SS Canberra launches

Finally, after a quite a battle, SS Canberra has sailed off to her new owner.

You can read of my troubles with this aged Airfix kit elsewhere on this blog but the end result isn't bad. Mounting the model on a plinth certainly makes it look more impressive than just an assembled plastic model. It also made packing her up for postage a lot easier.

I can't see why the same trick wouldn't work for any other boat either. All you need is a bit of wood and some brass bits. Presentation is everything it appears.

At the same time as I was fighting the model, it's prototype caught up with me. Not the entire ship of course, that's long since been scrapped unfortunately, but a fitting.

On the back door of our model boat club is hanging a genuine Canberra lifebelt. Donated by one of the members, it was a real surprise to see it hanging there and a little bit spooky.

Has anyone else been haunted by the full-size version of something they are building as a model ?

Deluxe Materials Solid Water

If you want to do a job properly, you have to collect the right tools. Deluxe Materials have a reputation for producing quality product and so I wasn't too unhappy at stumping up over a tenner for two small pots of resin that would produce, apparently, clear fake water.

In use, equal amounts of the two chemicals are mixed and the result poured into the place you want flooded.

As a test I decided to preserve my penultimate pot of genuine Humbrol Track colour paint. As you can see, the results are very effective with any air bubbles quickly leaving the "water" which is indeed, very clear.

The only problem is that after two days it hasn't set properly ! I assume I simply haven't measured and mixed properly. I did this by eye but next time will use the proper syringes. There should be plenty for the Canberra swimming pools and hopefully for some toy train projects I have ideas for.

Update: I've mixed and poured a second batch which has set perfectly overnight.

GP Polyester Resin

Casting around for something to fill the swimming pools on the Canberra, I thought I had a suitable clear cast resin - Tiranti's "GP" Polyester Resin.

I thought I'd better experiment a little before working on the ship and I'm glad I did.

Once the correct catalyst had been found, I mixed up enough to fill a bottle cap. This was carried out in the garage because the stuff stinks. A lack of planning meant I didn't have anything to set in the resin but felt encasing something would be more interesting than just pouring it.

The only thing to hand was a dirty cotton bud from the spray booth. Needs must so I loped the end off and dropped it into the resin. Think bug encased in amber a la Jurassic Park.

Once set, I peeled the cap apart and you can see the result. It's clear-ish. Certainly no use for high class swimming pools. Maybe if it were a municipal baths full of mucky school kids...

Unusual transfers

Or: Don't posh people play a lot of tennis ?

The Canberra transfer (decal for American readers) sheet is covered with tennis courts and other oddball symbols (quoits ?). I've put 13 of them on the decks of the ship which has really filled those huge brown areas.

I'm used to numbers and names to be applied to a model but this is a first for me.

The quality of the transfer sheet is excellent. Perhaps this is a little more film around the edge of the lines than I would like but apart from that I have no complaints. The transfers were strong enough to be dragged around and released very quickly and easily from the sheets when soaked in cold water.

Lining things up against the raised plank edges isn't as easy as you might hope - the lines are feint and vanish under the film, but only a little prodding was required to line everything up.

Once blotted with a very soft tissue napkin that I can't remember the origin of but would like some more, Micro-Sol was sloshed everywhere to stick the things firmly in place.

Portholes and red oxide

Looking at the photos of Canberra, under the waterline she is painted with the traditional red anti fouling paint. Airfix think this is topped with a black band and helpfully mould little ridges in to the hull side for both colours.

Since I'm following the pictures, only the top ridge is required but they are so fine, I ignored the bottom one. The fineness makes it interesting to follow with masking tape but after a bit of fiddling, I managed a smooth line even around the pointy bits.

Colour is supposed to be brick red but plainly isn't. I mixed up a special brew from red, brick red and a Revel reddy-brown colour. The job used more than expected so a second mix was required one the original paint cup was exhausted. A bit more red in the second one produced something that looks about right. I suspect the official images are brightened up a lot, either that or the paint was bought in a job lot from the Post Office.

Above eh waterline, porthole painting has started. The round ones are easy requiring only a drop of paint into the centre of the hole. Square windows, of which there are a lot, have been represented with raised mouldings. Well, except where they are on sloping parts where the well-defined top taper to nothing at the bottom.

As previously mentioned, I'm using Railmatch Weathered Black for these and it seems to be working. I reckon a matt black would be too stark against the famous white sides.

This fiddly work is slow as after a while tension in the fingers causes cramp and less than adequate brush control. The results are worth it though, bringing the model to life as you look along the sides.

Canberra Funnels

Another "Did anyone from Airfix look at this ship before making a kit" moment arrives with the funnels. I thought I just had to stick them together, whack on the gloss buff paint and fit to the model with the little joining piece.

