Hi Robin - hope all is well with you.

I am amazed just how many parts and details you have added into those tiny tanks.

They look really very good.

Tony

Fantastic work Robin, now let me find my glass and see properly.

keep Safe

Trev

Many thanks again to Trev and Mark for their kind words! Mark, I just use the standard NHS vision corrector as shown in the first pic below. I did think about the deluxe version with the self guiding laser thingy but this one seems to do the job without the 10kw power requirement!
Anyhow....
Carrying on then from last time, here’s where those half soldiers went! Photo 12 shows the Churchill tank variants each now equipped with a tank commander in the turret. From left to right: Standard Churchill, Full Carpet Layer AVRE, Standard AVRE, Empty Carpet Layer AVRE and two more standard Churchills. Photo 13 illustrates the Shermans getting the same treatment with the latest Firefly up against the good old penny. The wireless aerial is from a 0.01mm black coloured copper wire – this will be seen properly later on when we get to the beach and wall defences. Photo 14 shows the bottom-most strip of figures from the PE fret, these are composed of kneeling and crouching figures, some will become AA crew and some will be at the bows of the landing ships looking after the exit ramps.
Photo 15 shows the full infantry figures fret with the painting under way. At this point, the whole fret has been primed, painted with Vallejo English Uniform with the gaiters picked out in Vallejo Khaki. The top row has gone further with the flesh painted in Vallejo Dark Flesh and with tiny dots of Khaki for the Basic Pouches. A stripe of Mig Satin Black provides the boots down by the sprue. You can’t actually see the basic pouches in this shot as this is the rear of the fret with larger dots of Khaki to simulate their backpacks, (which I forgot on the first figures!) Rather than cutting off the figures in groups as I did on the badly bent and twisted first fret, I’m going to slowly work down through this one until all the figures are painted, then I can separate the head ends from the fret and cut away the foot end at each side of the main sprue leaving the figures attached by their feet whilst I paint the helmets before finally cutting them free (hopefully easier to hold onto this way!)
Photos 16 and 17 show the production line from the twisted fret – 16 was taken a couple of weeks ago, 17 was taken a couple of days ago, recruitment continues! Finally for this installment, Photo 18 shows the first gun crew installed on the LSI. What I never realised until I found a photo on the web recently is that the over hanging gantry at the bow is actually hinged in the middle of each of the ‘arms’! When travelling, the arm is swung back parallel to the hull with the pulley system attached to the exit ramp around half way along. Then when the ship grounds itself on the beach the pulley cables are pulled tight and the arm swung forward to the position seen here. As the arm swings around, the exit ramp is swung out at a slight angle and carried forward ready to be lowered to the ground. You learn something new every day!
Completing the whole fret of infantry is going to take quite a bit of time, and once its done, guess what, there’s another two frets waiting in line after that! So in the meantime the next installment will be the return of the 0.01mm black wire as it gets turned into the first of the German beach defences (barbed wire) and also the pulley system for the LSI ramps before I can add the troops going down them!
Until then, stay safe everyone and Happy Modelling to you All!

Robin.

Incredible patience.… excellent progress Robin....

