On with the Aerial Flyer project and the reason for the resin pun-foolery.
Significant progress to report! The deck house is more or less complete and the mast's ready for stepping. Two Riveresco portholes can be seen in the after part of the deck house. I'll put some kind of glazing in them before gluing the roof in place. I've first got to paint the inside area where it can be seen through the doorways. I'll also glue some thin card over most of the fore part of the deck house structure to represent light armor plating. It gives a better surface for the '3D' paint to grip to when it comes to riveting.
I used the Hirst Arts Small Pipe mold #321 and the Inn Accessories mold #59 to cast some component pieces from resin. These are aerial torpedo tubes, boiler caps, bomb racks, drive shaft and ventilators. The photos show the rough layout of what will go where. The model is sitting on a plastic bag to protect the underside.
I embedded short lengths of aluminum tubing in the middle of the long pipes while the resin set so they would be firmly fixed. These go into the tubes drilled in the deck earlier. These are an optional fitting; the sponsons can also be used for Gatling or Nordenfelt guns when I get around to making them.
The bomb racks are the bottle racks from the Inn Accessories mold. When I first saw the component I did think it looked rather like something off a World War One airplane. I'll site these on the edge of the deck either side of the boiler as shown, probably with some kind of control mechanism. This will allow the Flyer to drop lumps of explosive nastiness in its wake without interfering with the propeller, or the racks suffering any back-blast damage from the torpedo launchers.
The ventilators are the elbow bends from the pipe mold. I was going to use the Riveresco type but I think these look more appropriate to Victorian SF. A small pipe cap atop the deck house serves to ventilate the commander's cabin. The little shield on the glacis plate is from the inn mold. I'm going to take a leaf from the modern Royal Navy's book and paint a ship's crest on it. The inn mold also has a nice little two-sided piece that can be either a chest of drawers or a cupboard. I'm thinking of taking a resin cast of it for use as a signal flag or arms locker for inside the deck house.
From previous experience I find it's best to leave cast resin for a while before attempting to paint it as it allows volatile elements to evaporate from the surface. Otherwise the paint tends not to stick. Once I've glued the boiler casing to the caps with epoxy glue, I'll give all the resin pieces a good going over with spray undercoat.
Onward and upward!
4 comments:
It's coming along very well! That's a great imaginative use of those Hirst Arts mold bits.
It is really coming together well- moving on in leaps and bounds.
I really like the look of those bomb racks.
Thanks, gentlemen! I'm moving on to painting and fixing some of these pieces in place. For the bomb colour, I'm thinking along the lines of WW1 again, with mustard-yellow casings and black fins. The mounting will be white.
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