More Monitor

Having a few minutes to spare these last couple of days I worked on the Ozark-style Monitor model. Joppy's idea of running a bolt through the turret to mount it on the hull is good, and I like the idea of using the bolt-head for a director cupola on top of the turret. Trouble is, I don't currently have a drill bit capable of boring through the metal plate serving as the turret trunk. An experiment on a spare lid aimed at piercing a hole using a hammer and nail was hurriedly abandoned when the plate began to buckle with no appreciable sign of a hole forming.

So, back to Plan A: a magnet.

This turned out to be easy enough to make. A couple of wooden pieces glued either side to support the cross truss, a small bar magnet, and Bob's your uncle. I positioned the truss so the magnet is almost touching the base plate. That way it reduces friction and so avoids the magnet becoming detached from the truss. It's easy to turn the turret yet it has still got plenty of magnetic adhesion to hold it in place.

Moving on, I painted the deck with the first undercoat, aiming at the kind of bleached wood effect seen on old sailing ships. I'm going to mix a little Spackle/Tetrion filler into the next coat to fill the gaps in the planking which are a bit too obvious for this scale.

Now a trial run to see how everything fits together.

I'm not 100% happy with the decking on top of the deck house, and may yet cover the lot with thin card scored to resemble planking. For convenience I'll fit a single smokestack abaft the conning tower instead of the prototype Ozark's twin stacks as it'll take up a bit less space. I'm thinking of putting a skylight in the centre of the upper deck just for looks. The philosophy behind the model is that it's a gunboat, pure and simple, here to carry big guns to a place where they can do a lot of damage and not act as a personnel carrier. It won't carry more than six or so figures, tops. 

So, next steps will be to apply the final coat of paint to the main deck, and work out what to do with the upper deck. More to follow.