Grateful thanks again to Tony, Kev and Alan! Currently working on the last of the ships - a trio of LSMs or Landing Ship Mechanical (or sometimes Medium). These are the bigger of the LCTs with opening bows like a car ferry. I thought they would be the easiest of the vessels to make and paint but they're not! The cargo deck is not as wide as the smaller type and the hull sides are higher which makes getting the paintbrush in to get a good straight line flipping difficult! More on them later!
Tony, my first attempt into resin casting was with the American Alumilite product which I bought through the Hobby's catalogue. Its a good resin but quite pricey over here, but then I discovered a British company called DWR Plastics which, in my opinion is superior in every way. First of all its far cheaper as you'll see below and on top of that I think its a finer or more fluid mix which takes up better detail in the mould. I use the Fast Cure Beige resin which is mixed 1:1 A and B. Once mixed you only have about 3 minutes to get it poured in before the curing begins and the hardened casting can be removed after about 30 minutes. I have tried the slow cure version as well which gives about 20 minutes to pour but that needs hours to cure before removing and still takes about 72 hours before its fully hard. On the Chindit bust model I also used the Roto/Slush resin which is a different method to create a hollow casting - more effort but you save a heck of a lot of resin on bigger moulds!
As for the moulds themselves, DWR produce a Silicone rubber and Catalyst set which is excellent - takes a couple of hours to cure at room temperature although an attic workroom at 100 degrees plus can be a problem during a heatwave! The other good point is that the DWR resins are non toxic so there are no problems sanding the stuff afterwards.
The resin begins with 250gm sets for £4.50, 500gm for £9.00 and the one I use now the 1kg set at £14.40 They go all the way up to Jerrycan size for hundreds of pounds but I find the 1kg will be used up before it 'ages' after about 18 months (still usable but not such fine detail)
The rubber is available from 515gm and up, £7.60 for 515gm, £13 for 1.03kg and the one I use now, the 2kg at £23.85. The 1kg comes in a large plastic tub and the 2kg in a larger plastic can. I use it from the tub and simply refill that from the can when it runs out - lass of a footprint on the worktop that way!
The Roto/Slush is slightly dearer at £5.50 for 250gm and £17 for 1kg. On top of the product price its about £5-6 for postage (they're quite heavy!) You will also need a good mini digital scale to accurately weigh the resin or rubber out - mine is a dinky little thing from ebay, measures 5 inches by 3 inches, accurate to 1/100 gram and cost under a fiver! I also bought a pack of 3ml disposable pipettes to measure out the resins and catalyst and a pack of 25ml plastic pots (like you get with cough medicines) to mix the resin in, both packs cost a couple of pounds. To mix up the silicone rubber I use washed out desert pots from Iceland (leave the mixing stick in the pot with the residue and you can pull the rubber skin right off leaving the pot clean again!)
You can find DWR advertising on Ebay or you can go direct to the firm's own mail order site at www.dwrplastics.com I would highly recommend them for beginners, let me know how you get on, its a really fascinating part of this hobby and can save pounds in the long run (look at me - I've got a whole navy now!)

Robin.