Then I look at my photos and spot that there is something sticking out of the top, above the swoopy tan bits.

Something black, and as far as I can tell, tubular. The pictures aren't clear thanks to the smoke coming out of the top but I think we just have a pair of round tubes. A matter of a few minutes to make with some plastic tube but still anoying.

Mind you, every time I find a picture of this boat, I spot something else wrong. The decks seemed to change colour every time it left port. Grrrrr.

Bow thruster

At the front end of the Canberra, there is a blanked out hole. On both sides of the hull.

In real life it's a bow thruster - an auxiliary drive at the front of a ship to allow the captain to swing the nose in sideways. Airfix put a blind hole in as a guide but then didn't follow through with a representation of the propeller that should be visible.

Undeterred, I drilled through the holes with a 4mm bit and scratchbuilt a suitable hole filler. The photo isn't great but you get the idea. The prop is made from a circle of plastic sheet with blades cut in it (I've assumed a 4 blade prop) supported on a length of plastic rod with some more to represent the central bulge that I assume holds the pivot and drive bits.

The design is a combination of ideas gleaned from a web search and what I reasonably thought I could build. It might be that there should be a grille of some sort over the hole but I reckon this would need to be so fine you wouldn't see it. Well, that's my excuse.

Decks on. Boats in. Handrails up.

Aboard the Canberra I've finished gluing and clamping the decks into position. Apart from a little bit of touching up, we are there. Well, that and sorting out the alignment of the walkways at the stern.

The boats are fitted too. If you are building the same kit, pay attention here, they are handed. Rudders should face towards the back of the main vessel. Start in the middle too as one or two at one end of the row need to be trimmed a bit as the mounting holes you use want to force two bits of plastic to occupy the same place in the space/time continuum. A touch of the non-sonic scalpel (non-sonic unless you could the swearing when you discover the things don't fit) does the job without the results being visible to the viewer. I've left the front boats out for the moment as they have orange tops - presumably to aid mustering the fleet in an emergency and these need to be painted an satin varnished before fitting.

On the top deck, handrails have been fitted. Ideally I'd liked to have replaced these with something etched but no one appears to produce anything in this area. In lieu of this a bit of scraping has refined them a touch and opened up the holes flashed over in the mould.

Annoyingly the holes they should locate in aren't always in the right place. Usually the discrepancy is 1 couple of mm but enough that if they were used the handrails wouldn't fit properly. As it is there are one or two gaps to fill with microstrip but nothing major.

Deck clamping

Over on the Canberra, I'm putting the pre-painted decks in place.

The kit is showing its age again with some bizarre break lines between parts. At the front, areas that should be flat have join lines in the middle of them that will be difficult to hide - all I can hope to do is minimise their impact.

My technique is to apply plastic cement and let the plastic soften a little. Then the parts are clamped together and prodded around to align them. This way, the soft plastic tentatively holds it's neighbouring part so they stay in the same plane.

The clamps shove the two parts together firmly and once dry, there are no gaps so I'm saved the hassle of filler work, quite a relief.

At the back end, the curved balconies are fixed, they just need tidying up to look like solid pieces of metal.

Vertical alignment between the two halves of the hull isn't perfect but with a bit of minor jiggling the decks appear to be in the right place with any errors hidden. We're talking fractions of a mm here so it's not difficult.

What IS a challenge is to pin down the colours. The pool surround should be brown it appears so I'll have to fix that but other work can now carry on while the paint dries.

Model boat presentation

My plan for the Canberra involved proper presentation. This model wasn't going to sit on the plastic stand that Airfix intended, that might be fine for a teenagers bedroom, for a proper model, the presentation should be of suitable quality.

The plan was to mount it on a couple of brass pillars on a wooden plinth.

This was supposed to be easy to arrange. I would purchase a plinth from the man who is always at a local market and mount it on that. Sadly he wasn't at the market. Or the next one. Or the one after that.

Which made things awkward. The fixing method would be a couple of bolts through the plinth screwing in to nuts fixed in the bottom of the boat. As time went on, I needed to fix these but didn't want to do this without the plinth.

Finally, the decks had all been painted and I need to move on so it was off to the local hardware shop to acquire a length of wood from their quality offcuts box. Half an hour with a plane and power sander then 6 coats of Ronseal varnish to get colour and shine.

A couple of holes were countersunk in the bottom so the bolt heads are inside the wood. In the hull, a pair of brass nuts are held in place with epoxy glue. To separate the two, some brass tube has been carefully cut. Now it all looks nice and I can take it apart for polishing and hull painting. Best of all, those decks can now go in.

