Been a bit late, chaps, but didn't have time to take pics till today. Well, I always wanted to build my own Nile Gunboat, and this contest is the perfect excuse to start one. I will try to build the "Abu Klea", one of Kitchener's gunboat flotilla for the battle of Omdurman, not a real scale model, but a somewhat shrinked wargames ship. It should be similar enough to be recognized, but simplified enough to be playable. Will be mainly build from sheet styrene, strips and parts from my (now well known ...
) parts boxes. Don't know if I will make it in time, but last weekend's start looked quite promising ...
So, here is the original ship on a contemporary photo (from Osprey's Omdurman Campaign book):
Started the hull from medium thick sheet styrene in a laminated fashion and used styrene strips as spacers between the two hull pieces. The deck piece was "wood planked": first heavily grinded with coarse abrasive paper in one direction only for the wood-like grain structure, then scribed with a scribing tool to similate the separate planks. You will see it better once painted and weathered. Side walls of the lower hull were added and thoroughly glued with liquid polystyrene cement.
The Abu Klea was a stern paddlewheeler, so on to the paddlewheel. I needed some time to think about a simple but convincing solution for that, and only a good search through the scrap arsenal discovered two old Historex 54 mm (1/32 scale) gun wheels from a french napoleonic howitzer carriage (from my very early modelling beginnings some 35+ years ago ...). Using those as a start, everything else was just working and glueing some strip-material from Evergreen.
The miniature is just for comparing the size, and was painted by the great Steve Dean.
I had most fun building the boiler and engine unit for the ship. This is by no way anything which would work in the real world, just simply looking good! Parts were taken from an Airfix 1/72 scale airfield tanker and some old 1/48 scale tank engines from the early Bandai WWII range (yes indeed, ages ago I had them all collected, but after some years I decided I could make better use from some of their parts ... Ahhh, heretic!
Yesterday evening I started the main deckhouse from sheet and strips, but not much to be seen here.
That's it so far. Let's see when and how this will continue, depending on finding some time. Next days will be quite busy, so maybe next Sunday.
06 December 2009, 09:34:20 PM