Regards

Alan

Many thanks for those kind words from Mark, Alan and Roy! A great photo Roy, you keep him safe now, our parents generation have so much still to pass on to us all! Mum is still coming up with things I never knew - one of the famous VE Day photos was of Lady Nancy Astor dancing with a sailor on Plymouth Hoe during the celebrations. I knew that my father was one of the musicians who played for the crowds that day but I never knew until a couple of days ago that Lady Astor sat on his lap and played the drums just before the photo (she got around a bit that Lady Astor!)
Anyway....
Until now, all my experience of constructing barbed wire has been with the type of electrical wires found in small electronic devices – the general purpose 7/0.2 insulated wire. This is shown in close up in Photo 1. The ‘7/0.2’ simply means a cable or wire composed of seven individual strands, each one of which is 0.2mm in diameter. This was brilliant for making highly detailed barbed wire in 1/72 scale (see my Messines diorama diary for the ‘how to’ bit), but this is far too thick a diameter for 1/700 scale. My first attempt was with a fine copper wire half the diameter as shown in Photo 2. This was fine (excuse the pun) but had one drawback – because it was bare copper (designed for soldering repairs on PCBs) I had to try and colour it either black or gun-metal. I tried to blacken it chemically but it just didn’t want to know (probably the copper is lacquered which prevents the chemical from acting on the metal as it should), and trying to paint it with enough paint to cover the copper made it too thick once again. The solution was to get pre-coloured 0.1mm copper wire (which, when I sent off for the copper one, I didn’t know existed). The reel of black wire is shown in Photo 3, and whilst the copper version was obtained from an electrical supplier, the black one came from of all places a fishing supplier! There are so many different media our hobby can make use of – this wire is supplied for tying home made flies and lures! The difference in the diameters can be seen in the side by side shot in Photo 4. Photos 5 and 6 illustrate the methods I was using to create the coils of barbed wire. I say was, because it dawned on me as I was creating the first few coils for colour testing that I’m going to need quite a lot of this and perhaps there was a more ‘industrial’ method of producing it without quite so much intensive finger-work! After some searching on the web I discovered a nice little gizmo to produce different diameter coils (its actually called a gizmo by the manufacturers too!) Two of the diameters that come with it are the same as I'm using here! In the next installment I’ll be trying that one out to see how it goes, just as the black wire came from the fishing hobby, the gizmo comes from the beading craft hobby, that genre has a lot of useful looking tools to think about in the future . Anyhow, initially I was using a 1.5mm sprung steel rod (aka piano wire) for the beach wire and a 1mm beading needle, both held in mini vices, for the wall top coils.
Before carrying on with the barbed wire, Photos 7 and 8 illustrate the other use I have for the black wire – producing the disembarkation ramp pulley cables. Photo 7 shows the ramps after having their guard rails fitted. These were another of the PE ship’s rails sets from China and were fitted to the ‘in-board’ sides of the ramps. Some photos of troops debarking on D-Day show rails on both sides of the ramps (which I would definitely prefer if I was going down them) but others show only the in-board rails and since that not only means half the work but also its far easier to place the minute troops on later, I’m going with that version! In this shot, the LSI has been placed in its final position on the sea base so that the ramps can be superglued in place. Since the beach undulates a little (and therefore isn’t completely level) each LSI’s ramps will be at a slightly different angle, this first one won’t fit snugly against the shore anywhere else now, as you can see in the next pic, on level ground the ramp ends are suspended above the ground level matching the slope of the beach. Photo 8 shows the wires in place, a simple ‘U’ shape glued to the beam above and to the sides of the ramp below. Once the glue was set I snipped off the excess below the ramp and painted the glued on part grey to match the ship.
As I mentioned, the first attempt at 0.1mm coiling was with the copper wire, that result is shown in Photo 9, perfectly good coils but just very difficult to paint! The black coloured copper wire is shown coming off the 1.5mm steel rod in Photo 10. With the coil made it was time to experiment with various ways of turning it into barbed wire. I went through quite a few different ‘silvering’ trials, starting with the Uschi Metal Polishing Powder (Chrome) but that just wouldn’t take to the black finish. Then I tried Mig Polished Metal acrylic (looked too dark) and Humbrol silver enamel #91 (goes all stringy like candy floss between the coils). Eventually I found that the Humbrol acrylic #56 Aluminium gave the best results. I first applied it thinned down over the entire coil but that took away most of the silvery effect so I went for full strength which was better. Eventually I discovered that I could actually paint the coil whilst it was still on the steel rod but you have to be quick in sliding it off right after or the quick drying acrylic gums up all the coils! Once I had the metal effect I then had to try different rust effects. The Citadel Rust Brown Ink wash was a little too thin to be effective and I ended up with Mig –043 Shadow Rust for the best result. This is quite a thin acrylic to begin with and further dilution didn’t work well so it goes on ‘as is’ with a fairly big soft brush whilst holding both ends of the coil in sprung tweezers to keep it under tension. The results are illustrated in Photo 11. The bare black wire is at the top with the Humbrol Aluminium applied in the centre and the Mig Shadow Rust effect at the bottom. Interestingly, as you will see later, on the green mat the colours looked just right but when the first section was applied on the sandy beach the coil looked so dark against the lighter background I had to dry-brush more Aluminium over it to pick out the steel effect again!
In the next installment, hopefully the coil making gizmo will have arrived and I’ll give that a try plus putting in the first of the barbed wire fences on the beach and a new alternative to the Blacken-it chemical process for making the fence posts.
Until then, Happy Modelling to you All and stay safe!