Bridge ahoy !

Canberra's bridge now has green decks. It's also been fitted together - with more than a bit of fiddling to get the parts to fit properly.

It would be a good to point out that the crossed part on the top is supposed to lean backwards. It's just the photo makes it look like it's leaning to the side as well. This is not the case, I spent a lot of time poking the drying solvent joint to make it so.

At the front we have the windows. Now this boat is peppered with windows and portholes, all of which need to be painted to look right. After some cogitating, I'm going for weathered black to do this. Pure black would be too stark against the white paint and greys or blues too pale. The prototype photo makes them look black anyway so that's good enough for me.

The kit windows are moulded proud at the top and flush with the sides at the bottom. To achieve a nice neat edge I used a thin strip of Tamiya masking tape along this. A fine paintbrush and they show up nicely.

Airfix gets it wrong

This Canberra kit takes a lot of painting. Much fiddly pre-painting before I get to the fun bits of sticking things together. I've been working on the decks and followed the notes on the instructions.

Which was a mistake. Apparently the decks are brown. But if you look at the rather excellent photo, suggested by Tanllan a few days ago,  below, you see that the ones around the bridge are green. Bright green. To be fair to the Airfixers, the painting guide says sea grey but that's as wrong as brown. The only excuse will be if the paint numbers have changed over the years, but I don't think they have, have they ?

So, my two coats of brown will need to be replaced by green. That will teach me to look at the photos before getting into the job.

(Note: The parts of the bridge shown above are just clipped together. I will be sorting out the mould lines before gluing them together)

Terrible part fit !

Blimey, you can tell the Airfix Canberra kit was introduced back in the 1960's - the parts fit together just like a kit from the era. Not a good one either.

To be fair, the moulds have produced many thousands of the things. On the other hand I don't recall some of the fuselages of the many aircraft kits I ruined built back in the day being a whole lot better. In the last few decades the process has come on so much that modern modellers are as spoilt with part fit as a guest at the ambassadors buffet is when shut in a room with the Ferrero Rocher pyramid.

At the front end, the box goes together OK - at least if you flood the joint with liquid glue and shove the bits hard to squish the plastic. Around the much more complicated stern, the decks don't line up well at all and the walls come within shouting distance of each other but not much more. Some masking tape hauling things around is the solution, I just have to be careful in case the glue squeezes out under it and forms a mess for me to clean off later.

At least these parts are detail free. I wouldn't fancy doing this and having to re-instate a load of portholes that I'd scrubbed off with sandpaper...

Man the lifeboats !

Before any assembly can happen on the Canberra, it needs to be painted. The days when I waved the brush over a model after construction are long gone. I've looked closely at the instructions and know that there are plenty of parts that will be all but inaccessible, while remaining clearly visible, on this ship.

First colour was white. I know the plastic is white but it's the wrong white. Satin white looks a lot better as well as being easier to touch up if required !

Basically, everything got two coats from the airbrush. Then I could move on.

According to Airfix, the lifeboats are brown inside. The same brown as the decks it seems. Painting them seemed to take forever as I was being careful - touch up is one thing but the less I have to of this the better.

But, I have a question. Were the boats stowed uncovered ? Surely, even when tucked under the decks as they are, rain and seawater would get in. I've had a good look at the photos I can find and can't answer this. Maybe in 1:600 scale it doesn't matter, but I'd like to know anyway. At least until it's too late to do anything then please don't tell me !

SS Canberra

SS Canberra from the P&O fleet from 1961 to 1997. She was built at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, Northern Ireland and launched in 1958. Perhaps her most famous time was a troop ship serving in the Falklands, earning the nickname "Great White Whale". After the conflict, she returned to civilian service before being broken up in 1997.

The Airfix kit was first introduced in 1961 and stayed in the catalogue until 10 years ago. It's 86 parts produce a 1:600 scale vessel 16.5 inches long.

I've been asked to build this kit to represent the ship as launched. Rather than just stick the bits together, I'll be trying to build it in the style of a "Builders Model". To that end you won't be seeing any weathering and I'll try to do better than the supplied Airfix moulded stand. Something in wood with brass supports would seem more in order.

This should be an interesting project as it's a long while since I build a plastic kit boat. Even then it was a probably a battleship, not a type of craft that have ever interested me much. At first glance, the mouldings look OK. Most of the parts appear to be lifeboats, a couple of which have been fitted to the wall that supports them.

The great age of the model is shown by the different approaches taken than and now. Panel lines for example, are raised when I suspect they should be recessed. It's almost impossible to do anything about that without degrading the model, but it's not out of keeping with the Builders Model vibe. These were often slightly simplified miniatures anyway so this should turn out better !