HMS Devonshire


Some while ago I bought a Hansa model of HMS Devonshire on Ebay missing its mainmast and (therefore) Type 965 singe bedstead radar. Apart from the missing mast, it was in pretty good condition and my original intention was to make a replacement mast and paint it to match the rest of the model as a minimal repair but there were various faults like gaps, bad pitting on the sides of the hull and moulding flash that was just painted over so in the end I did a complete strip and rebuild with some additional details.


After stripping all the paint off, I filled the pitting on the hull and cleaned up the mould marks. I built a new mainmast and radar from plastic sprue, plasticard and brass rod. I got the height wrong initially and, rather than start again, added some extra sections at the base.


Initially I was going to use the original MRS 3 director but decided it didn't look much like the real thing and made a new one, again using plasticard, plastic sprue and brass rod.

I added some aerials from fine piano wire, a couple of scratch built Oerlikon 20mm guns and replaced the gun barrels with slightly thicker ones to better match my other models with cast 4.5" guns in Mk.6 turrets. I undercoated the model with Halfords white primer and airbrushed it with my Vallejo mix for light weatherworks grey. The decks and details were brush painted before glueing the superstructure into place.



The transfers for the pendant numbers and flight deck straight lines are from Skytrex but I couldn't find a suitable curved line for the flight deck so that was brush painted to match. The helicopter is the original casting but cleaned up a bit, photo-etched rotors added and scratch built brass wheels.










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