Building Advice and Lessons Learned

[Erik]

Hi All,

Let’s start a thread that contains painting and building lessons for these boats and ships we are enjoying.

This is meant to be more oriented toward personal experience than the specific questions in their own threads, if that makes sense.

I’ll start.

I am learning that I should not have put in the crew figures or the guns before painting. I was excited and wanted to see the boats in complete form but now I am experiencing some problems.

The crew are so tiny that paint globs up on them, diminishing their details.

The guns are usually in some kind of nest or have crew attached. I am having a miserable time getting into the tight angles. Next time, I will attach after painting.

Also, that demarcation between the gray gun base and the different colored deck is hard to get straight.

Next time, I won’t attach until final weathering.

[Michael Davis]

Magnetizing the S-38/S-100 is possible, but right at that edge of not worth it. 6mm magnet mounted inside the hull under the turret hole, then trim the turret peg, drill a 1mm hole, and glue a stack of 1mm and 1.5mm-2mm magnets. But adding the turret magnets can be a pain. It’s nice to be able to switch between the 37mm or quad-20mm on the S-100, but I think I’ll stick to gluing the quad-20mm to the S-100 and the 37mm to the S-38.

[invisible officer]

How fashions change.
In “my time” one simply drilled holes in hull and gun with a mini drill and inserted a wire.
No modern mini magnet high tech fuss. 😉

I feel soooooo old.

[Michael Davis]

And another I’ve learned the hard way: when using the Warlord’s painting guide in the Starter Set, reverse the first two steps. So much easier to paint the vertical surfaces after the decks, than trying to paint the decks cleanly between vertical surfaces.

[Erik]

Good idea, decks first.

Thanks for that.

[Niall]

On magetizing turrets try a 2-3mm magnet in the locating pin hole and steel paper on the bottom of the weapon(after cutting the locating pin off). I used this method on a 1/16th scale tank aerial base.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 2 months ago by Niall. Reason: picture did not link

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[Michael Davis]

To save paint (or make use of any excess paint you prepped), after painting any brown bits on the model, thin the brown paint down with a good bit of water. You can now use that to add streaking, rust, and grime to little bits on the hull without having to break out the washes and shades.

[Author]

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