Thanks again to Kev and Alan, much appreciated as always! One thing I forgot to say to Tony regarding wastage with home cast resin, what I've done is to have a few moulds around which can be filled in stages without affecting the end result. These are 'dumping moulds' which I can pour any excess resin into during the casting process - during the Chindit build it was the head mould, by the end of the project I had a half dozen heads, some of which I then used to practice the face painting on. In this build its a couple of moulds for casting the buildings which you'll see later on the beach front. The final ones will be heavily 'personalised' with shell damage etc but it means there is actually little to no wastage of the resin at all!
So on to the first of the tank landing craft (or landing craft tank!)
Photo 1 shows a close relative of the LCT I’m modelling here. I couldn’t find an exact match but this one is roughly the same apart from having her pair of 20mm AA guns on the stern deck behind the bridge whereas mine has a pair of bridge wings with the Oerlikons positioned on those. As mentioned earlier, after D-Day when the LCTs were used more and more as large troop transports, those still transporting tanks were renamed as LSTs. Officially this meant Landing Ship Tank but according to many of the crews it stood for something a little different: Large Stationary Target!
Photo 2 illustrates the parts for the LCT on the Skywave sprue. As mentioned earlier, this craft comes in two versions in the kit – the LCT and the LCT(R). Curiously, although the bigger LCT (or actually LSM), which I’ll be adding later, has a detailed cargo deck moulded with steel plating, both of these vessels have a plain deck (complete with injection moulding circles). The rocket version has its deck covered by the rocket battery and this one comes complete with a canvas cover which I won’t be using, but you’d think as most of this type were open topped and loaded with tanks which the model might be expected to portray, they’d have put some kind of detailed decking down there! Unlike the other LCT, there was a slight problem in the construction of this one – as you can see in Photo 3, there’s a dirty great gap under the stern deck when the hull is glued on to the waterline base! For all I know there may well be an open section down there on the real thing and ordinarily, this wouldn’t be a problem, except of course if using the original to cast replicas! Pour the liquid silicone over this and it would all flow happily under the stern locking the hull into the mould forever! The solution is very simple and involves adding a plasticard inner bulkhead around the tank deck as shown in Photo 4. This seals off the gap at the back and I only needed to add a little Milliput putty at the end of the plasticard at the bows to seal off the ends to prevent the rubber getting in behind.
Photo 5 shows the ‘coming together’ of the small parts mould I mentioned earlier. This consists of the little parts of the LCI from the top left (two ramps and gantry with the life boat (including a resin copy making a copy of a copy, can’t have too many life boats), and the two life rafts. To the right of those is the large internal ramp for the larger LSM whilst along the bottom is the bow ramp and bridge for this type of LCT. To use up the rest of the space I also stuck in three of the little resin Churchill tanks. The three castings are illustrated in Photo 6, at the rear is the first casting which I carried on through the entire process to complete it before starting the next two – that one taught me a couple of points which changed the way Numbers 2 and 3 were made afterwards! I think when modelling multiple models of a home made resin cast, its well worth taking the first example through the entire process – construction, priming, painting, weathering and adding any extra details. In all three of the ships, building one right through has provided tips and procedures, which made numbers two and three (and four in the case of the LCIs) easier to work with than the first one! In the foreground is a bare resin hull and in the middle a grey primed hull ready to begin the painting. The prototype was modelled with the ramp closed and a full complement of Shermans, the other two have their ramps down and will be unloading onto the beach. This first example is shown again in Photo 7 with the traditional penny for a size comparison. When I constructed this one, I glued the bridge complete with its mast on before spraying it with the primer. I then discovered it was a nightmare trying to paint the superstructure under those wings! That’s why the other two shown beside it in the last photo have no bridge on as yet – the bridges were primed and painted separately as can be seen in Photo 8, which illustrates the painting phases. Also, after supergluing the elastic rigging to the prototype, I glued the second pair’s rigging to the deck before the bridge went on too! As you might notice in Photo 7, it was taken before the long PE ship’s rails had arrived from China! I did have the other type of rail used on the LCIs but I needed the longer type seen here (I’ve got about four different sorts now as you might have seen in the last posting!) The first example with the tanks now also has some tank crew stood among the vehicles but I’ll keep those pics back for the installment on the figures! The painting procedure was pretty much the same as the LCIs with the same light grey and blue camouflage and washed/dry-brushed decks, the only addition was I gave the tank deck and the inner hull bulkheads a wash of Citadel Rust Ink to give them a rusty, grimy appearance . All three are now completed apart from the tanks, I’m still deciding which ones to put in them yet!
In the next installment, another of the ‘Funnies’: the Churchill Bridge Layer.
Until then, Happy Modelling to you All!

Robin.

Hi Robin,Great update thanks for posting.

Trev.

Looking excellent Robin. Going to be a great dio when finished.