Robin.

Many thanks again for those kind words Trev!
Firstly, in Photo 12, (just for you Mark) I couldn’t resist seeing if the painted figures really did look like ants! As you can see from the visitor, they actually look like they could be ant riders! (No ants were harmed in the production of this photo though I do understand she received a rocket from her squad leader for being AWOL from her assigned patch without permission, sorry about that!) Photo 13 shows that coiling gizmo I mentioned earlier. It consists of a ‘U’ shaped frame with a series of paired holes attached to a ‘G’ clamp by a couple of short bolts. Below that is the set of rods with shaped handles, which slide through the paired holes as shown in Photo 14. To operate the coiler, you first tie a simple ‘granny knot’ in the wire and fasten it around the end of the handle at position ‘a’ whilst still coming off the reel ‘c’. Then, holding the reel to keep the wire slightly taut (I found pushing a long tapered paintbrush handle through the centre of the reel was just about right) and holding the handle at ‘b’ you turn the handle clockwise winding the wire around the rod whilst moving the reel slowly down the length as the wire plays out. In theory you could make coils the length of the rod minus the width of the bracket. The only thing you have to watch is that the wire is not held too taut – my second coil snapped part way through but this wouldn’t be a problem with thicker diameter wire (0.1mm is VERY thin! ) This useful little tool worked out at about £11, there is a slightly cheaper version for £9 without the G-clamp which you simply screw to the work bench but I though just a couple of pounds more for the clamp was well worth it. Photo 15 illustrates the lengths of coil made with the different methods. At the top is a length of coil still on the handle/rod, in the centre is a long section of coil from the gizmo and at the bottom is the longest section I made with the old manual piano wire method. The main advantage is sheer speed and ease of winding, much easier on the fingers than pulling the wire around the manual version (plus on that one you had to cut lengths of wire from the reel first, if it was left on the reel it just tangled up when winding!)
So with the wire coils under way it was time to sort out the posts to fix it on to. The posts were made from 0.4mm brass wire, purchased from another bead craft shop on ebay. Rather than painting the posts I decided to blacken them chemically. Up to now I had always used a product called “Blacken it” as shown in Photo 16. I hadn’t realised until I was looking for the current price of Blacken it for this posting that the company making it had ceased production in 2017! There are still a few stocks left on line and I’ve since discovered that many other manufacturers like Vallejo and Mig make their own alternatives now. As you may have seen on my Chindit build last year, one of my other loves is collecting and renovating old guns and bayonets (I’ve now got an Enfield No4 Mk1 (1944) to go with my SMLE MkIII (1914). Both of them were de-rusted, cleaned up and re-blued using a product called Phillips Professional Cold Blue. This comes in a bottle about the same size as the Blacken it for around £3 more than that one, but is mixed with water to produce a far greater amount as you can see in Photo 17. To be perfectly honest, the Blacken it is far quicker as it was designed primarily for brass and would blacken the metal in a few minutes. The Phillips solution is designed for steel and takes a few hours to get the job done but it does get there eventually! (Steel takes about five minutes). Photo 18 shows the first set of brass posts with the electrical snips used to cut them to 9mm lengths (I later switched to 4mm lengths but that’s for the next installment!) Photos 19 and 20 were taken a few hours apart and show the brass when first dropped into the Cold Blue and after they had been blackened. The pieces have to be swilled around every 30 minutes or so to roll them around, if not, the side you can see goes black but the side resting on the bottom stays bright brass! After the process was complete, the Cold Blue was poured back in the container to be used again, the blackened posts were swilled around in some clean water to neutralise the chemical and then placed on clean toilet paper to dry them off (or kitchen roll for the more wealthy among us! ) Photo 21 shows the finished product. Finally, in Photo 22, a 0.5mm drill bit in the pin vice is drilling out the first series of holes for the posts, which will create the barbed wire emplacement around the left hand bunker. The brass posts were then glued in place with Deluxe Card Glue by placing a drop of glue on a suitable card and dipping the end of the post into it before placing it in the hole with tweezers.
In the next part, the lengths of barbed wire begin to really appear and I discover a better and easier way to cut those posts out of the brass wire to size!
Until then stay safe and Happy Modelling to you All!

