Looking very good Robin.

Some very neat work on those telegraph poles.

T9ny

Robin

Very interesting update on those water effects.

it is surprising how the prices have gone up on some of these items.

Not sure what will happen on pricing in the New Year what with all this Brexit stuff and the like. I had a email from a company that produces scale lighting and sound effects for aircraft mainly and they are saying they expect a very large increase (40%) on what is termed the "Toys" category so that puts much of the modelling product into that category.

Guess we will just have to wait and see what happens.

Your sea effect looks very good and I guess if there is a plus side to the costs its the fact you have been able to keep the product for so long without it going off. That is one of the issues I have with superglue. Buy a bottle, use a cocktail sticks with and next time I go to use it its set solid in the bottle :-)

hope all continues well.

Tony

I'm just blown away with the level of detail you've managed to apply to your dio. I'd actually forgotten that the overall size is only around 30cm square. Truly stunning work Robin.....

Regards

Alan

Grateful thanks as always to Tony, Phil, Alan and Mark! I know just what you mean with that super glue Tony - the worst one I used to get was the large bottles of 'Industrial Super Glue' I used to get from the local "Toolshed" shop. It was a brilliant glue but once opened if you didn't use it up within a few months (and I never did) you'd go to use it on something very important and find the entire bottle was a solid lump! Ah, just found one (completely solid) it was called "Ever Build Industrial Grade Superglue", a 20gm bottle, looks like I used about 2-3gms of it!

Anyway. Before carrying on, here’s an earlier shot I didn’t fit into the last posting! Photo 14 shows the entire base right after the last of the ships had been added onto the wet wave medium. The photo above was the one I took much earlier to plan out the positions of the major vessels and as you can see it’s a pretty close match! There’s some very slight differences in the distances between some of the ‘biggies’ (mostly determined by having to avoid some pesky landing craft or DD tank getting in the way), the unloading ships can’t be moved as they had to line up with the troops already glued onto the beach of course. The only real difference is the LSI in the centre which was originally, beached and unloading which I decided to have completely unloaded and in the process of backing off out to sea again. The liquid Realistic Water is shown in Photo 15, note the stern of the LST with the light reflection coming off the now submerged hull. The solidified waves have essentially divided the sea base into a checkerboard with the vertical lines formed by the ships hulls and the horizontal lines by the waves themselves. Each space now has to be filled up with the liquid, which was added in by disposable pipette (although they don’t need disposing using this stuff!) I dripped the liquid in at first but found that introduced too many bubbles so ended up resting the tip on the base and slowly squeezed the Realistic Water in until it spread out and contacted the surrounding hulls and waves. One thing I noticed early on was that the dried and transparent waves went back to white within a few minutes of the liquid going on! However, they do go transparent again as the liquid surface dries off. After filling in the areas where the sinking LCAs and the swimming DD tank were to go I carefully placed each of them down with tweezers as shown in Photos 16 and 17. A few survivors and casualties were added before placing them down with some others added floating in the water too. Photo 17 especially, illustrates the depth of that liquid layer around the beached LCA and the swimming tank (as well as the surf turning white again!) As soon as I’d placed the sinking LCAs in the liquid I had a sudden brainwave (this thing is still evolving as it goes despite all the planning! ) I still had another four fully painted empty LCAs to add on, these were planned to be either reversing out or heading back out to sea and would be added in once the liquid layer was at full depth and hardened off. Grabbing one of these I selected some painted infantry still on their brass fret and cut them off before bending some at the waist so they could lean over the side and others with their arms bent forward being dragged on board. And so in Photo 18, I now have a rescue LCA to place alongside the ‘blown in half’, sinking sister craft! The effect of flooding with the liquid medium is shown in Photo 19 with the area between the two wave fronts filled up to just proud of the ship’s hull bottoms. Note that blooming great air bubble under the right hand LSI’s stern! I didn’t even notice that until I checked the photo in the camera view window – soon attacked it with a cocktail stick until it burst! Actually, bursting air bubbles is not as easy as you’d think with this stuff, although its liquid, it still has a slight viscosity and I found that squeezing the last of it out of the pipette introduced many bubbles, especially alongside the ships hulls! Many of the tiddly ones were still there but I managed to hide them away under the waves and wakes, which come later. Talking of which, Photos 20 to 24 illustrates those waves and wakes going in! This was the Water Effects, at first applied with a cocktail stick, but later I discovered it was easier to apply it with a cheapie small paintbrush which, with its longer handle made it easier to get in amongst the armada of ships (but not before the left hand LSI lost her mast cross bar which was super glued back in place!) Photo 25 is not exactly a wave or wake but a splash! I positioned this sinking LCA so it was actually being swamped by the incoming wave. This was the first application of the breaking wave ‘splash’, when this was dried I then ‘topped it up’ with a bit more.
Once the waves and wakes were completed and dried, it was time to begin the painting stage to introduce the foam. I began at the water’s edge on the far left (as seen from out to sea) using Mig Matt White acrylic and, for the area to be covered, a very small brush! The breaking surf was painted in and then blended or faded out by lots of stippling with the brush tip. The stippling was more ‘linear’ at the shore but more random on the waves further out where they were breaking and passing along the ships. When this effect looked OK, it was allowed to dry and then a thicker white for the wave crests was stippled on with a larger brush and my tub of Revel Matt White Aqua Colour. This paint has aged into almost a tooth paste consistency compared to the ultra liquid Mig and is perfect for building up the foam (and hiding any inconvenient air bubbles!) The beach surf is shown in Photos 26 and 27 and the first section with the wave crests and wake is seen in the final Photo 28.
In the next installment, finishing off the water with some exploding shells and a final micro ‘vignette’ of figures for the beach before getting those telephone poles fitted in at last!
Until then, Stay safe and Happy Modelling to you All!

