Midland Shipyard

HMS Queen Elizabeth just before leaving for Westlant 2018. Taken from the deck of a Brittany Ferries ferry.  I first became interested in warships in the early70s and watched the TV series Sailor about the Ark Royal, just a couple of years before she was paid off and scrapped. I remember too reading in many books that the UK could no-longer afford aircraft carriers (they never quite explained why the French still could) and the future was frigates, destroyers and through-deck cruisers. It seemed a much diminished world and I regretted that I'd never seen, and now never would see, a 'proper' RN aircraft carrier. Then came the Falkands War, won only because the government hadn't quite managed to dispose of Hermes and Invincible before the Argentinian invasion. That old veteran (despite the removal of its catapults and arrestor gear) and the new 'through-deck cruiser' (despite the design being optimised for a very different war, with a small deck and even sm...

Learning how to make custom decals has been on my to-do list for a while now and after this first go at it, I thought I'd write up my experience. I had three waterline ship models that had been stalled for a while for lack of suitable transfers. - A Triang Vanguard that I was upgrading with more realistic gun turrets and paint scheme where the bridge looked too blank without windows. - A refurbished Triang Varicella that was just lacking the Shell Logo for the funnel. - A Delphin Canadian Tribal Class DDH that really needed a transfer for the complicated flight deck markings. I had actually bought a pack of transparent water-slide transfer paper off Amazon a couple of years ago. It cost about £11 for 20 A4 sheets - far more than I expect I will ever need. This had been languishing in a drawer ever since. Lacking either the software or expertise to use a proper graphics program, I actually prepared the design in Microsoft Excel. The Shell logos and the ship's crest for ...

Some while ago I acquired a Delphin model of the Canadian Tribal Class DDH, HMCS Algonquin  with rather battered paintwork and a broken gun barrel. Rather than the fairly complete detailing job I had attempted with my HMS Zulu I decided to restrict myself to a basic strip, clean-up and full-colour repaint. There was very noticeable pitting of the hull surfaces in a few areas as well as some over-deep lines such as on the flight deck and side of the 5" gun turret which I filled with Miliput - you can see some of this showing through the primer in the picture below. After priming, progress on this models stalled for a long time. The main challenge was the relatively complicated flight deck markings, made doubly difficult by using yellow and curved lines. I decided to use this as a learning exercise for making my own decals but it seemed a waste to print off a whole sheet for just one model so I left it until I had a couple of others to do too - I've already posted the res...

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 v...

Finished at last, though not without a few hurdles on the way. The first and worst was that, after airbrushing the main Light Weatherworks Grey and brush painting the decks, I snapped off one of the rather too fragile GAM-BO1 guns, leaving a crater in the deck as the glue and paint lifted off around it. Tiny wedges of plastic glued to the surface was obviously a mistake. I shaped the replacements by filing the end of some dia 0.75mm brass rod, leaving a small circle to represent the base and a reduced diameter extension below so I could secure it to a hole drilled in the deck. This time I soldered the barrel on (trimmed afterwards) and glued the plastic rectangular piece on after gluing them in place. After that and a bit of repair work, I could complete the painting. The flight deck markings and pennant numbers are decals from Skytrex - applied over Kleer and bedded in with Micro Set and Micro Sol. The waterline was hard work. I was using a lining pen, held at an angle a...

After relatively fast progress (for me) up to part 2 of my posts on HMS Cornwall, I was stalled for a while, expending quite a lot of effort and time without actually getting anything usable. The four Type 22 batch 3 ships changed in detail through their time in service. During these delays, I decided to make mine to depict their earlier appearance, before the torpedo tubes were removed and the conventional ship’s boat replaced by another Pacific 22 RIB. Most importantly it meant I could use the original, rounded, 4.5” Mk.8 turret rather than the later faceted Mod.1 version. The first difficulty was the Type 911 SeaWolf radar-optical directors. I wasn’t able to find any definitive dimensions so relied on scaling of various drawings which, I eventually realised had different and incompatible dimensions. As mentioned in part 2, my first attempt looked far too big so I set that aside and decided to sort out the Harpoon launchers first - four tubes, how hard can that be! T...

I posted a part two of this build that accidentally missed out a lot of steps so this is catching up properly with those missing stages. I'll repost that accidental part 2 later as part 3. I made the aft part of the forward superstructure from layered plasticard and attached the SCOT radomes and supporting structure from the kit. A small radome is visible in photos, at the fore end of this and I shaped that from some 0.75mm brass rod. Despite thinking everything was looking OK with the masts through the magnifier, the close-up picture below shows a different story, with some serious deterioration of the top of the Skytrex mast. I can't believe I missed it before. Two steps forward and one step back: I was going to have to make a replacement. Making the replacement mast was easier than I'd expected. The main part is an old bit of sprue, filed square then tapered and cut to length. To improve strength and give me something to key it to the structure below and i...