Before the Skywave/Dragon/Revell
kits were released, there was only a very expensive resin kit in this scale.
Scratchbuilt in a fairly short time (for me at least!) during a fairly bad
bushfire season in 1994, it was made for an "Australian built and Australian
service" thematic competition at my modelling club. I resolved to make the
HMAS Australia that never was, but that might have been. I had waited for
an injection moulded kit of the Invincible class for many years and the
Skywave promises looked never to be fulfilled so I thought I'd make a simple
scratchbuild for the aforementioned competition. I used a good set of drawings
from an excellent book on the class and construction was very straightforward
and proceeded very rapidly - although I did build it a little bit too slowly
and a kit was actually released just as I was about to start the detailing.
Built mainly from plastic in various grades plus some Skywave weapons set
items as well as some appropriately sized plastic beads from a cheap necklace,
I also used a nice stiff red coloured hull base from a Fujimi WWII battleship
(the Hiei I think).
The funnels, their block shaped base pieces and the bridge structures were
used as masters and cast in resin (not shown in the photos) as I rather
optimistically thought I may build another one!
Details were stretched sprue, some adapted commercial etched brass and the
cute little 1/700 Sea Harriers and Sea Kings were done by an obscure Japanese
manufacturer. The photos and captions give a guide to how I went about it.
I am now awaiting a good set of plans for HMS Ocean to see if I might be
able to adapt the basic hull! |
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