Robin.

Whaahoo

That's some amount of detail

Really like the explosion in the sea

Lookin' forward to your next update

Grateful thanks as always to Budgie and Tony for their lovely comments again! (You were quite right in your um, earlier comments Budgie! The water is decidedly 'purplish' compared to what it started out as - an unexpected reaction between the printer ink and the resin I think. The red bits only appear in the digital photos thankfully, the lighting for my workroom comes from two 5 metre white LED strips, glued and pinned to the ceiling, I normally only use the one but switch in the second when I'm doing really small detail painting. (I'll try and show a photo of them in the next posting). It's a beautiful light for modelling but tends to bleach out some colours when photographing the results! In real life the sea doesn't look half as bad!
OK then...
The first stage for the telephone wires was to glue the four previously constructed poles into the base. The locations were carefully drilled out with the appropriate drill bit using a hand held micro drill. This was not as straight forward as it might seem as the drill bit was so small (and therefore short) and I had to take care that the drill chuck was held dead vertical and the overhanging jaws of the chuck didn’t inadvertently grind away at the adjacent moulded resin walls! This mainly affected the second to fourth poles, the first was on the corner of the shop pavement and fortunately I had a bit of luck here. You may notice in Photos 1 and 4 that the double shops and the half timber house are no longer on the base. Whilst this is not exactly an endorsement of my gluing prowess it did prove extremely useful allowing me much more leeway to get in over the diorama for the more ‘fiddly’ bits. (Actually the whole flaming procedure was fiddly but some bits more than others!) I glued those buildings on with a large tube of standard poly glue (same stuff as you used to get in those little soft clear capsules included with old Airfix and Frog kits – anybody remember those little things?) Anyway the glue was donkey’s years old but still looked useable so I used it! Whilst trying to test fit the poles in their holes I leant my fingers against the models and they both popped off. The other shop and the first house are as solid as a rock – with the same glue. So anyway, Photo 1, minus the shops shows the two poles on the left of the base from the back and Photo 2 shows the other two on the right. The poles were glued in with Deluxe Card Glue, which gives enough fiddle time to ensure the poles are standing at 90 degrees before it goes hard. Photo 3 was the first one I managed to take with the auto focus fixing its attention on the pole instead of the background! Applying a drop of super glue by cocktail stick to the inner white insulator I managed to hold the end of the Uschi Standard Size Rigging thread in place long enough for the glue to hold on to it as shown here. My initial plan of holding the line for gluing to each pole in turn proved more fiddly than I’d thought but a fortunate accident (all right I dropped the flipping bobbin onto the base) proved a blessing in disguise. As you can see in Photo 4, the bobbin (looking like that rocket powered beach clearing Panjandrum experiment that didn’t make it to D-Day) is resting on the road with enough weight in it to keep the elastic thread taut over the poles. All I then had to do was to position the thread so it ran over the inner insulator on the second pole and then touch it with a drop of super glue on the stick again to fix it in place. Then just carefully move the bobbin off the right side of the base placing the thread over the other two poles on the inner locations before super gluing them too. Once all the poles were fitted with the first wire, the thread was snipped off about a half inch beyond the last pole and gripping the excess with tweezers it was gently pulled taut and then snipped off right against the pole with the micro scissors. As it was under tension, the tiny bit standing proud of the pole then shrank back flush. The same was then done to the spare piece at the beginning on the first pole. This procedure was then repeated with the other two threads until the triple wires were finished as seen in Photos 5 and 6 with a closer view in Photo 7.
