze framing various shots of the hut from the
Battle of Britain film DVD and literally counting the bricks from one end to the other. With the number of bricks worked out, I could then carefully place individual bricks in a line (up against a steel ruler) to work out the overall length in 1/72 scale.
Photo 3 shows the full length of the wall, the model will be slightly shorter than this, approximately half way between the last two pillars.
With the length secured, the next job was to determine the height of the walls.
Photo 4 shows a part of the plasticard building jig being used to form a channel for the bricks to be placed edge on as they would be in the wall. As it turned out, trying to place 29 bricks together proved a little difficult, after 10 or more, the stack of bricks would suddenly pop out of the channel! After the third attempt I just measured the 10, doubled it and added another 9 to get the final height for the wall!
Now that I had both measurements, I could make up the pre-formed wall jig as seen in
Photo 5. The jig is made out of a form of thick plasticard, but not, as far as I’m aware, one available in model shops!
Many years ago my brother used to work in the local Boots warehouse (Boots the high street shop that is, NOT a warehouse full of boots!)
Back then Boots used to stock records and Cds and the racks of music were separated by glossy black plastic dividers made of - that’s right, shiny black plasticard! When the stores were re-designed all of that lovely plastic was thrown away, well, some of it was! Most of my stock is A5 sized but somewhere out in the garage workroom I’m sure I’ve still got some pristine A4 as well. The first task was to cut out an ‘L’ shaped base on which to build the actual wall. In the film, the Dispersal Hut is sat on a concrete pad and the ‘L’ base will become the part of the pad which shows beyond the wall. You can just make out two pencil lines along the short side of the ‘L’, the one on the left is the full width of the hut, the other one marks the part of the hut which will actually feature in the model. The pad was fixed to the melamine board by a series of small holes drilled through the plasticard with a brass pin threaded through a length of yellow wire insulation and hammered in tight. When it comes time to remove the finished hut, the pins can be pulled out by gripping the insulation with pliers. Also seen in
Photo 5 is the wall former in two sections. I was originally going to cut out the door and windows but in the end it was easier to glue thicker plasticard formers in place and brick around them as will be seen later. Using the mini set square, the two wall sections were glued together and once dry placed inside the ‘L’ at which point the remaining rectangular part of the base (also pre-drilled for the pins) was pushed in place to securely wedge the walls in position. (As seen in
Photo 8).
As I mentioned earlier, some of the myriad bricks will need a little cleaning up before use. Over half of them are perfectly good to use straight away, but the rest may have a tiny ‘rim’ of ceramic material left over from the moulding process. For most of them, this is just a tiny little knob sticking out on one or more sides. If you are making a wall ‘freehand’ then this tiny ridge is irrelevant and can be ignored. If, like me however, you are using a former to place the bricks up to, then any protruding edge will force the brick out of alignment and needs to be removed.
Photo 6 illustrates a ‘naughty brick’ with the little knobs and also a complete rim around the bottom. I began by actually filing and sanding the rims away but in the end discovered that it was far simpler to just run a safety razor blade down the sides to clean up the edges as seen in
Photo 7.
In
Photo 8, the wall building begins. At this point there is no sign of the door opening in the wall, there is a concrete step outside of the raised floor level which is three bricks up from the ground. I started from the small end wall in the corner and worked outwards in both directions. Note the corner ‘pillar’ which is matched by a further three along the length of the hut, (the end wall would have had a central pillar if the model hut had extended that far!)
According to the Juweela instructions, the bricks can be glued with either ‘standard model cement’ or tile cement (grout?) It would be interesting to try the tile cement but in this case I decided to go with a super glue gel, (a
Poundshop pack of three to be exact). Once the first layer or course of bricks was down, I found the best method was to apply a little bead of gel with a cocktail stick on either side of the brick joint as shown in
Photo 9. The beauty of the glossy plasticard is that the inevitable bleed through of super glue onto the wall former doesn’t have a good grip on the shiny surface and after every row of bricks the former can be flexed free.
The one thing that becomes apparent when building the wall is that not all the bricks are exactly the same size depth wise. Some are a little thinner and the odd one is a little thicker. This means that after each row of bricks is finished, a check has to be made to see if any ‘lumps and bumps’ are visible. Usually there’s not too much to bother about, a thinner block can be put right with a thicker drop of gel but a thicker one will need to be sanded down before the next row goes on top. After some various trials, the best tool for this turned out to be the
Poundshop emery board nail files as seen in
Photo 10. The bricks are quite soft and can be sanded down easily. They can also be cut to size for half bricks etc by simply pressing down on the top with a safety razor blade, much in the same way that the full size bricks are cut with a hammer and chisel (
something I’ve never been that good at!) As you can see, there’s quite a bit of brick dust produced which needs to be removed before the wall former can go back into the channel again. Many years ago I bought a ’mini dust buster’ type of tool, not much bigger than a couple of tubes of toothpaste, it’s really coming into it’s own now!
So that’s it for now, in the next instalment the walls go higher and the first door and window formers go on to allow those openings to be produced in the brickwork. Very soon, the Battle of Britain film is going to overtake Star Wars as my most watched movie, AND the Aces High theme is fast becoming an integral part of my daily waking life - it’s a good job it was already my most favourite tune of all, (with 633 Squadron a close runner up!)
Until next time, happy modelling to you all!
Robin
Plymouth57 attached the following image(s):
First wooden ship:
The Grimsby 12 Gun 'Frigate' by Constructo Second:
Bounty DelPrado Part Works Third:
HMS Victory DelPrado Part Works 1/100 scale
Diorama of the Battle of the Brandywine from the American Revolutionary War Diorama of the Battle of New Falkland (unfinished sci-fi), Great War Centenary Diorama of the Messines Ridge Assault
Index for the Victory diary is on page 1
US
