Shapeways Italian CV Bonfiglietti

I ordered the 1/2400 Bonfiglietti on the 10th. It arrived on the 13th and they gave me overnight shipping even though I paid for 2 day shipping. I can't imagine this being the norm for them since I was quoted at a 10 day arrival time.

Anyway here she is in frosted ultra detail.

The details are actually pretty nice and she measures in at just over 3.5 inches. One thing about the material it is made of though, it is extremely hydrophobic. That is, it repells water like nobody's business. This thing has ended up being a real pain in the ass to paint. Here she is primed.

I've screwed up on her. First, I put the primer on too thick. Second, the light grey paint I put on the hull didn't want to take and it ended up getting layered several times until it was too thick and started cracking in several places. This also resulted in the holes on the side of the hull getting filled in. Here she is with the basic colors, wash, and matt coat applied.

It's such a beautiful ship but I have royally fucked up the paint job I think. Now that I have knowledge of working with this material, I think I may end up buying another one because I know I can do better than this dreck. Regardless, I'm going to finish her up anyway and the camouflage is being applied right now. Since this ship never existed I can do whatever I want to her. She will have the same jagged black markings with white and light blue like other Italian ships. I will also do the nose in the red/white stripe.


**Update**
 Using my advanced MS Paint skills I have drawn up a possibility for her camouflage.

I think I like it.

**Update 2**

And disaster Hindenburg style. I put Tamiya painter tape on to start getting the camouflage down and the paint ripped up with the tape. This obviously isn't supposed to happen. All of the perfectly straight hull lines on my USN ships are painted using this exact same tape. So either the paint isn't sticking properly to the primer or the primer isn't sticking properly to the model. So I whipped out my trusty dremel tool with the brush head and started removing ALL of the paint from the model. Got about half way done before it died but I need to just start over with this model and reclean it and figure out something. I've read coating it in Pledge acrylic floor shine prior to priming works but I'm going to be honest here. I am thinking my best bet may just be to try and make a mould of the ship and then cast it in some 2 part liquid resin that I have lying around from last year. I am NOT a fan of painting this UV cured plastic.

USS Montana Christened!

GHQ Micronauts 1/2400 scale Montana Class battleship.

I finished her up just in time for Veterans Day tomorrow. Thank you all for serving by the way.

I changed up my technique a little bit with this ship and I think it turned out better than the previous ones but I still need a lot of polish. This was a fun model to do. Enjoy.

Ye Olde Destroyer Squad

The Farragut destroyers are now finished. All I have left to do is make the bases. I didn't notice a paint chip missing until I took these pictures so that got fixed.

As a whole there are some things I would change in terms of saving time and better quality but I'm not so sure my shakey hand is up to it. For my first offering into the GHQ Micronaut line, I am very pleased with how they turned out.

Back to building some ships. Maybe finish up the Israeli conversions. Maybe even get a platoon of Merkavas painted. Who knows?

First USN Ship Christened

I have a destroyer squadron in the works that is comprised of three Farragut Class destroyers and an Omaha Class cruiser. Although I am working on all four ships simultaneously, I got excited and finished up the Omaha first.

Everything I own are 1/2400 scale GHQ Micronauts except for this Omaha which is CinC. It's not as detailed as the GHQ model and didn't have the aircraft catapults on it so I used leftovers from my GHQ models.

This is my first ever 1/2400 scale ship.

Will probably have the destroyers posted later today.

Micronauts Test Base

I slapped some drywall putty down and got a test base finished. I need to research (look at pictures of ships for ten hours straight) more so I can get the wake and divergent waves just right. I have too many waves coming off the bow and they aren't angled properly. Not bad for the first one but I'm just not happy with it. Will throw this one away because I know the next one will be a lot better. Once I get my technique down I can start mass assembly lining them.

Finished base with a single gloss coat. Dark Prussian Blue base highlighted with Dark Blue and then drybrushed with white. I might experiment with some greens but we'll see how it goes. The Dark Prussian Blue is an absolutely rich and gorgeous color. This particular base was made specifically for an Atlanta Class cruiser.

An Atlanta Class Cruiser on the base.

Without flash.

What I really love about actually modeling the waves on is that when viewed from the side there is actual depth which obstructs parts of the hull making it really look like it is a ship in water.

I will take pictures during the creation of the next base as I go and post up a step by step tutorial for anyone that will find it useful. Peace!