Robin.

Very nice work Robin . That must have been weird for the visitor, bet he thought he’d been supersized.

Mark

Hi to All again! It’s been a while since the last post but I have been busy in the meantime! There’s quite a few tiny troops sprinting across the beach with the first of the tanks now in place (heck of a lot to follow yet) and as promised last time I’ve been working on the Barrage Balloon and Crocodile Trailer. Both of those are now completed after a few casting setbacks as you’ll see in the following installment.
First of all though, a little potted history of the Barrage Balloon I’m modelling for the diorama for those who like a little historical info. Photo 1 shows what you get in the Skywave Beach Head Vehicles set. A simple two-part model. Now when I was looking through all the photos of the landings the one thing that became obvious was that all the Barrage Balloons, British or American had one thing in common – they all had three fins not two as on this one, (although the American ones did have thinner fins like this). I immediately thought that Skywave had just made a twin fin type to make for an easier moulding but I was wrong! Photo 2 shows the exact type as in the kit. This is a later photo taken in the ‘50’s and that poor old balloon isn’t going to be around much longer as it was taken near Los Alamos and guess what was going on down there! That’s right – the balloons were being used to haul an atomic weapon up a few thousand feet for atmospheric detonation tests! In actual fact, after I found that photo I found another of a British (or possibly Canadian) Barrage Balloon crew launching the exact same type so both Allies did in fact use them in NW Europe. The type I want to model however is shown in Photo 3. This is the much beloved old ‘Gas Bag’, which was used to guard much of the south coast and the approaches to London as well as most bomber targets from Cornwall to Scotland. I always thought that Barrage Balloons were just that – a simple bag of gas at the end of a steel cable but in actual fact the British Balloons especially were far more than that, a quite sophisticated weapon in fact.
Diagram 4 illustrates the main parts of the Balloon. A) is the main body of the Balloon, filled with hydrogen gas to keep it aloft. Not all of the body is full of hydrogen however, there is an air filled inner ‘keel’ called a ‘Ballonet’. This helps to maintain the shape of the gas filled envelope and control it’s buoyancy to an extent, this is kept filled by an air scoop near the nose at B). The three fins at the rear C) are also filled and inflated with air, not gas through another air scoop at D) later photos seem to show an improved version with each fin equipped with its own scoop. The fins are simply wind vanes used to keep the nose of the balloon (and hence the air scoops) pointing into the wind. You can actually tell what the wind conditions were when any photo of a Barrage Balloon was taken – compare Photo 3 (with a bit of a breeze about) and the fully inflated fins to Photo 5 taken in a dead calm causing ‘droopy fins’! The hydrogen gas is fed into the envelope through a valve at the ‘er, back end of the balloon at E). F) is called a ‘Rip Panel' and I’ll come back to that shortly. The balloon is attached to the main steel cable by short lines attached to sewn on panels marked G) and above these are another set of panels with long ropes attached hanging down about 20 feet at H). These can be seen in both the photos and are called ‘Picketing Lines’. These are held by the ground crew (often women in Britain) and used to ‘walk’ the balloon from the gas vehicle to the winching position. Finally, the steel cable that does the damage is at position I).
In operation, the deflated balloon envelope would be connected by a hose to the hydrogen truck, which was carrying a number of compressed hydrogen gas cylinders and semi inflated to the point where the ground crew could walk the limp balloon to attach it to the winch and cable. In permanent locations the hydrogen would be made on site with another vehicle equipped as a mobile chemical production factory. Once attached to the cable the balloon was fully inflated and reeled out to its operating altitude. As the war progressed the humble gas bag became more and more sophisticated. At the start they had just a steel cable hanging beneath the balloon. If an enemy aircraft flew into the cable, the speed and impact it was hoped would damage or better still destroy the enemy. At the same time, the force of impact would pull an attached cable inside the balloon linked to the Rip Panel mentioned earlier, ripping the panel off and releasing the hydrogen causing the balloon to deflate for recovery and re-use. Later the cable was fitted with a pair of parachutes, one below the balloon and the other part way down the cable, known as a “Double Parachute Link”. When the enemy aircraft struck this one, the cable detached below the balloon (still pulling the Rip Panel) and also at the lower parachute, leaving the enemy with a cable wrapped around the wing with a parachute at either end dragging the plane out of the sky. Later again they came up with the idea of including explosive charges between the parachutes for good measure . Whilst the idea of the Barrage Balloon was initially for defence against dive bombers and lower level strafing attacks, (and captured German pilots admitted they were very nervous of them), the long length of cable required to reach the He111 and Dornier Do17’s usual bombing altitude was too heavy to be supported by the balloon. They really came into their own again later in the war against the V1 Flying Bombs which flew at a lower altitude, bringing down a confirmed 231 before their launching sites in France were over run.
So that’s the history lesson! In the next installment, converting the Yankee into a true Brit!
Until then, stay safe and Happy Modelling to you All!

