"scratch building materials?" Topic

I mentioned it in another post, but i'm scratch building 1:1200 ships, and i'm wondering how many of you have done it also?

it seems most people buy kits and assemble them, and i might do some of that in the future, but for me part of the fun is building and pushing for more and more detail with every ship.

i know even though most of you build molded kits, most everyone customizes theirs to some extent also.

so i'm looking for ideas for cannons. obviously a 1:1200 scale cannon barrel is a pretty small thing, so im not expecting to build tiny gun carriages and all that haha. but i'm just looking to add a little something to the decks and maybe gun ports on the sides.

has anyone done any of that? i'm thinking maybe thin beading wire or something like that. but its hard to cut them all uniformly.

any other ideas for details around the ship are welcom too!

I have scratch-built Napoleonic SOLs before, I won't do it again, since GHQ and Langton do such a good job and make more robust models. I found that I could do most parts as well as anything I could buy, but I couldn't make nice stern galleries.

I made the basic hull from balsa, rails from .010 square-section styrene strip, deck gratings from .010 x .125 styrene strip (with grating carved into the surface), bulkhead doors and deck fittings from styrene bits cut and filed to shape, etc.

I made deck guns by cutting a tiny piece of .010 or .020 plastic strip to the size of a carriage, gluing that on the deck in front of the porthole, and gluing a barrel made of brass wire on top of that. Without a magnifying glass, this actually looks just fine. Cutting and shaping those tiny pieces is a PITA, though, and so is holding them in place while you put CA glue on them.

If I ever do this again (probably in a larger scale), I'll make one hull, make a mold from it, and cast a bunch of hulls in resin from the mold. If I want to be able to customize each ship slightly, I'll leave off things like the gun port lids (easy enough to glue on later), and maybe cast a few different stern gallery pieces separately so I can make custom stern galleries on each model.

I've been thinking lately about how to make sails for my 1/1200 16th-17th C. fleets – they're mostly Valiant Armada period ships, and I don't like the lead sails much. I could buy a bunch of brass mast sets from Langton (easy but expensive), or fashion them out of wire and use styrene sheet for sails. A lot of people use paper for sails, but I think I'll prefer the robustness of plastic. If I can find wire-core styrene rod in thin enough diameters, I may use that for the masts and spars, since styrene sails, masts and spars can be welded together with a proper high-flow styrene cement. After the cement sets, the plastic mast with sails would be a single unit like a cast lead one, but much lighter.

If anyone knows how to vaccuform sails from sheet styrene, I'm all ears….

- Ix

I just use paper sails and styrene rods for my 1/1200 stuff.

I just saw the original postings about that model yesterday. That came out pretty nice.

Of course, if you don't mind flat, untextured sides and stern, you could always buy 1/900 scale patterns from War Artisan, shrink them to 75% (when printing or on a copier), and assemble them as 1/1200 scale models. As you can see in these photos, they look awfully nice when they're assembled and fully rigged.

There's no reason those printouts couldn't be glued around a balsa core like the SOL above. If you want to add weight to the model, you could use the balsa as a substrate to glue in metal weights.

- Ix

I love all the work above and stand in awe of you all. I must say for guns, sails and masts. see Vols Blog "A Miniatures Hobby Room" I think his stuff is so good. He re-makes masts and sails for most of his models. Also made guns for his scratch built fort. All in 1-1200 scale.
Be safe
Rory

yeah i saw his scratch built masts. very nice.

where do you find the styrene rods exactly?

You must ask Vol. Or I hope will find this thread and tell you himself.
Be safe
Rory

where do you find the styrene rods exactly?

I've always found the styrene parts in hobby shops that sell model railroading stuff. Unfortunately, that hobby is graying even faster than ours and retail sources of model railroading materials are disappearing.

On line you can try going directly to the web sites for Evergreen or Plastruct.

- Ix

wow that evergreen site has a lot of stuff! i could definitely do some good scratch built stuff with those kinds of materials.

i actually did the hulls out of basswood. its easy to work with but a little more solid and sturdy than balsa i think.

i know what you mean about the hobby fading. i also do HO scale slot cars and it can be hard finding certain things. online you can find most anything but its rare to find an actual store to go into and buy stuff now