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.










Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

HMS Warspite - Navis / Neptun Models and Memorabilia.

Image
Like many British naval history enthusiasts, I have a particular fondness for the battleship HMS Warspite because of its long and remarkable career. A career that could so easily have ended prematurely at Jutland in 1916 but instead went right through to bombardment duty 28 years later off Normandy and Walcheren via Narvik, Calabria and Matapan and eventually ended on the rocks off Prussia Cove before the ship was finally broken up a short tow away, in the shadow of Saint Michael's Mount. There are already many accounts of that career so I won't try to make my own version. A good online summary is here , including photos of the grounding and final breaking up just off the beach at Marazion.. Of course Warspite was heavily reconstructed between the World Wars, radically changing her profile from a classic WW1 dreadnought through the addition of a massive tower bridge, single funnel and midships hanger. More significant if less obvious improvements were made to the propulsion, ar...
Read more

HMS Suffolk: Airfix 1/1200

Image
The initial impetus for my renewed interest in waterline ship models in 2012 was the reissue by Airfix of their 1/1200 scale models from the 1970s. Many years ago I built some of them, not very well and they are long lost so I wanted to see if I could do better second time around. I had mixed feelings about the decision to sell them only as a 'Sink the Bismarck!' set of: HMS Hood, HMS Ark Royal, HMS Suffolk, 2 Tribal class destroyers, Prinz Eugen and Bismarck himself. At £20 it was certainly good value and I bought two immediately, on the other hand I'm still not sure what to do with two Ark Royals and didn't particularly want the German ships at all but I would have bought a few more Counties. I hoped Airfix might have added to the range but I guess the demand just isn't there and that will never happen. HMS Suffolk was the first one that I set about building. I wanted to do the best job of it that I could so spent some time on research. Over ...
Read more

HMS Queen Elizabeth - Aircraft Carrier - Part 3: transfers and flight deck

Image
I've read many times that small scale aircraft carrier models stand or fall by their flight deck markings. I guess the decals included in the Mountford kit (as the kit itself) must have been based on early renderings because they bear little resemblance to the markings seen in photos of HMS Queen Elizabeth during Westlant 19. From Wikipedia Commons licensed under    Open Government Licence version 1.0 The striking features for me in photos of the flight deck are the yellow-black hazard markings around the lifts and the rectangles of different greys. The colours seem to depend on the viewing angle or maybe the main deck colour has faded with time. Many pictures show the large central area and one alongside the ski-jump as bluer and the others as a much darker grey than the general deck grey, for example here among the many excellent pictures of HMS Queen Elizabeth at SeaForces.org  and at the top of this article on ' Save the Royal Navy '. Taking advice from Jef...
Read more