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Building The HMS Mary Rose, 1916

The funnels in my kit were made of resin- one of the funnels had very slight ‘waisting’. In retrospect this would have been virtually invisible… alas I decided to manufacture new funnels using brass tubes, copper wire and small stainless steel washers with the steam pipes being made of soft tubing to allow for the curves to bypass the midships 4” gun band-stand

I added some of the fine PE details from the fret to the deck structures. I was particularly pleased with the boiler-room vent covers-these after painting were gently smudged with a ‘pencil-dust finger’, which nicely accentuated the relief etching of the hinges etc.



With a gulp of air and some Dutch courage, I then proceeded to mount the ship in its swell of very rapid-setting Auto-body filler, this has a workable window of around 3-5 minutes..! But it does have the advantage that a created wave shape will not droop until set—I wanted the ship to be set within the surging waves-not merely placed on top. After a few repeat applications of filler the base and ship were set aside to cure-this is an exothermic reaction—the heat production was surprising!



Once fully cured I set about carving any granular appearing structures away using sharp blades.