HMS Zulu - Type 81 Frigate: Delphin + modifications 1:1250

As a child I had a little book with paintings and side elevations of various contemporary (1960s-70s) RN ships. A favourite of mine at the time was the Type 81 Tribals class on the dubious grounds that it had two main gun turrets and thus looked more like a 'proper' warship than the T12s with only one. I have had a fondness for theT81 ever since so I was pleased to find a Delphin HMS Ashanti on Ebay at a modest price.

The model was in quite good condition but the gun barrels were a bit bent. In straightening them, I broke one off and one thing led to another. I decided to make some changes to represent HMS Zulu. There were a number of problems with the model: the Sea Cat launchers were rather blobby and in the wrong place, no directors and the Limbo was also poorly defined. I decided to scratch build replacements and add some more detail. The most unsatisfactory feature - as often with post-war RN ships - was the lattice mast but short of some custom photo-etch (on my to do list) there was no solution to that apart from careful painting.

I spent some time trying to get the hull colour right. At the time, RN ships used Light Admiralty Grey with a pronounced green tint compared with the preceding neutral 507C and the current slightly blue Light Weatherworks Grey. The closest accessible match I could find was Vallejo Light Sea Grey with added white. The three numerical values are the RGB values of swatches of the colours as measured by my image editing software. The match, though not exact, was close enough for me an looks right - in any case, one thing I have learnt about ship colours is that prevailing light makes a huge difference to the perceived colour - far more than being a few points off in the theoretical colour.