Ścianka

Steven Van Dyck
Thanks for the acclaim, now Essex is also loaded with PE parts under the front deck. I also removed the rear lift floor in the hangar deck, because it will be visible through the side doors. The deck edges are getting PE plating with the correct catwalk acces doors and fire station hatches, but I'm still thinking about methods to remove the space behind these PE parts. Drilling is not enough.

Gary Victory
Very impressive work Steven. Loving the progress.

Steven Van Dyck
All 4 axles are now added to the frame, together with the shock absorbers that I had to shorten a bit at the front axle. The torsion bars are fixed at one side so I can remove the air bellows for painting.

Steven Van Dyck
The fuel tank hoops and steps are now replaced with PE. The steps are quite hard to bend in the right order and no dimensions or angles are given to mount them.

Dash Rendar
What a pity, but at least there's a solution already in sight. That LED lamp looks pretty cool as a base, actually!

Steven Van Dyck
The scale figure did not yet acquire his new base, but now I've taken Jim to a whole new level. I decided to replicate his costume in 1/1 and use it to perform some cosplay at the FACTS 2024 event. In fact I already wanted to do this in the fall 2023 edition, but corona prevented this for me. Last weekend it worked after all. The materials I used for this are a rubber mask of a grinning banana, a can of PUR, a bottle of moulding latex, a morphsuit, two chemical gloves, some styropor shapes, a toy gun, a white backpack, a drill holster and a dog collar. The water gun was a broken toy from the second hand store but I repaired its function and restyled it to look as much like Jim's gun as possible. My first styropor collarpiece broke, so I decided on the dog collar, but it was not painted with Tamiya like the mask but with Motip. This appeared not survivable during the show, maybe next edition I'll find a yellow one. Surprisingly many people recognized the character, but I suppose for the children I was just an alien stumbling around...

Steven Van Dyck
I started this reconnaissance Viggen project out of an early interest in this plane, while I never encountered a kit of it until I in recent years went on eBay. It will have woodland camo. You'll see I now removed the detail of the instrument surfaces, to be able to apply the Maestro photo etch replacement.

Matti Thomaes
Waw, Steven, you never do just a simple build do you, and this combined with the two aircraft carriers, how do you find the time.

S M
Ambitious project! I'm in!

Steven Van Dyck
Thanks! Last weekend the ship was at BSMC and won either silver or gold (together with Princeton).

Joachim P.
Hello, Steven, what an impressing work to be witnessed here. My hats off to this high level of skills. I really like the glass cover, by the way 🙂

Joachim P.
Wow, this is an amazing range of airwing! I can understand now, that the original island and the Revell PE parts are somehow demanding to combine. I will follow, very interested!

Bobby Thumbs
yo you need to build a saddle

Steven Van Dyck
I could provide a Fred Flintstone-style worker's cabin. But now brachiosaurus is primered red after some engraving sessions.

Steven Van Dyck
Some areas were painted Vallejo Air metallic colors like aluminum and chrome. Then these were masked. The last phase was painting with spray can chrome, which is not resistant to Tamiya tape. This the most reflective paint.

Steven Van Dyck
The raider is unmasked and Tamiya black wash is applied in the panel lines. A video now shows the raider doesn't shine through anymore. But I will still need to respray the base for the overspray.

Youtube Video

Brandon H
Awesome work here, nicely done!

S M
Fantastic finished diorama! That's a kind of museum I would like to visit 😄 👍👍👍

J35J
Masterpiece! Amazing work👍🏻

Gary Victory
Wonderful work Steven, a real labour of love and detail on your build. Truly awesome work Sir.

Guy Rump
Thanks for sharing, some beautiful modelling going on in Antwerp! 👍

Nicolas
Thanks for sharing.

George Williams
Some very nice models on display, thank you for posting them here.

Tom B.
Very interesting project idea 👍 Looking forward to what eventually becomes of it!

Treehugger
How long is it? No jokes please. 😄

Steven Van Dyck
Well, I did put this up as an idea because there will probably first be another large ship project in the future, but this one made me decide to do the Columbia in stead of the Birmingham. I saw at least the radar antenna is correct and different from the first Cleveland kit. The dock will only arrive as early as october. It seems at least some figure sets will be needed. This does give a good opportunity to show a full ship hull and a waterline model at the same time. As the length is predicted to be almost 80 cm, this will take as much space as the Zuikaku showcase.

Steven Van Dyck
A review of the ABSD kit and the Birmingham kit used on it:

Used out of the box:
- All allied 1/350 ships can be placed in the dock, that still seems widely available everywhere. The period of use of the dock as an ABSD is restricted to 1944-early 1945, after that they were changed to AFDB status and an expansion was built around the walls. Maybe this can be scratched onto the kit without much reshaping.
- Cleveland type light cruisers are frequently portrayed on old ABSD pictures. This makes them easy subjects in a diorama, but some problems arise. You can't use the complete ABSD kit, remove two of the pontoons for a correct proportion. For me this discovery came too late. Also, the Veryfire Cleveland and Birmingham hulls have apparently an intentional kink in the keel, necessitating a rework of the first part of the keel to make them fit on the blocks. The builder is also completely left on his own device for the docking plan of the ship. Seemingly an Iowa hull was used as the manual example, but it is not reproduced correctly. A lot of blocks have to be tripled in number, I only nearly had enough of them for a cruiser. The tripling of the blocks is made more difficult because they are not perfectly square, the result has something of a wedge shape.
- The modules can also be used individually, for a port diorama or the towing by a tug. The walls can be shown down or maybe even angled halfway up. This would reduce the dio size.
- The berth of the pontoons is minimalized in the kit, most of the pictures show them sunk on par with the accompanying barge deck heights. This I also discovered later on. I could only provide access to the YRDM's on their main deck. Some of the YF barges have cabs built on them, these would be accessible then. A solution is using resin water to fill the gap, but you would need huge amounts.
- Make sure to use the wall tops as the base for the construction of the wall sides. I first squared the sides and then added the top, leading to a skewedness causing a bad fit between the pontoons.

