Hello there Robin.
I think the picture was taken at combined ops in Largs, Scotland.
My dad was on HMS Gleaner, shadowing the Bismark leading to it's destruction.
He was in the fray on D day and then in a survivors camp at Sur De Mer.

He still tells us some hilarious tales - not everything was grim.

One such tale, he and a shipmate were ordered to swab the deck of their ship as a punishment for something or other. (Jankers, it was called)
They decided to speed things up by using a massive hose to wash the deck.
Unfortunately, they didn't check all the hatches were shut...

They flooded the engine room and blew up several generators.

Oh dear.

Many thanks again to Roy, Tony and Kev! That's a great story Roy! I think I might have tried a "Blimey Capt! Did you see the size of that ruddy wave that just went past!" My own Dad was disabled with a metal pin through his hip, the result of TB contracted after falling into a pig vat in his early teens. He served in the Plympton Home Guard through the war and along with his future father in law (who served in the Devonshire Regt through WW1) was the best shot in the platoon (his step father was a Royal Marine who taught small arms firing in the Devonport barracks and he regularly sneaked Dad in to shoot Lee Enfields on the range)
After a night blitz on the rail yards his section was ordered to dig out twenty or so HE bombs that missed the railway and landed in the river Plym which is a tidal mud flat at low tide. The more they tried to dig them out the further down they slipped. In the end the UXB men said 'forget it'! They're still down there to this day!
Onwards! As you’ve seen, the walls and road surface are created from the embossed styrene sheet, and to differentiate between those surfaces and the pavements I needed to have another size of block work or in this case paving slabs. There’s probably a perfectly sized embossed sheet out there, but since I only need a small amount I decided to make my own as shown in Photo 23. The blade in the foreground is the Olfa scribing cutter which is normally used for cutting sheets of 2mm Perspex, here it it used to lightly scribe over the thin plasticard sheet in parallel rows at right angles to create the slabs. Later on I’ll be adding a bit of surface debris around the damaged sea wall and the road craters and Photo 24 shows a section of the block embossed sheet in front of the safety razor blade used to slit it along the ‘courses’ of the blocks. When the debris is required I’ll use the same blade to slice off the individual blocks from the strips and liquid poly glue them onto the ground-work. Photos 25 and 26 illustrate the pavements in place, 25 shows where the two shops will be located (note the crater in the road, later to be deepened and ‘detailed’) and 26 shows the wall running along the front of the larger hotel. There may well be some more shell damage to add here later! Photo 27 shows the two shop buildings in place, the larger double fronted one on the right was composed of two identical houses which were glued together after sanding off the roof overhangs and moulded windows and door on the two walls where they join. Once the resin copies were glued together and set I then added the shop front boards and a roll up blind before hacking away with the rotary grinder. The black oval marks where another crater went in soon after!
The two civilian houses are shown in Photo 28, this was taken before the pavement was added on, and before the hotel garden wall as well. In Photo 29, the position of the house has been pencilled in and a thin plasticard ‘foundation’ cut to match the bottom of the building was temporarily fixed in place with a couple of spots of Deluxe Card Glue. Another strip of plasticard has been glued down to create the garden path leading up to the front door. I then ground down a section of the stone wall to represent a shell hit from the naval bombardment and then applied a thin skin of the Modelling Paste to create the ground level. This can be seen in Photo 30 after a stiff paintbrush was used to stipple the paste to make the ‘grass’ surface before digging a section up again to make the shell crater. The ‘sausage’ applied around the inside of the wall (after the paste had dried) is white Superfine Milliput Epoxy Putty. This was then sculpted with a large sewing needle, basically by ‘stabbing’ at it over and over, gradually creating the ‘garden hedge’ effect as shown in Photos 31 and 32. Note the ‘blown in’ effect behind the shattered wall and the ‘blown out’ section forced out over the stone wall by the shell blast. I’ve also added a little more paste behind the crater and later on I’ll add a few bricks to the garden and some on the road outside. Finally in Photo 33 we have the house fitted into the garden. The foundation piece was carefully removed creating a location point for the house to sit in. I now have to make a silicone mould to cast the house in resin and then give that copy the shell shock treatment before making a second mould to cast the finished article. More on that next time!

Until then, Happy Modelling to you All!

Robin.

