The Last of the British Fleet

 These are the last 1/2400 scale British ships I needed, all destroyers and escorts. On the top are 6 Hunt class destroyer escorts. Next row left to right: 5 S-class destroyers, 4 E-class, 1 Tribal class, 5 A-class. Bottom row left to right: 5 Town class, 5 M-class, and 5 N-class destroyer built for the Royal Australian Navy.

I now have 7 more US ships and 58 more Japanese ships left to finish, plus a few French and Italian vessels, and some more merchant ships. After that I need to think about what to do for the aircraft squadrons.

1/1200 HMS Aeolis 32-Gun Frigate

It has been four years this month since I completed a 1/1200 scale sailing ship. I used to  these little guys out one after another, no problem. This was hard! I suppose I have become somewhat spoiled by the larger 1/700 scale sailing ships I have been building since then. And it's been eight months since I've built one of those. 

I finished rigging this little ship today. Not my best work, but hey.

There are six more 1/1200 ships to finish: two needing spars, sails, and rigging; four needing just rigging.

1/3000 Scale Isengard Diorama

The tower of Orthanc at 1/3000 scale is pretty small, just a bit over two inches. So I decided to build the entire Isengard compound, with flaming pits, timber towers and cranes of the uruk-hai.

The tiny tower of Orthanc on my template

The basic foam shape

The cavern cutouts

Vinyl plaster covering

Starting the enclosure. Wall sections are foam and bastions are fired cosclay

Making the bastions

Firing the bastions in my heat gun powered makeshift tea tin oven 

Making the wooden towers

Adding an uprooted tree

The cranes are in place and the tree root craters are done

The foliage is complete

Finished shot with the wooden base

This was a fun build

3D Minas Tirith in 1/3000 Scale

While I had the printer up and running, after printing all of the 1/2400 WWII ships I needed, I printed three LOTR iconic locations: Minas Tirith, Barad-Dur, and Orthanc in 1/3000 scale. Actually Barad-Dur is a much smaller scale, but is about the same size as the Minas Tirith model so they can sit on a shelf together. I was surprised at how large Barad-Dur was and how small Orthanc was compared to Minas Tirith. In the books Orthanc is 500 feet tall. Minas Tirith is 1,663 feet tall, and Barad-Dur is a monstrous 4,482 feet! At 1/3000 scale that would make it 18 inches tall. Who has that kind of shelf space?

Here is Minas Tirith

The book describes the first wall as black, made from the same stone as Orthanc.
The movie ignored this.