HMS Vanguard - Triang 1/1200

By Royal Navy official photographer - This is photograph A 31247 from the collections of the Imperial War Museums., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18806845

One of my great regrets (ok, not life and death so maybe 'great' is over dramatising things) is that I didn't buy a bargain Albatross HMS Vanguard the first time I went to the Theale MiniShips show. The Albatross model is certainly the gold standard in 1/1250 but at the time £40 just seemed too much, I didn't realise just what a bargain it was and certainly didn't realise I'd never see another one at anything like that price.

I still wanted a Vanguard for my collection and I thought it might be interesting to get a really scruffy Triang and see what could be done. This battered and repainted Series 1 example, advertised as 'in need of some TLC,  certainly fit the bill and nobody could accuse me of vandalising a period toy by stripping and repainting!

There is a view / truism in painting Wargames figures (the subject of my other blog) that, as long as the hats, flags and bases are good, nobody notices what is in between. My idea was to apply that principle and see whether, with more realistic masts and turrets, and a neat paint job, a reasonable representation could be achieved.

New masts was the first thing to make. I used my usual method of soldering brass rod with thin steel wire for the cross-pieces. The picture shows some of the parts held in position by masking tape, on a surplus ceramic tile.

After stripping off the paint, filing off some burrs and giving it a good wire brushing, there were a lot of chips and gouges that I filled with Milliput. I also added the prominent belt from Plasticard. The cranes are the original ones and, unfortunately, rather battered and frayed.

Apart from the lack of undercuts, the biggest problem with the Triang Vanguard is that the turrets look nothing like the real things - the secondary 5.25 Mk.2 being replaced by their 4.5" Mk.6 and the main 15" turrets by something very strange - I'm really not sure what the inspiration was!

I set about the 5.25" turrets first. The Mark 1* mountings on Vanguard were noticeably different to the smaller and part circular Mk.1 on King George V class battleships and Mk.2 on the Dido class cruisers. Getting the complex faceted shapes right would be key to achieving a reasonable look.

The first step was to make the best drawing I could from an enlargement of those in Raven & Roberts and Friedman then calculate the 1/1200 dimensions from that

I didn't think that it would be possible to get the angles right by free-hand sanding so came up with a plan for a series of sanding guides. For the basic plan outline, I drew the required shape on a piece of scrap card, extending the lines far beyond the turret envelope. I stuck a piece of plastic of the required thickness (and incorporating the distinctive cut outs for the gun barrels) in the middle then nailed it to some scrap wood with the sides of the nails aligned to the guide lines. It was relatively simple then to use a home made sanding stick to achieve the required shape with nice vertical sides.

The slopes around the roof of the turret were more complicated. I made a couple of different jigs, out of some thick scrap card, with the required slope then mounted the whole thing on a drawing board so I could use an adjustable set square to hold the jig at the required side angles. So I could see how much I'd sanded, I painted the turret dark grey and used a 10x magnifier with a measuring scale to gauge progress, taking off a little amount each time.

After taking so long to make one, making another seven by the same method was out of the question but I had no experience of making castings. After asking advise on Dockside, Jeff came to my aid with a very detailed step by step guide and lots of encouragement. I bought a small tin of RTV, activator, a ladle and some KA low melt white metal alloy from Alec Tiranti and set about it.

It turns out the whole process is really hard and full of possibilities to go wrong! In my first attempt, I had far too many bubbles in the RTV, including some near the turret cavity which reproduced perfectly when I poured in the metal. Another pitfall casting small, fairly round objects, is to have a rotational misalignment between making the first and second mould halves. I got round that by adding a timing peg in a hard Milput pouring gate. After a few tries, I got an acceptable result, although the register between the two halves of the mould wasn't perfect and you can see a faint witness line along the top of the finished turrets.

Another opportunity for things to go wrong is casting temperature - too hot or too cold is no good but finding the Goldilocks happy medium isn't easy.

I didn't attempt to cast the barrels - as with my other models, I prefer wire for this.

My original plan was to use the turrets from a spare Airfix HMS Hood, soon changed to casting copies. In fact the shape and size of these isn't right so I made a new master of the basic shape and cast multiple copies, adding the barrels from brass rod filed to a slight taper.

The only other addition I made before painting was the STAAG anti-aircraft mount on B turret.

Because of the limitations of the moulding methods used, the Triang model has no representation of the windows on the front of the tower bridge. I considered trying to paint these on but I thought there was no chance of getting a the relative sizes and positions right for so many windows. I decided therefore to have a go at making my own decals and bought some clear decal paper. I'll do a separate post about this first experience of making decals.Although far from perfect, for a first go, I'm pretty pleased with these - the end result is certainly better than I could have painted and the imperfections visible in the highly enlarged close-ups aren't noticeable on the model in normal viewing.

Although the finished model is a bit of an awkward compromise between the simplifications of a Triang and attempts at realistic turrets and masts, the proportions of the original Triang model are good and without the distraction of the unrealistic original turrets and in the correct colours, I think it looks like Vanguard.