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Building an A/B Waterbase for Your Ship Models
Russian Navy Diorama
Sovremenny DD
Another example comes with my USS New Jersey BB/ USS Spruance DD "Refueling at Sea" diorama. This illustrates a case where the base was fully built before any ships were attached to it. The photos are self explanatory. Again, note the weights and clamps that I used to hold the water surface while gluing the diffuser to the ship’s hull.
The procedure I used to build the base on my Gato-class sub illustrates a case in which the top of the base was cut in two. For this model I wanted to represent the sub in very undulating water, typical of this type of submarine's hull while navigating at speed on the surface. This case poses a special difficulty consisting in determining what will be the hull’s profile at different points of contact with such extremely undulating water. First, I used a contour transfer tool to roughly determine the ship’s profile at different points of attachment. Then I draw a template on a piece of cardboard and made little adjustments stepwise by trial and error.
As you can see in the photos, initially I marked and cut this general hull profile on the diffuser to make a single piece top, only to realize that it would be very difficult to make further necessary adjustments because of the extremely waving nature of the water surface. The already attached PE propeller guards additionally made this operation even more difficult. So I came up with the idea to cut the diffuser in two halves longitudinally along the axis of symmetry of the opening. Now it is much simpler to make final adjustments and to attach the two halves to the sub’s hull.
You can always use this approach for any ship. You don’t have to worry about any gap or overlap between the pieces while they are being attached to the hull. These and any other imperfections resulting from this process of marking, transferring, cutting and gluing the diffuser to the hull can always be corrected during the gel application and make them unnoticeable.