Wow fantastic detail for such a small scale

Grateful thanks again to Tony, Nightwisher and Mark! I'm almost looking forward to the painting Tony (almost!) Some more groundwork to finish yet though, and then joining the beach to the wall! Anyway, here's the first 'civvie' house completed!...

Photo 34 illustrates the full process in adapting the Skywave house to the shell battered Normandy version. On the left is the first casting made from the Skywave original via the initial silicone mould. The slight overhang of the roof edge on the right was filed away at the ridge to allow a new chimney stack from plastic square section to be added and topped off with a chimney pot from plastic rod. A new silicone mould was created for this version and a second resin casting produced which is pictured in the centre. This one then had a plastic rod drainpipe added (which should have gone on the first one but I forgot! ) and was then attacked with the rotary tool equipped with a very thin diamond dust engraving bit. As you can see I took some chunks out of the walls (and also from the sides of the chimney stack which are hidden here) and removed some tiles from the roof along with some hollowed out windows and a dormer to simulate shattered window glass. When the damage looked about right, I then made a final third silicone mould to cast the finished building, the casting of the finished article is shown on the right.
Photos 35 and 36 show the earlier shop buildings in close up and also the ‘enhanced’ craters in the road now equipped with the individual cobble stones and paving slabs thrown up by the explosions. Note the shell hole on the pavement between the shops – that’s the one shown by the black oval in the earlier installment! There’s a few more blocks gone in since these pics were taken but I have to be careful not to stick them everywhere (even though that would be more realistic) otherwise they’ll stop the tanks from sitting flat on the road!
At the moment I’m trying to model a 1/700th greenhouse to place in one of the gardens. My original bottle of clear resin obviously didn’t appreciate the temperature up in the attic and is now more treacle than water so I’m awaiting a new, hopefully better type of clear – the new one says faster cure and ‘no stickiness’ which would be very welcome!
Until that arrives, the next installment will be the final part of the invasion fleet – the tiny LCA or Landing Craft Assault – a whole one inch of fiddly re-engineering!
Until then, Happy Modelling to you All!

Robin.

Hi Roy!

No, I hadn't seen that one! It looks a really good read too! At the moment I've been reading the "D-Day Remembered" IWM book by Richard Holmes and the Anthony Beevor "D-Day, the Battle for Normandy" which is purely text apart from a few pages of photos. It's well worth reading though, just for the horrible mistakes that happened throughout the campaign - eg, US 8th Air force is instructed to bomb ahead of the Canadians - Canadians use yellow smoke grenades to show their positions, and the US bombers are ordered to use yellow smoke markers to indicate the targets! The Richard Holmes book is currently in 'The Works' discount store at £10!
Give my best to your Dad - and all our thanks too!

Robin.

Great work Robin, working that small is going to take some painting and sore eyes.

Mark

Grateful thanks as always to Alan, Mark and Tony! Have to admit, this scale is pushing my eyes to the limit, thank goodness I've built up a sizable collection of magnifiers over the years!

