Many thanks to the Alans! Read on and you're both 'mentioned in despatches'!
OK then, here’s part two of the
Flag Locker Saga!
I’ll start off with the shot of the finished Transom Knees from Part One. In the first photo,
Photo 6 you can see the finished Knee assembly with the cap for the Ensign glued on top. In this shot the cap has only been painted in Admiralty Black and hasn’t been dry-brushed to bring out it’s angles yet.
And now on to the Flag Lockers! (These are the two large wooden storage lockers situated on the poop deck from where the signal pennants are retrieved to be sent up the halyards. The flags used to spell out Nelson's famous "England expects etc etc" signal would have been taken from here (usually by a young Midshipman). To begin with I had fully intended to build these items out of the grating strips previously used within the decks, but when I checked the old first grating which used to sit on top of the Foc’sl deck I found a problem – using
that grating, I would only get a grid of six along and two high giving me only twelve pennant ‘cubicles’ for the locker, which, in reality, has ten cubicles along and four high, a total of forty! Some difference! It was at this point that I decided I’d have a go at trying for the full complement of cubicles by once again going down the same route of the hull entry steps – ‘drastic plastic!’ Not only would it be plastic, it would be the
same plastic that I used for those steps. The first step (sorry, unintentional!) therefore was to measure up the dimensions from the McKay drawings and construct a basic frame out of the 0.8 x 2.5mm plastic strip. My ‘cheapo’ guillotine cutter came in very useful here giving a nice right angled cut each time. Once that was done and super glued together (probably the fiddliest part of the whole build) three more strips were cut to fit snugly inside that frame running horizontally from side to side, giving me the four tiers of cubicles. After that came the next most fiddly part, forming the vertical joiners to create the square pennant cubicles. These were so small that it proved impossible to achieve an exact result on the guillotine so I ended up cutting each one by hand with the safety razor blade. It was a slightly hit and miss technique, the tiny bits of plastic had to be large enough to just wedge themselves in the gap between the longitudinal bars but not
too loose that they would fall flat inside before they could be glued in position. As it happened, even being ‘just right’ would very slightly push the long strips out of true which meant that the next one above or below it would be correspondingly smaller to fit the thinner gap. The beginning of this procedure can be seen in
Photo 7.
The spacers were fed into the gap held by tweezers and once just sitting in position and held firm by their own pressure, secured in place by a cocktail stick applied drop of super in both corners. NOTE! They were only super-glued at the back face of the grid, this kept the face that would eventually be on view much cleaner.
It was at this point, when I had already put some hours of work into the project (
time really flies when you’re engrossed in this kind of sub-miniature work!) that a little niggle began to grow in the back of my mind. It was something to do with reading up on the excellent diaries from
Gandale and his SOTS, and
Sparks and his twin of my DelPrado Victory. Something about wooden gratings it was. I knew that from Sparks diary, he had made his lockers using wooden grating strips but had got far more cubicles into them then I would have using my pack of strips. And as for Gandale, Alan had mentioned more than once that he had replaced the kit 2mm grating material with 1mm to achieve a better result.
2mm grating?
1mm grating? I then got hold of my steel rule and measured my Constructo pack grating – 2mm!
2mm?, then you can get grating packs in
ONE MM? The penny suddenly dropped. After all these years of modelling it had never occurred to me that there were finer grating strips available than the ones I had bought in the local model shop! Despite all the references in the various diaries on here I had never looked at gratings on the CMB website. I now realised how Sparks had got a much smaller grid using wooden strip than I was going to get! As I looked at the beginnings of my plastic creation I decided rats to it! In the words of Magnus Magnusson
“I’ve started so I’ll finish!”
Photo 8 shows the size of these little spacers. Actually, as the grid progressed it became easier and easier to judge the actual size required for the next piece to fit in and, if it was just oversized I just kept it back for the next row, every bit would fit somewhere, even if it
wasn’t where initially intended! Although as I said, the longitudinal bars were slightly displaced by the spacers, it was only apparent when looking straight at the grid lying flat on the bench, once it was upright and the point of view was from further above, it wasn’t noticeable at all.
Photo 9 is the completed first locker front standing up approximately in the correct spot, as I said, any irregularity in the grid isn’t that noticeable, (well, it doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb anyway!).
Now came the reason why I had to wait until my weekly trip into Plymouth last weekend. I had plenty of plastic strip material in my packet to make the grids but I didn’t have the plasticard sheet to make up the rest of the locker body. In actual fact, that’s
not exactly true, I
do have quite a lot of plasticard in various thicknesses! Unfortunately, all my store is located in my old workroom which was built onto the back of the family garage. There is only one door in and out of that room and to get to it would mean organising a week long expedition to fight my way back through mopeds, garden tools and God knows what else – far easier to wait until Saturday! I
was pleasantly surprised at the cost of the sheet though, whilst nearly everything else in the modelling world seems to have gone through the roof since my youth, the 0.8mm A4 sheet was £1.50 from the local Antics. (Talking of going through the roof, the roof of my old workroom is screwed down ‘wriggly tin’ and yes, I
did consider it!).