And so, on to the final additions to the diorama – the rest of the ship-borne Barrage Balloons. I’d already cast the remaining balloons some time ago when I made up the first one, all that was needed was to cut them off the resin sprue, sand down the nose and any flash on the fins and drill out the holes in the belly before super gluing the 0.2mm lengths of brass wire. Once that was done the five balloons were primed with Vallejo Grey Primer and then, unlike the prototype which was spray painted with a silver car spray and then matt varnished, the new ones were brush painted with Mig Matt Aluminium acrylic. Then came the period of muttering and cursing as the Uschi Rigging Thread (same one as for the telephone wires) was super glued on for the bracing wires followed by the EZ Line brown elastic thread for the guiding ropes. The trouble with model barrage balloons is once you’ve made a couple you suddenly have an infestation of the little blighters – buzzing around your ears and crawling around the ceiling! Fortunately I found this excellent ‘Dawn Patrol’ Barrage Balloonicide! A couple of squirts and they drop like flies as seen in Photo 8 . Anyhow, once the little blighters were subdued it was possible to carefully cut the trailing wire to size and insert the end into the previously drilled holes in the stern section of the LSIs and LCTs. The LSIs have a winch already moulded on the deck so the hole was drilled right beside that. The LCTs don’t have any winch as part of the model but they do have a convenient round thingy in the deck just behind the bridge so that’ll do! Photo 9 shows one of the LSI Balloons in close up showing the black bracing cables and the brown guide ropes ‘blowing around’. Finally, Photo 10 shows the entire compliment of Balloons in position. They should really be about three times that high but then I’d have to make the display case three times higher too!
In the next (and possibly final) installment, its time to make up the diorama nameplate and the Perspex cover so until then…
Stay safe and Happy Modelling to you All!

Robin.

Many thanks for those kind words Mark and Happy New Year to you All!
As promised last time, and prompted by darbyvet’s excellent LED tutorial, before continuing with the nameplate design, here’s a photo of the lighting arrangement in my attic workroom (and yes, it usually is this disorganised!) During the years before the little skylight was fitted in, this was the only light source for the workroom apart from a five foot fluorescent tube at the other end of the attic. The pics have their own descriptions but from left to right we have the original set up with a single low wattage light bulb/tube – this is a 20W bayonet bulb which gives (eventually) the equivalent of a 100W ‘normal’ bulb. As mentioned in the text, the problem with these, apart from the obvious yellow tint to the light is the length of time they take to get to their full intensity.
I replaced this bulb with a five metre strip of LEDs supplied on a roll with self adhesive backing. These actually use more power than the 20W bulb, drawing about 60W but are inherently safer as they run on only 12v from a plug in adapter. (Although I say ‘replaced’ it’s actually ‘added to’ as the bulb is still there if needed.) The strip is self adhesive as mentioned, but when ‘sticking’ to a bare pinewood ceiling, it needs a little help so I’ve actually pinned the strip using the tiny brass pins from my ship planking supply, driven into the strip using a pin pusher in the spaces between the LEDs. Incidentally, these are the LED strips without the waterproof clear rubber covering – I did have one of those for the second strip but the rubber reduces the light output quite a bit! Despite the higher electricity cost (only pennies) the light is brighter, whiter and instant (the ‘cool white’ LEDs are the best, ‘warm white’ gives you the yellow tint back again). Finally on the right are both of the strips in operation. Strangely, the digital camera shows little difference in the light intensity between one and two strips but in actual fact both strips are considerably brighter to the naked eye. I only use both for really close up stuff (like painting those 1/700 scale figures) and avoid having both on when photographing the models, although the workroom doesn’t look very different in these photos, photographing the model directly under the lights bleaches out the colours when both are on. The strips were purchased on ebay (of course) and work out around £12 or so for a five metre strip including the 12v power supply. For a couple of pounds more you can get them with a diddy little remote control to switch them on and off or even dim them down!