In this installment we have the last of the 'floating' items: the British Landing Craft Assault...
Photos 1 to 3 show the actual British Landing Craft Assault in action. The design of the British craft began early in the war and was the result of a choice between two competing designs. Of the two designs, this one was constructed of marine plywood for the most part with an external skin of armour plating. The other design was constructed entirely in metal and that was the main reason it lost the selection process. Long before the needs of D-Day, the LCA was designed primarily to ferry Commandos on raids into German occupied coasts. One of the requirements therefore was ‘stealth’. With the engine encased in a wooden superstructure the LCA is actually silent to a listener over 25 yards away! On the other hand, the all-metal competitor, although it handled perfectly well, sounded like a tank struggling up a steep hill from a hundred yards away!
You are all probably familiar with the scene in Saving Private Ryan where the American landing craft hit the shore, the ramp drops down and all hell breaks loose! The British version was actually better for beach assaults and in fact, the US troops preferred to be taken ashore by the RN where possible, Photo 1 was taken a couple of days after D-Day and shows American re-enforcements doing just that! In the American design, the landing craft is capable of transporting small vehicles as well as troops, hence the large front ramp and the crew positions at the stern. The British LCA is purely a troop carrier however and unlike the American craft where the infantry have to stand up, the troops are sat down on three benches, one down the centre and one on each side under an overhang, which provides shelter from small arms fire. The sitting arrangement is shown in Photo 2. Additionally, the crew consisting of the cox’n (driver) and a Lewis gunner are positioned at the front in a pair of armoured ‘boxes’. The bow ramp is smaller than the American and between the two crew positions is a second internal armoured door which was only opened after the ramp was down (and any MG42 which might have opened up when the ramp went down had run out of ammo!) Photo 3 was taken during the British landings and you can see the smaller ramp in the water and just to the left of the Lewis gun firing port you can make out the top of the inner door opened out flat against the hull. (All three photos courtesy of Wikipedia). Photo 4 shows two of the US style landing craft, which come with the Skywave Beach head vehicles set which will be forming the basis for the conversion. The two holes at the stern are supposed to be for a pair of guns (50 cals I think) but the LCA has a couple of either air intakes or exhausts, not sure which, in that position so I can leave them there!
Diagram 5 illustrates the conversion process on the kit parts. I first made up a silicone mould to cast the American craft ‘as is’. Once I had produced a resin version I then sliced off the angled bow where the ramp should attach on one of the kit originals and, using a resin copy, sliced off a section of the bow with the angled front intact and glued it onto the kit hull, lengthening the craft to the British dimensions. (This is all a lot clearer in Photo 6, which shows the conversion in its entirety). I then added a thin sliver of plasticard to the centre of the floor to form the lower part of the centre bench followed by another sliver on top to extend the bench to the aft bulkhead. The two armoured crew cockpits were also made in two parts – a lower half up to the top of the hull sides and a top piece which extends out to the extreme edge of the hull (note that the ‘driver’s cockpit is rectangular but the gunner’s position is wedge shaped!) At the rear of the deck a little winch was made up from styrene rod, this would be attached to a kedge anchor and dropped when approaching a shallow beach to enable the LCA to drag itself back off the beach for the return to the troop ship. Finally, the angled sides of the kit ramp were cut off and glued to the front of the hull and plasticard strips were used to make the tiny inner armoured doors (but not glued in just yet). The reason that the inner doors and ramp weren’t attached was that I now made a quick silicone mould of the LCA as it was, and cast two resin copies. One of these had the ramp attached in the ‘up’ position and a single plasticard strip with a groove cut down the centre was glued in to represent the inner doors closed up. The second resin copy had its bow ramp glued in the down position and two little plasticard doors added opened up. With the two variants completed I could then make a second, larger mould to cast one of each at the same time.
The sequence of painting from start to finish is shown in Photo 7. From bottom left we have the bare resin casting, about half a dozen of these were temporarily glued to a coffee stirrer with a drop of the Deluxe Card Glue and once fixed, were primed by brush with Vallejo Grey Primer as shown by the centre example. (A very useful tip here – Mum is prescribed eye drops, which come in a dinky little plastic bottle. Once the bottle is empty I pulled the dropper nozzle off and washed the bottle and nozzle out. I then filled it up with well shaken, Vallejo Grey Primer and pushed the nozzle back on – I now have a nice little air tight primer dispenser which saves having to take it out of the big Vallejo bottle each time! I must put a label on it though, just in case!) On the bottom right is the next coat, Vallejo Sky Grey 70.989 with a light wash of Citadel Skaven Brown Ink. In the top row the first two on the left have had a dry brush of lightened Sky Grey to pick out the highlights and the rim of the troop compartment painted with Vallejo Ivory with Mig Satin Black for the centre of the winch. Finally, satin black was carefully painted over the ivory to create a black and white stripe effect, which many of the LCAs seem to have had. Tiny little black stripes were painted on the inner doors and the cockpits for the view slots. So that’s the dinky little LCAs – as you can see in the final Photo 8, there’s a few more to go yet! Some will be beached, some going in and out and maybe a couple with air bubbles will be ‘going down’!
In the next installment, it’s back to the houses again!

Until then, Happy Modelling to you All!

Robin.

Robin

Hope all is well.

What can you say to this post ? A sub miniature greenhouse - wow - now that really is something different and looks just what it should look like.

You are so skilled and so impressed with the details you pack into such small items.

Tony

Lovely work as usual Robin, such skill. That greenhouse just looks fantastic.

Mark