¹⁄700

Spanish Navy Battleship PELAYO, 1895

The first major surgery to be taken in hand was the erroneous stern shape. So as to be able to sand and file and grind without getting the inevitable cracking of fillers on a feather edge, I decided to cut away a major section of the stern,and glue in a lump of resin;


...this was part of a discarded 1/350 WEM Hood resin turret.. So as to prevent the glue cracking under the stresses of grinding I drilled and pinned the grafted section for belt and braces security.



After the correct profile was achieved I turned my attention creating the missing gunports. As most photos of Pelayo show her static in harbor with all the square scuttle lids open I decided early on to portray her in a mini-diorama setting so as to use this feature to show of her tumblehomed hull shape. I used parts of the ever-useful WEM Askold PE set, the gun embrasure lids furnishing me with perfect little brass squares in a variety of sizes; in the event I needed over 150 little brass squares....
These scuttles when opened in harbor often did not have the lids at an exact uniform level of opening; I replicated this feature in miniature.



The sternwalk and its roof was fashioned from ordinary printer paper, once tacked in place using white glue, it was soaked in CA glue which made it rigid, and gave excellent adhesion all around the edges.