Welcome to the great project (or experiment) for 2026! After a brief flurry the poor old Victory is again sidelined, although I’ll try to do some more on her when I can. The ultimate aim is shown in Photo 1 – a 1:200 scale model of the World War One fast Cruiser HMS Lion. This is a card/paper model kit by the Polish company GPM which comes in a big A3 book consisting of 8 pages of fairly thick card, about the same number in paper which are designed to be glued first onto 1mm thick base card before cutting out plus a few more pages of 3D diagrams and instructions and the history of the Lion herself. That’s the eventual goal except that my intention is to use the kit as a template to build the model in plasticard or styrene sheet together with some home cast resin pieces (for multiple items) and also a few basic (very basic) 3D printed bits as well. Now this will either be a stupendous looking model – or a complete disaster. So instead of jumping straight in I thought I’d give the technique a trial run first with something a) much simpler and b) much smaller. The object of this diary therefore is another WW1 subject and also another Polish company’s card model – the 1:100 scale Royal Navy Monitor by WAK – HMS M15.
Now I’ve been working slowly forward on this model since before Christmas but just like the Lion project I didn’t want to start a diary until I was sure that this one wasn’t going to be a disaster too – this is my first attempt at a card to plasticard conversion (I could have tried the WW1 MkI British Tank or the WW2 Cromwell Tank which I also have card kits waiting for the same treatment which would have been simpler still but I decided to stick with the ship theme, plus I bought the M15 years before all the others, just after the Sopwith Pups project in fact. So far it’s going pretty well, there’s a slight bulge in the hull which shouldn’t be there, but as I’m going for a waterline model for this one, a bit of choppy water spray should come in handy there!
Photos 2 and 3 show the WAK prototype model, I contacted the company in Poland and they kindly gave me permission to use any of their publicity shots in the build diary so you can at least see what my efforts should have looked like! I should have taken more notice of the dimensions of the model though, I thought it was a lot smaller than this – at 1:100 scale she’s the same scale as my Del Prado Victory, The Victory with a crew of 850 is 26 inches long (excluding the bowsprit), the M15 with a crew of only 69 is 20 inches long in the same scale!
So in the pages to come we’ll see how the conversion takes place and the lessons to be learned for the Lion’s eventual (I hope) turn.
The M15 Class Monitor was designed not as a full on warship but as a Shore Bombardment Vessel. Horatio Nelson once said “Only a fool fights a fort with a ship”, these ships were designed to do just that! There were fourteen vessels in her class all built in 1915 under the War Emergency Program (which meant that they built the things quicker than we build their models!) She was laid down on the 1st of March 1915 in Hartlepool and launched almost two months later on the 28th of April. She was completed in June and towed to Malta to receive her main armament of a 9.2 inch gun. M15 and her next three sisters received a spare gun on a MkX mounting originally meant for the Drake and Cressy Class cruisers along with a 12pdr QF gun for self defence and a 6pdr Hotchkiss HA gun for air defence. The remaining ten ships had the same gun with a MkVI mount. Six of the class later had those 9.2 inch guns removed (to be turned into ground based artillery) and replaced with 7.5 inch cannon. There were subtle differences between the ships which I’ll mention during the build. M15 herself took part in the Third Battle of Gaza where she shelled the Turkish shore installations and also defended the Suez Canal. On the 11th of November 1917 she was torpedoed along with the destroyer HMS Staunch almost a mile off the coast in three hundred feet of water by the enemy submarine UC-38 with the loss of 26 of her crew. Altogether three of the class were lost to enemy action during the war. Regarded as generally good vessels, they did have a tendency to suddenly roll from side to side. One in the Thames estuary was recorded as having rolled suddenly by 90 degrees – 45 to port and then back again and 45 to starboard! Most were subsequently scrapped in the 1920’s, the last survivor was M23 which became a Drill Ship and lasted until 1959.
As a postscript, in 2020 the Palestinian Hamas group dived on the war grave of M15 and removed the large calibre shells to recover the high explosives.
In the first part of the build I’ll be adapting a common tool to begin the frame construction.
Until then, Happy Modelling to you All!

Robin.