Dock for the USS Teaser (VSF Flyer) Update!

[floating white bear]

Every VSF flyer needs a dock. (Duh!) So I began construction on a landing pad/ support structure.   The first pictures show the basic building blocks of the docking tower and the fuel-regeneration factory.

I started also some window masters.  Using a shaped plastic tube, I cut the end off and set it into a plastic ring.  This will be a large circular skylights for the deck around the landing tower.

I needed a smaller spherical bead for some round window-ports. Since I did not have one and I found a ball bearing just the right size, I made a squash mould from some ‘green stuff’ and pressed two half spheres in ‘brown stuff’.  The one circular window will be ports around the outside of the circular building, while a hemi-sphere/tube bay window will feature on the square structure.

Regards, Rob.

[Mason]

This is looking promising.
I think I will pull up a chair and get comfortable.
 

[Wirelizard]

The cage mast is great, obviously inspired by the masts seen on some pre-dread battleships! What is the mast constructed of, styrene strip?



(pic ganked from here

Were these basketwork/cage masts mostly just an American thing, or did other countries use them in the last quarter or so of the 19th C?

[OSHIROmodels]

This is looking promising.

This most deffinately 

cheers

James

[Fates Fickle Finger]

Nice! Looking forward to this!
FFF

[Dewbakuk]

Very interesting. What scale is it for?

[floating white bear]

Here is a snap of Teaser in an approximate dock position.  The steel ruler is 15 inches long and this is for my 15mm VSF project.

The spiral geodesic masts are from Evergreen styrene rod.  They were characteristic of US dreadnoughts in the 1930s.   

The relative positions of the flyer and its support station is yet to be worked out.  As are the positions of various walkways, ladders, cranes piping doors and windows.  I am also planning some sort of headquarters building to go alongside the dock/fueling station/support structure.  As most of my projects tend to grown beyond reasonableness of time and space, there may need to be a barracks and possibly some kind of security/defensive positions as well.  We’ll  see how it goes.  (Usually at some point I just cry “Enough!”, declare victory and the project is over.)

I also found a lovely plastic overhead walkway at a recent model train show to add somewhere, and I have some plastic ping-pong balls to make holding tanks in the smaller bit with the three ports. Shown are some 15mm ACW figs for scale.

The final shot is of some of the plastic detail bits I’ve collected.  When I visit my local model railroad shop I try to stock-up on a pack of Evergreen and a pack of details.  Depending on the item the packs are only a few dollars and it is a relatively painless way to build up a stock of material and parts for future use.  Shown are: Tichy Train Group in the white-label pack; Grandt Line details in the blue label; the large white bit is from an English company called Ratio; the black ladders/stairways have been in the parts box for a while and I don’t recall the company.  Walthers also makes detail parts and many model railroad building kits will have useful items.  All of these are available in a variety of scales.  I generally use N scale for 15 windows, HO for walkways and such.  HO will work for 28s and there is also large O scale for heroic 28s.

If you live in or near southern Ontario, I recommend Credit Valley Railway in Mississauga (Winston Churchill and 401)

http://www.cvrco.com/

There is more on USS Teaser and the cage masts from December on my blog:

http://floatingwhitebear.blogspot.ca/2012/12/more-on-vsf-flyer-geodesic-tower.html

and:

http://floatingwhitebear.blogspot.ca/2012/12/uss-teaser-hms-indecisive.html

I believe it was Jay who had a great comment for the geodesic masts.  I use Testors liquid solvent for my styrene joints.  It however dissolves the plastic a bit, but it forms a super bond.  Used on smaller thin stock, the plastic tends to crack and breaks up like spaghetti.  Test your materials first and try other glues such as ‘Crazy’ glue (Cyanoacrylate).