So, on to designing the nameplate(s) for the base. Photo 1 illustrates the actual design which was put together with Corel Print House with the two flags coming from clip art found on the web. The design once completed was then printed out onto plain paper, altering the dimensions until the design fitted the wooden frame nicely. Once that was done I then created a second Corel page and inserted the design (previously saved as a jpeg) into it, duplicated it once to get two images and then printed it out onto white inkjet decal paper as seen below.
The next step was to create the actual frame and plaque onto which the decals would be applied. This is shown in Photo 2 with a frame of 1mm square plastic rod poly-glued onto a 1mm plasticard sheet. If you look closely at the corners you’ll see they are not exactly neat and tidy at this stage – this doesn’t matter though as the excess bits are cut off once the glue is dried. The design shown above, which the frame pieces were glued around isn’t actually the decal but the plain paper printing which first gave me the size to work to! The following day I was able to remove the plaque from the sheet by placing a craft knife up against the frame, then placing a steel rule against the blade and scribing along and through the sheet, pressing outwards against the steel guide to avoid cutting into the frame itself. The separated plaque is shown in Photo 3. Once free of the sheet material I could then trim those corners back and gently sand down the edges of the frame/backing sheet to end up with the nice smooth and clean article as shown in Photo 4.
Once the first one was finished, it was much easier to produce the second, using the first for all the dimensions as in Photo 5, as you can see, I just managed to get two frames out of the width of the sheet! Photo 6 shows the test fit on the wooden base, its always a nice feeling when the nameplate is willing to stay where its going without any glue – makes keeping it in place when the time comes much easier!
I’ve now gone back to my original plan for the diorama’s dust/display cover in Perspex. I did think about having it cover the entire base and the nameplates but that would have required an extra sub-base, possibly MDF with a groove for the case to sit in. As I haven’t got any MDF I’ve gone back to the original plan of having the cover sit on the contoured rim visible just below the top of the wood (which runs behind the plaque). The next job was to prime the plaques. Photo 7 shows the pair of them after temporarily gluing their backs to a bamboo skewer with Deluxe Card Glue. This is strong enough to fix them in place but still allows them to be pulled off again later. Both plaques were then sprayed with Poundshop Matt Black Car Primer – this was the “Prodrive” range which was excellent for both grey and black primers, sadly the ones they stock now are a different make, if you want a good shiny grey just use their current ‘matt’ grey primer! I tried two different finishes for the raised frames as shown in Photo 8, the lower one was Vallejo Metallic Brass acrylic applied by brush and the top one was gold leaf applied with the ‘proper’ metal leaf size (acrylic glue). I didn’t much like the gold leaf version but as that might have been due to the gold leaf being a few years old by now, I decided to send off on ebay for some imitation gold leaf and try again. The new sheets duly arrived and I repeated the process, this time using a Humbrol gloss enamel varnish for the size but still preferred the Vallejo Brass paint. The gold effect looked too bright and garish for me so in the end I repainted the leaf with the brass to end up with two (virtually) identical plaques. The first one (the original brass) is shown in detail in Photo 9. If you look at the ‘B’ in “Beach” you’ll notice a thin line through it and the text below! Only after I’d printed, lacquered, cut out and Decalfixed the decal did I realise that I had another newer pack of white inkjet decal paper and I’d actually used the last part sheet from my original pack from a few years ago! It would appear that there is a scratch or something running through the sheet and when it was loosened in the solution and coming off the backing paper the decal (in fact both of the decals) split at that part of the design so I had to apply the thing in two parts and slide the bits together. Fortunately, its much more noticeable in the close up than on the real thing . Anyway, they’ve come out pretty well overall and are just awaiting the completion of the Perspex cover before getting permanently glued in position.
The final installment will therefore be the clear cover and for this one I’m using an entirely new type of glue – of which I only have a tiny amount, enough to glue the four sides together which I’ve already done, but not enough to fix the ‘roof’ on with - so I’m waiting now on a bigger supply from ebay. Having done the sides though I can safely say the new method beats the old ‘plastic weld solvent’ technique hands down!
More on that in the next installment!
Until then, stay safe, Happy New Year and Happy Modelling to you All!