Mark

Grateful thanks as always to Tony, Trev, Alan, Mark and Kev! Things are coming along well, I've just finished adapting the little American landing craft into the larger British version and the first of the larger tank carriers is completed (and coming in the next installment). After a few trials and tribulations the Bridge Layer has come out really well, speaking of which...
Photos 1 and 2 (number 2 courtesy of the Tank Museum) show one of the most elaborate of the Churchill tank adaptions – the Bridge Layer. There were two types of bridge layer, this type which was the largest of Hobart’s Funnies and called the “Jumbo”, and a slightly simpler one where the bridge is carried out in front of the tank like a huge drawbridge and lowered in place by cables. The one advantage that that type had was that it retained the turret, either the standard gun or the AVRE ‘dustbin launcher’ which of course meant it could carry on fighting once the bridge was laid. There was a third type of ‘bridge’ as well where the Churchill itself was the bridge called an ‘Armoured Ramp’ – I’ll be modelling the Ramp as well later (as its really easy to make!) As you can see in Photo 2, an hydraulic ram fitted on the rear engine deck pushes a piston arm forward pivoting the arm holding the bridge up and ahead, the two wheels at the bottom of the arm rolling back on the ground as the bridge is laid down in position over the obstacle. Once in place the end of the arm disengages from the bridge span and the tank reverses back out of the way. Photo 3 illustrates the basic components of the Bridge Layer: a casting of a standard Churchill with the turret removed and the top sanded smooth and the parts to build up the bridge itself. Two lengths of square section styrene rod, sliced roughly into a curve on the top and sanded down afterwards and a strip of thin, flexible plasticard which is glued to the top and bottom of the ‘girder’ to provide a tiny lip around the edges. As you can see, I didn’t try to get the correct appearance of the cut outs in the sides of the girders but simplified them by just drilling shallow depressions into the sides instead. I realised afterwards I could have used a triangular file to get those cut outs but it may have proved a problem with the silicone rubber mould later on! Photo 4 shows the bridge section glued together and sanded down, then joined with a pair of small girders in the middle. What you can’t see is a tiny piece of stretched sprue sticking out from the centre to represent part of the hydraulics’ but as you’ll see later, that bit is now redundant! Also seen is the rotating arm with the twin wheels which will be glued under the bridge later. This was plasticard cut to shape with styrene rods for the axle and wheels. The basic hull now has two plasticard ‘shelves’ added on to support the bridge in place. I made a small silicone rubber mould of all these components (along with a Sherman Crab Flail and a couple of other unrelated small parts, to cast the whole thing in resin once more. Photo 5 shows that casting was a little more difficult than I’d anticipated! The first few attempts produced hulls that always had something wrong (as in missing) although I did eventually get a good one as shown in the foreground. It was either the basic supports with air bubbles, or the protruding front tracks, or often both of them! Compared to that flail however these were perfect – damn that thing! At this point I considered simply using the plain turretless hulls and adding plasticard supports as per the prototype but in the end I decided if I was going to have this much trouble casting a basic design I might as well have the same amount of trouble doing a more detailed version – so I did a redesign. Incidentally, the bridge itself came out beautifully each time, the wheeled arm 50% of the time (the other 50% missing a wheel). The new version had far more detail on the top of the hull, gone was the pair of shelves to be replaced with a flat steel (actually plasticard) disc with the hydraulic thingies now included on the hull along with a smaller quadrant of styrene rod to represent the back gantry supports. What I didn’t realise until too late was that there is a tiny armoured cupola on one side of the disc with vision slits (I was wondering how on earth the crew knew where they were going!) but even if I added it on it would be hidden away under the bridge unit so its no problem (or not worth the effort actually! ) I’ve only just realised that in Photo 2 you can see a crewman’s head sticking up out of that cupola – Duh!
Photo 6 illustrates the new (and improved) hull section: at the top is the original basic version with the more detailed Mk II in the foreground. Its still a very simplified representation of course but is actually easier to cast than the double shelf one – not always a good casting mind you, you might notice there’s an air bubble at the back of the hydraulic ram on the cast resin example in the centre of the three hulls but in this case, for once that’s actually a plus – the solid quadrant at the rear is actually two separate supports on the real thing – nicely simulated by the bubble! I then needed to make the parts of the support cradle, which stick out around the bridge as shown in Photos 7 and 8. These are formed from the left-over frets from one of the PE railings sets (the cut off strip is shown in Photo 8). The rear one is a simple straight piece with 90 degree ends whilst the front one is a little more complicated as it bends down to rest on the hull front just in front of the flat disc while keeping the bridge level with the rear support. Photo 9 shows a dry fit of the bridge on the supports (without the wheeled arm on yet) and finally, Photo 10 reveals the finished article: undercoated with Vallejo Grey Primer followed by Mig Russian Green with Citadel Skaven Brown Ink wash, then dry-brushed with Vallejo Khaki for the highlights and finally Citadel Rust Ink wash over the bridge top surface and a touch over the Mig Polished Metal tracks. The trouble with the Churchills, is you can hardly see the ruddy tracks even after you’ve painted them!
So that’s the largest of the Funnies, I’ve already done an AVRE which will be coming later together with the Sherman Crab flail tank and, if I can model a microscopic trailer, a couple of Crocodile Flamethrowers too. But in the next installment it’s back to the last of the main vessels, the LSM (the LCT’s bigger brother!)
Until then, Happy Modelling to you All!

Robin.

Beautifully done Robin, your usual excellent standard I see.....

Regards

Alan

Robin

Your attention to detail is great.

The loaded landing ship looks brilliant.