Robin.

Great write up Robin very interesting to read


Regards

Trev

Many thanks again to Tony, Trev and Mark, glad you found it interesting too!


So the first task was to create the tiny little replacement fins to re-create the ‘inflated’ appearance instead of the US flat ones. Photo 6 shows the first one under way, with the outline pencilled onto the edge of a 2mm scrap of plasticard and the centre section being ground out with the conical diamond dust engraving bit shown in the foreground. After carefully sanding the edge of the depression to round it off, the outline was cut around by simply slicing through the plastic with a mounted razor blade, ‘nibbling’ off the corners and then sanding those to a rounded profile too. The three fins are shown along side the kit balloon in Photo 7 and attached to the de-finned balloon with its twin original in Photo 8. The set of ‘dimples’ drilled into the side are guides for the tension wires to be attached to the resin copies. Photo 9 shows the ‘sprue’ through which the resin will be poured into the silicone mould, this was created from a short length of styrene rod glued into a wider styrene tube with the assembly then glued to the nose of the balloon. Note also the miniscule air scoops from plasticard under the nose and bottom fin. The first half of the mould is shown in Photo 10, ready for the first pouring of the liquid silicone rubber, below the balloon is the prototype of the Churchill Crocodile Trailer which comes later (saves on rubber having them both in a single mould!) During last winter I bought a small heat mat of the kind used in reptile vivaria (and my Tarantula’s tank too!) It was bought to keep the two part resin bottles warm to improve the flow (it tends to get too thick for fine details when its cold), I’ve now found another very useful application for it – warming up the block of plasticene before cutting it to size and impressing the models half way into it as seen here. The locating holes around the sides and bottom came from pressing single width Lego bricks into the soft clay.
Photo 11 shows the results of the first trial castings. No matter how carefully or quickly I poured in the resin (you only get about three minutes before the cure begins) I got flaming air bubbles at the nose and also at the leading edge of the left fin. The white casting was using the long cure resin hoping the bubbles would rise up before the resin began to harden. Eventually I cured (oops another pun) the problem as shown in Photo 12 by carefully slicing out a channel from the nose to the top of the mould with another one from the offending fin root (marked with the asterisks). This allowed the air to escape up the channels as the resin pushed it out. (The wheels on the trailer also suffered the same problem which wasn’t fixed with their channels, but I came up with a simple method to fix that as you’ll see next time!) The first successful casting is shown in Photo 13, there is a small amount of ‘flash’ at the fin caused by the channel which has to be sliced down and sanded smooth but that’s much easier than having to fill in the bubble each time. The sprue is then sawn off and the nose sanded to a smooth rounded profile before proceeding to the painting stage. Photo 14 shows the ‘experimental flight’ procedure. I needed to find the thinnest possible means of supporting the balloon ‘aloft’. I had reels of 0.5mm brass wire (looked like a tree trunk), 0.4mm (looked like a gutter drainpipe) and even 0.3mm (better, but still too thick). This photo shows one of the bubble-nosed trials suspended on a single strand of 0.2mm electrical wire. I fully expected the balloon to nose dive to the work top but I was pleasantly surprised that it actually stayed up! I then expected it to very slowly arc its way over and so left it overnight. The following morning it was still proudly flying so I decided 0.2mm was the way to go. The only problem was that 0.2mm electrical is basically a copper wire with a veneer of tin and it bounces around all over the place (and is too easy to deform by accident) so I went back to the craft and jewellery suppliers and got a 0.2mm brass wire coil instead. Still the same diameter, but a little stiffer to use. All the following photos are using the brass wire.
