Two Halves

Posted on March 18, 2022 by Niek Nijsen

A long silence, that’s all you’ve had from me over the last year on this project. Yes, I’m still working on this model as it’s my “main project” at the moment. Having said that, it’s also the one that’s causing me the most issues and delays. Hence the silence as I’ve been trying to sort out the problems and come up with ideas to make it work. So, I can finally say I think I’ve got it figured out and am ready to present you with another update on the Bismarck!

First of all, I decided to slightly change the idea on how I’ll be displaying the completed model. Yes, we’re still looking at cutting the model in half (more on that in a bit) but it will no longer be on an open sea. Instead, I’m going down the route (which is less common it seems) of presenting the ship while it was anchored in Norway, days before she set off on her final journey. I found a great photo of her crew working on removing the Baltic camouflage scheme, which is something I’ll try to represent in my display.

This than meant I had to go look for figures, which I eventually found after a long search. Despite ordering them back in November, I’ve had nothing but issues and delays with this company. Eventually, he did send them with a tracking code (which didn’t work). But as luck would have it, little did I know dear Putin was about to invade the Ukraine. And guess where my figures are coming from…. Yeah, I doubt I’ll ever see them again (just as the money I paid for them). Not sure yet as to what’s going to happen, I’ll leave it for now and perhaps find something else in the future when I get closer to completing this massive kit. If in the meantime anyone knows where to get a German crew in 1/200, please let me know!

What did arrive was the decal that I want to “sandwich” between the hull halves to give the sea a really cool (in my opinion) effect. I’m going to keep this as a little secret until I get to that stage by which time, I’ll reveal it through the photos.

As I already mentioned, I continued cutting the hull in half. Since I was already “halfway” there, there wasn’t any way of going back and changing my mind on the displaying of the finished model. This painstaking process continues still, as I’m currently trying to trim 6mm off the bottom half with my little razor saw, which takes forever. Secondly, it also means my cut isn’t perfectly straight, which will have to be sorted once the hull is in place on the acrylic sheet with (a lot of) putty and sanding. The joys just keep on coming…

It’s not all been about cutting things; I’ve actually managed to add some things to the plastic as well. I’ve started adding the PE portholes, which replace the moulded ones. This meant I had to sand them off first, without damaging any of the other fine details that are present. A daunting task and one that takes a lot of time. I’ve spent at least a few hours on this and so far, I’ve only installed about 20 of the 200-ish windows. Let alone all the stairs I’ll be replacing next. But more on that next time, see you then!

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