Finally armed with my plasticard, work could resume and the first parts to be added were the side panels as can be seen in
Photos 10 and
11. These were carefully shaped not only to fit the curve of the transom but also to slightly slope down back towards the stern. Two reasons for that, firstly the McKay drawing does seem to show a slight slope (so there!) and secondly, the actual front plastic grid was a mm or so higher than intended (I probably didn’t add the thickness of the bottom frame in when I calculated it, but it was far too late by then!) if the locker went back straight and level it would be a little proud of the transom in the outer corners. That little slope took care of that.
The next job was to add the top of the locker on. This was made oversized depth-wise, from the same cut strip as the sides came from as can be seen in
Photo 12. Also in that photo is a piece of thin plywood, which has nothing to do with the lockers as such. I think this is the sheet I used to scratch build the internal decks for the stern cabins, the curve on it was cut to match the internal curve of the plywood kit part which the metal decorative stern plate glued onto. That curve exactly matched the inner transom curve (which is probably not surprising as it’s the same piece of wood after all!) The two pencil marks indicate the ends of the locker against the stern so it became a ready made stencil to mark the plastic roof for trimming as you can see.
In
Photo 12 both the lockers are made up and resting in position. As you might have noticed in photos 10 and 11, the port locker looks a little incomplete but there’s a very good reason for that as can be seen in the next two photos.
Photos 14 and
15 illustrate the creation of the canvas covers which, during normal sailing conditions covered up the flag lockers to protect the pennants inside. The covers were formed from the Decra-Led strip which I have been using throughout this build. The strip itself is about 8mm in width which is just slightly too thin for the covers. This was rectified by a simple bashing with a flat headed hammer on a piece of steel which not only makes the strip wider by making it thinner (more to a scale thickness in fact) but also imparts a rough texture to the lead which is a pretty good approximation of scale canvas.
Two covers were cut from the flattened strip, the one for the port locker was cut to size and the cut out for the knee removed. The cover for the starboard locker was only cut for width, the ‘drop’ didn’t matter as this was going to be the opened locker and the cover would be rolled up on top. This is why I didn’t bother to finish all the spacers in the port locker; apart from a few on the left side, all the others were going to be obscured under the canvas. I might be obsessed with details but if nobody’s going to see all that work then

(EXPLETIVE DELETED)

it! The lead sheet was formed around a largish sewing needle held in the modeller's vice as can be seen in
Photo 14. The partially opened sheet was wound around the needle until just the finished cubicles were on view, the other one was wound up completely except for a thin ‘tail’ which was flattened out with the safety razor blade, it would be this flap which would be glued to the top of the locker. On the partially opened canvas, the sheet wasn’t quite wide enough to form the flap so a separate piece of lead was cut and painted and stuck along the top, the actual cover was simply glued to the front of the locker.
The last piece of the plastic locker body is shown in
Photo 16. I’d noticed that when peering into the lockers once in position, I could just make out the transom and knees inside which, if the cubicles had gone all the way back as in real life,
wouldn’t be possible. There were two possible solutions, paint the inside of the transom and the deck matt black or build a ‘blind’ of some sort to block off the inside. Painting the stern and deck would have been ok, but one little slip of the brush and there would have been loads of quick clean up work to do so I went for option two. I just cut a simple slanting inner wall which runs from the bottom cubicle to just inside the knee position at the top, painted the inside matt black and glued it in. Done!
All that remained then was to give the locker bodies a coat of matt black followed when dry by Admiralty Dull Black so the lockers would match up to the other black items on deck, paint the canvas covers with an undercoat of Admiralty White followed by a couple of coats of ‘off-white’ (Admiralty White plus a tiny drop of Yellow Ochre) to simulate the weathered canvas which was finished off with a little touch of that Humbrol Dark Brown enamel wash for the shadows and a dry-brushing of white to complete. The final result can be seen in
Photo 17 in isolation and
Photo 18 in position on the deck. They are not glued down yet though, I need to drill the transom for the various cleats and also to add the iron Horse to the middle knees.
I quite enjoyed this little project, despite all the fiddly work, tweezer sprung spacers flying into orbit and the hammering the hell out of my lead sheet! All in all though, I like them a lot!
Happy building to All and my apologies to the two Alans for
not reading their diaries close enough.
Doh!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