From the bow - the yawning gap you see will be filled.
The view from the stern. The pilot house will fully enclosed once I have decided how best to do that. Again, notice the yawning chasm of the casemate corner crying out for lashings of filler!
Eric's collection previously made use of a wide variety of box sizes as well as some wooden drawers - most of which were solidly built (meaning heavy) but had seen better days. The upshot of this rather haphazard system was that it took up a substantial amount of space. Eric was meticulous in respect of his organisation so every box and drawer clearly identified the contents so the random selection of storage worked well enough but I needed to be able to properly tidy things up so took the decision to decant the collection into boxes of a uniform size. I duly ordered a pack of 20 boxes from Amazon and somewhat naively thought that would be enough….
I have filled 19 of them - 9 British, 5 American and 5 German but the latter also have 2 box files and 8 Airfix series two boxes. The German collection is very ‘Eric’ in that the artillery component is prodigious along with an impressive amount of armour - no Tiger 1s or Panthers though which was a surprise. Mind you, the pair of Jagdtigers, a Sturmtiger and a trio of King Tigers made up for this shortfall. Did I mention the eleven 88mm guns?
Now that I have decanted this lot it will be a whole lot easier for me to tidy the whole lot up into some kind of order for disposal but that will be for another day. I can now organise each box full in a far more leisurely fashion and without battling precariously balanced piles of odd sized boxes - rather like playing Jenga with odd shaped blocks. At least doing this has reduced the footprint of the collection in the man cave!
On the building front I was able to get some more work in on the C.S.S. Tennessee. As you can see the main parts of the casemate are not in place and the angles will be filled with filler. The plan is to tackle the pilot house tomorrow along with the filling so by the middle of the week she should be finished bar the painting. My building technique struggles with angles so it was quite a relief that this went relatively smoothly - I am crossing my fingers when I say that!
4 comments:
David -
I think we all have idiosyncrasies in collecting kit - especially WW2. I started out with my Germans having PzIVs and Panthers only. I wasn't having Tiger Is, let alone the bigger cats. I did get some Jagdpanthers though. Elegant looking thing. But then I wanted to 'do' the Desert War. Gotta have PzIIIs for that, and Matchbox did a very passable PxIIIL. Of course, one can't really dispense with the almost ubiquitous StuGIII.
... and so the the thing grows like Topsy.
Nuts, really.
My method of filling the triangular gaps was to cut out balsa or card. Any irregularities can be filed or whittled down, and any remaining gaps will require much less filler.
Cheers,
Ion
Good to see the ship yard back in operation. I love your models.
Hello there Ion (aka Archduke Piccolo),
Eric was always fond of rear echelon units and it with those that his WW2 collection ranges from the sublime to the kind of thing only he would like! Most of the German armour appears to be Corgi or cheap ‘made in Hong Kong’ Panzer 4 rip offs although the Sturmtiger is a great lump of a metal kit, as is the Pzr 3 Flammpanzer. I did discover a single Panther - a Corgi version, along with a brace of Jagdpanthers (yes, they are elegant looking!) - but no Tiger 1s. The German would be more than sufficient to scare the bejesus out of his rather larger British army (mostly Cromwell) and the Americans.
My plan for the angles is similar to yours - I wil wedge something in the gaps to give the filler something to ‘bite’ on. I should have the casemate finished today all being well.
All the best,
DC
Hi Mark,
Thank you Mark - on both counts! Joking aside it has been a real treat getting back to some shipbuilding again.
All the best,
DC
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