Robin.

Love the display plaque. That is going to be one great display piece when complete.

Mark

Grateful thanks again to Tony, Mark and Budgie!

Well, here it is, the final installment of Sword Beach! I've built individual 1/700 scale ships before (mainly in my teens) and I've discovered about a dozen unstarted kits out in the old workroom including some Matchbox and Tamiyas, some of them still have the old price tags on (and what a difference to today!)But this is definitely the largest diorama I've ever done in this scale. With all the scratch building and resulting rubber moulds I've now got, I think there might be some more in the future!
Ok then, carrying on from the last posting, here’s that glue I was talking about in Photo 10. You may have seen it advertised here and there, it’s the new UV curing type! I believe this stuff was actually invented by a dentist and was based on the modern type of fillings which, if you’ve ever had them (I have) end up with a strong UV lamp being stuck in your mouth to cure the filling material. I actually bought this set as a part of a mail order to try and repair a broken glass ornament (a glass goblet with a cat hanging off the rim and a little mouse sat inside it!) The goblet had broken at the base of the neck, the info said suitable for glass and we needed a small purchase to take us over the free postage limit – so I did! I tried it on the glass and it stuck it perfectly first time. I then used it on a couple of display cases bought on ebay to glue the parts together (Frederick the Victorious and the Chindit) and it worked great on the clip together Perspex sides and top as well so I thought I’d give it a go on a DIY case this time. Until now I’ve always used the plastic-weld type of glue, it does the job but I’ve always found it difficult to get a fine balance between gluing the acrylic sheeting firmly enough and using too much weld which can fog the clear plastic with the fumes. This glue works out quite dear buying it through a catalogue but you can find this same set on ebay for about half the price. There was enough glue left in the squeezy plastic dispenser to fix the four sides together but probably not enough for the top section as well so I sent off for a set of three little 10gm bottles of the stuff which come with a little push in applicator brush for each bottle, gram for gram the bottles work out much cheaper too. The bottles are made of black plastic and come inside a black polythene bag to shield the contents from sunlight which would obviously set the glue curing before it needed to! The Perspex sheet was a 4 x 2ft acrylic, sold in DIY stores for various applications – in fact I bought two sheets quite cheaply a couple of years ago, the sale stock when B&Q decided to close down our local store (damn their eyes!) It’s now a trendy (AKA expensive) electrical outlet, which is no use to me at all! Photo 11 and the close up Photo 12 shows the sheet laying flat on the kitchen table (it’s too big for the workroom bench), clamped at one end under an aluminium ruler for a straight edge ready to score the cut line. A steel one would be better, I did look on ebay – nearly had a heart attack at the price of a steel one metre rule! Photo 12 also shows the Olfa Cutter blade (upside down as it won’t balance the right way up). This is used in a series of light scribing motions, running down the edge of the ruler until the score is deep enough to go harder. For the last few cuts I usually remove the ruler and pull the blade freehand through the deep groove to finish off the extreme ends. The groove should ideally be around half the depth of the acrylic but I prefer to go to around three quarters to be sure of breaking the line cleanly. Although not shown here (I’d need four hands for that) the sheet is snapped along the cut by lining the scoured groove with the edge of the table or bench and pressing down on the overhanging section until it fractures the remaining material. This is always a nerve-wracking part, no matter how many you’ve done in the past! By taking the groove down past the halfway mark you can usually get the sheet to split gently in stages along the line instead of all at once like cutting a pane of glass (I’m absolutely hopeless at that!)