Tony

Many thanks again to Alan, Kev, Tony and Mark! Things are coming along, just finishing the camouflage on the second and third LSM's before adding the PE railings and about twenty odd little assault landing craft to paint soon!
Interesting D-Day fact: The RAF Typhoons operated mainly in the British section (Gold, Juno and Sword) around the Caen region. Most of the SS Panzer Divisions were sent against the British and the Typhoons were so effective at destroying their Panthers and Tigers and the SS hated the aircraft so much that their pilots took to wearing British infantry uniforms instead of their RAF gear, in case they had to bale out over enemy territory!
On with the basework!...

The first task was to cut out a piece of thin plasticard sheet to form a base to the beach section which will join the raised seawall / roadway to the printed sea area. This will be gently sloping from the water to a position about halfway up the wall and so the sides and back were given plasticard sides as seen in Photo 11. The rear section of the beach base is shown up against the seawall with the ramp sides made of the embossed styrene sheet glued on to butt up against the wall (Photo 12). As it happens, the next stage meant I needn’t have bothered with the stone block effect! In order to save on the amount of DecoArt Media Modelling Paste used to mould the actual beach surface, I tilted the base plate at a slight angle and mixed up some of my ‘approaching best before date’ resin and poured it in to fill up the thickest or deepest part of the beach. The resin is shown curing in Photo 13 and it was only then that I discovered just how much the liquid resin uses capillary action to pull itself up over obstacles! It oozed itself right up the sides of the stone block ramps filling in the embossed detail as it went! Still, no matter, if required I can always add the texture on again later. The beach surface is being moulded/shaped/sculpted in Photo 14, the darker colour up the top is the very thin covering of the paste over the resin foundation and the ramps are only partly filled in at this stage, their final appearance will be created when the beach is permanently joined on to the seawall later on. At this stage the styrene wall and road is under a protective layer of clingfilm to keep the paste off the plastic surface. I have also modelled various shell craters into the beach, similar craters will be ground down into the styrene road as the shops and houses go on. Photo 15 shows a nifty little gizmo I designed to simulate tank tracks all across the beach and leading up to the exits. On the left is a little screw top pot with hundreds of tiny brass cogs, they’re meant for making steam-punk jewellery (whatever that is), but I took four of the cogs with the ‘tightest’ teeth and super glued them together in pairs with the teeth lined up to give the track width. I then cut a tiny length of micro brass tube measured to give the distance between the tracks on the 1/700 scale tanks and screwed the lot together using an also tiny nut and bolt from a set of spectacle nuts, bolts and screws. By filing a small hole at the end of a wooden coffee stirrer (represented by the black bar) I could roll the gizmo along producing perfect scale tank tracks in any suitably soft material. Enter the ‘slight’ problem I hadn’t expected… I thought that modelling paste would dry to a plaster of Paris type consistency: solid and permanent but soft enough to emboss into – did it Hell! You could make bullet proof vests out of that stuff, it dries as hard as rock. Ah well, never mind, I might try and airbrush some general tracks going here and there when the beach is done instead.
Anyhow, on to the first of the buildings. Photo 16 shows the box top for the Skywave European Buildings Set. The box contains nine buildings in total; three of each type contained on three identical sprues (together with a few telegraph poles). The parts for constructing one of the small houses are shown in Photo 17 and the three finished examples are shown together in Photo 18. The next job was to make three small silicone rubber moulds to cast the buildings in resin rather than using the plastic models. The two smaller buildings will be remodelled as houses and beach front shops whilst the larger ‘block of flats’ type one will become a sea front hotel. The original kit house and its resin copy are shown in Photo 19 and the resin copy’s conversion into a shop with its own copy is seen in Photo 20. The shop front board, drainpipe and chimney were added from styrene rod and plasticard and shell damage was created by carefully grinding away with a rotary tool and a thin pointed diamond dust grinder. And for once, air bubbles don’t matter! If you look at the replica, there’s an air bubble in the name board and only half the drainpipe came out – now the mistakes are just more battle damage! I’ll stick a bit of drainpipe on hanging out from the bottom part – even better! The simple house conversion is shown in Photo 21, just an end wall chimney stack, which covers up the door at the bottom and the middle window, this one and the other small house with its extra chimney pot will also be getting the shell shocked look of course. Finally in Photo 22 we have the bigger mould for the large building. This one is being filled with the waste resin from other castings, but I put it in as another indication of how that resin manages to wick itself through capillary action into the tight corners, or in this case, four out of the five skylights!
In the next follow up installment, I’ll begin adding the pavements around the shops and wall, and start adding battle damage to the terrain!

Until then, Happy Modelling to you All!

Robin.

Robin

Brilliant update.

Really enjoying following along on this one as its got some real interesting history, some great tips and getting to see things i have never come across before - those buildings you are using for one.

Hope it all continues well for you.

Tony