¹⁄700

Scratchbuilding the NRP Alvares Cabral

Refrain your motivation!

I was highly motivated, as I have said before, and after making a lot of parts, modified PE parts - also a very difficult task, that should be made with fresh cutters and when the part is strong enough, annealing it (this should be done with a small flame or you could melt this delicate PE parts) - making brass rod parts I have finished the building phase!

Oh what a joy - it really looked like the ship I wanted to portray - and now that all is glued in place I needed to paint it! So remember to check the parts and subassemblies without gluing them in place (how stupid can you get - this is a newbie mistake, but than, I am young at heart (yeah, right!!))

Again I cried for help... I have a pot of the current original color Portuguese Navy Light Grey, which is a blueish/greenish kind of Grey - very similar to the Canadian Navy Grey! I wanted to use this color and bothered (again and again) WEM and John Snyder particularly on how to tone down and scale down the color to 1/700. A kind of a recipe was kindly supplied and advices made, but before I used it, I read some more articles published in the Navy Magazine and compared some photos, just to realize that the maintenance was made in several ports making the standardization of the color almost impossible. Also on some photos sent by Lawrence, show a much lighter shade of grey (Royal Navy), so before I made another mistake, I checked my WEM Colourcoats paints and independent of the label, I choose what seems more accurate to the photos I had - Modern US Navy Light Grey with some dabs of green was the selected for the vertical surfaces, US Navy Dark Grey for decks. After some jiggling with masks and tape, fine brushes and some patience, I was able to paint it!

Decals and Flags

I have made the Jack and Portuguese national flag, scale it down and printed it (all this work was lost, because of my computer hard disk death!) and for the hull numbers, I used Lettraset dry transfer sets, one of my stock and the letter F, from our club President Pedro Figueira (now deceased).