Once successfully cut, the backing polythene sheet is peeled back from the edge to be glued and a thin bead of the UV gel is applied along the ‘touching’ edge as seen in Photo 13 (excuse the slight off focus, its that auto focus thing on a transparent surface again!) To hold the two sides in tight contact, I used my brilliant Copydex (remember their glues?) Picture Frame (Mitre) Clamp as seen in Photos 14 and 15. This is a very old piece of kit, which I bought for just a couple of pounds on ebay a few years ago. Brilliantly simple in operation, a pair of spring loaded arms, which grip the wooden frames within a right angled mitre box. As you can see here, it is designed to grip a frame over half an inch thick, and because the acrylic is only 2mm I had to place some scrap wood blocks between the Perspex and the arms. With the two sheets firmly in place and the UV glue squashed between them it was then just a matter of slowly moving the UV torch along the join to cure the glue within seconds. If I’d cut some more wood pieces I could have done all four corners at the same time, as it was I did them one at a time, resting the opposite ends in one of the other clamps until all four were completed as seen in Photo 16.
Now came the moment of truth! I carefully picked up the four sided open box and lowered it down onto the rim running along the top part of the wooden frame – it fitted! It wouldn’t be the first time one of these cases didn’t fit though – measure, check, measure and check again then cut out and the ruddy thing somehow lost a mm somewhere during the process! This time however, bang on as seen in Photo 17. With the side walls ok, it was now the turn of the roof section. Photo 18 illustrates the ‘play safe’ strategy, instead of accurately measuring the top I deliberately made it about half an inch over-sized. In this shot the back and side out of the picture are sitting flush on the walls so I could then mark the remaining side and front of the top, dead on with the walls underneath it. After scoring and snapping off the excess the top was now a perfect fit, with the removed strips seen down the front in Photo 19.
With the top section cut and ready I now had to carefully peel down the outer layer of protective polythene from the top of the walls as shown in Photo 20. This was to remove any possibility of the UV gel from ‘wicking’ under the film before it was cured, the inner polythene layer was also removed from the roof piece as well. Photo 21 is a more unusual angle looking through the removed film at the front, at this stage the roof still has its top film in place apart from the edges, which are peeled back like the walls. I then applied the UV glue to the edges of the roof section, lowered it carefully down in position and then went slowly around the edge with the UV light, maintaining a slight pressure on the roof to ensure the glue was in contact with both surfaces as the UV set the bond. After completion I left the case overnight to make sure it was fully cured (leaving it on a sunny windowsill would have been quicker though) and next day was able to gently peel the remainder of the polythene film away as seen during the procedure in Photo 22. With all the film removed the case appeared as in Photo 23, the brighter beach is caused by the fact I had the old low wattage lamp (mentioned in the last posting) on (with its yellowy tint) whilst I was looking further back the attic for my sheet of blue cartridge paper to take the ‘proper’ final shot shown in Photo 24. Yes, I forgot it was still on!
All that remains to complete this very enjoyable project (which has run nearly 18 months longer than initially intended) is to glue on the two nameplates and then to get in close and get those photos for the finished model gallery which is – coming soon!
Many grateful thanks to you all for the wonderful and encouraging comments over the build and I hope you have enjoyed seeing this one come together as much as I have putting it together! It’s a major clear up under way at the moment in the workroom – there’s a rumour that there is actually a work bench somewhere under all that Normandy debris, if there is, its high time that poor old Victory had some time spent on it!

Until next time, stay safe and Happy Modelling to you All!

Robin.