All aBOARD

I have ships. Lots of ships. I think over 30 of GHQ's absolutely fantastic 1:2400 scale WWII era United States Navy ships. So far I have the following,

Carriers
-Yorktown Class
--CV-6 USS Enterprise
-Essex Class
--CV-10 USS Yorktown
-Sangamon Class
--CVE-26 USS Sangamon
-Casablanca Class
--CVE-73 USS Gambier Bay
Battleships
-Montana Class
--BB-67 USS Montana
-Iowa Class
--BB-61 USS Iowa
-South Dakota Class
--BB-60 USS Alabama
--BB-59 USS Massachusettes
Battlecruisers
-Alaska Class
--CB-1 USS Alaska
Heavy Cruisers
-Baltimore Class
--CA-69 USS Boston
--CA-70 USS Canberra
Light Cruisers
-Cleveland Class
--CL-56 USS Columbia
--CL-57 USS Montpelier
-Atlanta Class
--CL-53 USS San Diego
--CL-54 USS San Juan
--CL-96 USS Reno
--CL-97 USS Flint
-Omaha Class
--CL-8 USS Detroit
Destroyers
-x3 Sumner Class
-x9 Fletcher Class
-x3 Farragut Class
Destroyer Escorts
-x3 Butler Class
-x9 Bagley Class
And a whole crapload of aircraft.

Anyway that's a lot of stuff that needs painting and after building a few of the ships and seeing how stupidly tiny some of the details and guns are, I've decided that I want to base them. I did some measuring and came up with the following sizes I want for my ships. All sizes are in inches.

Fighters (2 per base) - 0.75 x 0.75
Bombers (1 per base) - 1 x 1
Torpedo Boats (4 per base) -
Motor Torpedo Boat -
Submarine -
Destroyer Escort - 2.25 x 0.75
Destroyer - 2.75 x 0.75
Light Cruiser - 3.5 x 1
Heavy Cruiser - 4.25 x 1
Battlecruiser - 4.75 x 1.25
Battleship -
Battleship (Iowa) - 5.25 x 1.25
Escort Carrier -
Fleet Carrier - 5.5 x 1.5

Ok so now that I had sizes I went and did some price checking. I found a website called http://bayareayards.virtualscratchbuilder.com/ that has some pretty damn sweet bases made specifically for GHQ ships. They're made out of resin and each base is sculpted to fit a specific hull. They're pretty nice but then I saw the price and immediately closed the site. Over $3 just to put a base on my Montana? No thank you kind sirs. People have at times asked me why I go so cheap on supplies and such when I buy such expensive models. One short answer is the cheap stuff usually works just as well as the expensive stuff. Another short answer is that I spent so much money on the models that I no longer have much money for supplies. Anyway I headed off to http://www.litko.net/ to use their base maker utility and get these things priced out. One thing I found interesting was that 1.5mm acrylic bases were $1 per package cheaper than the same sized bases in 1.5mm thick plywood. At any rate I was looking at $100 for acrylic bases and $115 for plywood ones. No thank you kind sirs.

Hours and hours of research and failed ideas later it hit me like a ton of bricks. Matboard. That stuff that they put in picture frames. That's matboard. It's not too thick and not too thin and I remembered it being fairly sturdy. Headed off to Hobby Lobby but couldnt find any matboard that I wanted but ended up seeing some artist board that looked perfect. I picked up a 3 pack of Canson artist board in just about 10"x8" sheets for $8 bucks. Pro tip at Hobby Lobby if you want to save money. Whip out your smartphone at the store and go to www.hobbylobby.com and under the graphic click on the coupon button. Show that to the cashier and get the discount for ANY one item you're buying at regular price. You can use that coupon for one item once a day. Right now it's 40% off and last week I got my mom a $200 painting for $120 by using that coupon.

Moving on, this is what the artist board looks like.

I then marked out the base sizes and labeled them. DD for destroyer, DE for destroyer escort, CA for heavy cruiser, and CL for light cruiser. No left handed person's art project is complete without ink smudging.

On the first sheet I cut everything by hand using an exacto knife and a metal ruler. It took hours and my fingers were numb by the end of it. What's worse, they looked like shit. The blade is thin so everything was beveled in different directions. Sizes were off by a lot at times and the multiple cuts it takes to cut through the sheets showed through on the sides.

Atrocious. These were unacceptable and I had to figure out how to get them done right. In another moment of genius I remembered a big ass paper cutter I had.

Surely this beast would be able to cut through the artist board?

And cut through it it did. 15 minutes later I had 2 CL bases, 2 CA bases, 14 DE bases, 16 DD bases, and 2 fighter aircraft bases plus just a little bit of waste material. What's even better is that the variation in the sizes is 1mm or less which isn't anything to complain about. If you want better then get a laser cutter or buy laser cut bases which obviously defeats the whole purpose of making $100 worth of bases for $8. I will be using drywall putty to make waves on them before mounting the ships.

Ship pictures to come in the future. I also have more Israelis on the way for some fun and easy projects such as the Sholef self propelled artillery conversion, Namer AIFV conversion,  and Merkava conversions into ARV and bridgelaying variants! FUN!