Embellished with aftermarket:
- The ABSD is an extremely detailed upscaling of Snowman Models' 1/700 dock, making the builder level quite advanced but not extreme. Yes, there's a lot of PE, but the parts are large enough to manipulate and prepared to fold easily. But it is not complete for a real ABSD setup. Therefore you would need about 240 centimeter of two-chain railing on top of the one provided for the catwalks, assuming you wouldn't sink these down the waterline and use it on top of about half of the walls.
- Maybe you want to replace the 500+ slightly wedge-shaped keel blocks by nice rectangular ones, about half of them in a triple configuration. But that's a lot of sawing. At the other hand, the kit ones all need clean-up to glue them flush to the deck.
- None of the specialized auxiliary boats are available in 1/350. Type YF en YRDM are visible on most period pics, accompanied by a floating crane, a tug and multiple LCM's. I could have used the new Black Cat one, but I veered back from the 30 euro shipping cost compared to my usual 6 euro L'Arsenal one.
- For the Cleveland and Birmingham upgrades I can give good acclaim. A pleasure to build and perfect detail.
- Also a thumbs-up for Ion figures. I now prefer them to North Star because they don't break (and don't arrive broken either).

Guy Rump
Some incredibly impressive modelling on show. Thanks for sharing. 👍

Steven Van Dyck
My second Leonardo Da Vinci kit, these can be built in a day but I'm investing some extra care in them, like sanding and painting. This one also has a smoothly running gear to drive the system. Youtube Video

Jennifer Franklin
I love it. I'm glad you posted a video; photos wouldn't do this justice.

Steven Van Dyck
Thanks, Jennifer. I have a movie now where the thing works for about half a minute. But painting it comes with consequences for the smoothness of running the clock. Avoid paint on the parts touching the cogs. I had to disassemble it once to remove the paint.

Steven Van Dyck
I had seen some Italeri Leonardo Da Vinci kits, but most seemed to me too simple to be funny to build. But then I noticed this ball contraption and I really wanted to make this. I spent some time first to sand the casting lines off the sides of the parts. Some of them were even delivered without a sprue, like the cogs and the maze part. It also got a steel ball and 4 metal rods whom one is a hex rod. I decided to use metallic cans to spray it. Construction is straightforward, but I found out I had to adapt the anchor system to make the system really work. You also have to investigate how many coins the lever needs as a counterweight. But in the last video it sort of works!

Youtube Video

Youtube Video

Youtube Video

Youtube Video

Jennifer Franklin
I love it; what a creative project, and *wow* yes, in the last video, it does work. Too much fun.

Steven Van Dyck
Thanks. I see I mixed up the videos, the one-to-last one is actually the best one.

John Hughes
Bright lad, that Leonardo! He'll go far. Quite fancy trying something like this for a change of pace. However, I do think the vids were meant to be on Tik Tok.

Steven Van Dyck
This might become rhe highest kit I made. We'll see later on what I can make of the small base that came with it.

Steven Van Dyck
Some tools are added in photo etch or schrach. I use the Voyager pieces though some are identical to the kit PE. The tank turret is now assembled and sports the aluminum barrel, though I also got some BESA barrels.

Steven Van Dyck
The Brengun is mounted on the turret, but the drum magazine seems positioned wrong by AFV. I think I need to remove the carrying handle from the gun to be able to add the drum correctly. I also wonder if the English at Alamein would still have white hatch insides as proposed by the manual. The Orange Hobby Besa magazines are a neat little kit, but I replaced the all-around embossing with a thread to avoid warping.

Steven Van Dyck
I found this old seventies Otaki CVN-65 Enterprise kit, but to upgrade it to modern standards there are some challenges. It didn't have the airwing but I found somebody willing to part with a dedicated Arii set for it. I will be receiving it in march 2023. There is also no PE for this kit, so at first I was happy to encounter an interesting eBay bid and mail the 1/350 basic GMM Taniya set for only 18 euros. Sadly this is made for a post-overhaul Enterprise with the new island design, so it's not very useful for my kit. Then I contacted Revell Germany and they were willing to sell me the 1/400 PE set designed for the Aurora Enterprise they reboxed with it as a premium kit. Though not completely fitting, this will very much improve the model. Another coincidence is the 2022 edition of new L'Arsenal F-14 fighters on many scales, and they had 1/400. So I ordered 10 of these and made a Scalemates product page for this, somebody else is going to have to add the other scales... Things to look out for are crewmembers and maybe some decals, because in the kit these are just stickers.

Steven Van Dyck
Many other types of airplanes were added today. It was also announced that some decal sets would be produced by L'Arsenal later this year.shipmodels.info/mws_..hp?f=16&t=377091

Steven Van Dyck
I added the helicopters, fire trucks and the Navy personnel. Thanks to L'Arsenal to send me an extra pack of regular positioned personnel x80!

Villiers de Vos
Fantastic work.

Ben M
Beautiful! But you should check your references, needs a little more orange 😉