¹⁄700

Tsarist Battleship Andrei Pervozvanny

The kit funnel caps were supplied in the form of PE -this were very over-scale and I felt unable to bend them into the hemi-spherical shape required anyhow. So I made my own using stretched sprue and a circle of copper wire - the end result was far more delicate and the correct profile in plan and side elevation.



Whilst on the subject of funnels... it is worth noting that many drawings, sketches and line illustrations show the forward funnel to carry a steam pipe on the aft face -examining all the photos I had I was unable to establish this as being existent. As neither of the kit funnels had any steam pipes at all it was not an issue-- they had to be fabricated anyway!

I chose for the stern section to use some PE davits from the WEM Askold set; because of the hull’s tumblehome I had problems with adhesion of the PE items due to the minimal contact surface--I cured this by cutting shallow notches by rocking a large Stanley blade into the hull




The ships boats were sharpened up a little with a blade, portholes drilled where required and the open boats furnished with oars made of brown stretched sprue with the ends flattened with pliers. The webbing strapping for the boats swung outboard in davits was made of brown sprue flattened by rolling a heavy metal cylinder over a thick ceramic tile-this could then be applied using liquid poly cement, the strapping then conformed exactly to the hull profile and had a sharp kink at the gunwale!