Then it was time to paint the trial balloons! Further research revealed an account on the BBC archives of wartime memories of WAAFs repairing the damaged balloons by standing inside them, as they were inflated by compressed air blowers. They would stick patches over any rips and tears (or possibly bullet holes) and finish them off by “painting them silver”. I would assume the outer skin of these balloons would be possibly linen (the videos show it to be pretty thin and flexible) so I’m wondering if the silver paint might actually have been a silver dope to weather-proof the envelope just like the fabric surfaces on the older aircraft (and also the ailerons and rudders on some of the WW2 ‘modern’ aircraft too!) The memoirs also stated that they’d spend thirty minutes painting and then twenty minutes in the fresh air, which sounds like a smelly dope to me! Anyhow, a silvery finish was required. The two shots in Photo 15 shows a coat of Humbrol acrylic Aluminium in the top frame, and a quick spray of Daewoo Matiz Silver car paint in the lower one. The Humbrol paint was hard to apply in a smooth coat as the silver particles are a little on the thick side whilst the paint itself a quite thin and the effect wasn’t quite ‘silvery’ enough. On the other hand, the car spray went on fairly smoothly but looked like the thing was chrome plated – too silvery! The eventual solution was a couple of coats of Humbrol Clear Matt enamel varnish, which dulled down the silver nicely. Next came the really fiddly part – adding the steel control cables which attach the balloon to the main cable. These are shown in Photo 16 alongside the reel of Uschi Rigging thread. This comes in two diameters, standard and fine and this is actually the thicker standard one! This is the rigging thread I used on my Card Sopwith Pups, it’s really elastic and was attached by first applying a tiny drop of superglue at the front location (those little dimples I included in the resin castings), holding the last few mm of the thread with tweezers and touching the end to the glue droplet where it instantly sticks fast. Then I applied another drop to the main cable under the balloon and stretched the thread down to touch that before adding a third drop at the rear location, winding the thread around the cable and then stretching it back to touch the rear drop. Once it was set in place I could then grip the excess thread, pull it away from the balloon and use the microsnips to cut it off. Because it was under tension when cut, any tiny excess left over shrinks back level with the balloon. The same procedure was then repeated on the other side before doing the same thing with the second and fourth locations. This then left just the middle cable which was attached, wound around the main cable and back to the centre on the opposite side. Sounds fairly easy – just extremely frustrating in practice! (So much so in fact that I made do with the five cables on each side instead of the six it should have had! The finished cable can be seen in Photo 17 with my thumbnail below (still with the odd silver particle from the car paint spraying several days earlier! The final pieces remaining were the Picketing Lines used to handle the balloon on the ground. As these were ropes, I was able to use my reel of EZ-Line Rigging, this was quite a bit thicker than the Uschi and being the Rope variety was already coloured brown! Again I ‘shaved off’ a line putting in four instead of the actual five. The final effect is shown in Photo 18 with an ‘in situ’ shot in Photo 19. I drilled a hole down through the resin LSI right beside the aft cable winch to stick the brass wire into, this isn’t glued in yet which is why the balloon is 90 degrees off – I can’t glue the cable in yet as I’ll need to work around the ships with the sea effects once they’re fixed in place, a bunch of wobbling barrage balloons in the way would be a right hindrance! (But only doing their job!)
In the next installment, making up the Churchill Crocodile’s armoured trailer.
Until then, stay safe and Happy Modelling to you All!

Robin.