¹⁄35

Building the Oktabriskaya Revolutsia

For a battleship she carried a decidedly sparse fit of boats which were deployed from cradles on deck and raised boat gantries. The kit supplied boats were actually quite usable, however the boat gantry parts were far too simplistic for my liking , desite their being virtually almost invisible I chose to construct four replacements from pieces of PE from a variety of sources to approximate the correct outline and girder pattern of the original ship; the photo shows the effort in my view to be to be worthwhile!



The remaining construction was stratightforward, with various details being added in an unremarkable manner, the exception being the huge ariel and halyard spreaders on both masts, these needing to be thin, yet strong enough to resist the cumulative tension of even sprue rigging posing the only true problem--I solved the dilemma by making the yards of the spring steel bristles from a stainless steel wire brush, these resisted all movement much more effectively than brass or nickelsilver ever could.

The project was just starting to become fun with the end at last coming into sight.... when I discovered a new photo; this showed the crane masts to be square rather than round... I loathe finding a near catastrophe a longway into a build--yet I fall into these holes with most of my models! The problem was solved by gluing styrene strips to the crane masts to form a square.

The ship carried a floatplane on turret 3 at various times of her career-- some photos show her without ; then again there are many photos with the KOR-1 perched atop the turret -making the ships side profile even more outrageous to the eye!



Although there is no aircraft supplied with the kit I decided it would be an interesting project to scratchbuild one. I carved the fuselage from a piece of scrap resin casting block . The wings were made of paper infused with CA. I drilled out both cockpits, atop of which perched the engine on a strut assembly. I made the engine cowling from a cocktail stick dipped into CA to harden it, merely adding a more rounded profile to the existing point.