Monthly Archives: February 2023

Historicals, Painting, WW2 Naval

Masts & Booms, Part Two

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After doing the detailing of the JMS 3d printed ships, I pulled out the rest of my 1/1200 WW2 ships, all pewter from Figurehead, and added masts to all of those ships that needed them. Most of these came with pewter cast masts that I had deliberately left off while assembling and painting these ships over the last few years as they’re incredibly fragile and my slightly ad-hoc (ie, bad) storage and transportation solution would have destroyed pewter masts in short order.

Masts all over, still needing paint. Various Figurehead pewter coastal vessels in the foreground, the JMS/Antics 3d printed larger ships background.
Stern-on view of the mast-installing session’s end. Very pleased with the masts and booms on the large coastal freighter on the right there.

Nothing special about the techniques here, just a tiny drillbit, fine tweezers, bits of plastic broom bristle, and superglue. Oh, and patience and a certain amount of bad language… The various coastal freighters all have booms alongside their masts as needed.

Overhead view. You can see the masts & booms on the two rear coastal freighters nicely here. Just for scale, the eight vessels in the center block there are all on 20mm by 40mm plexi bases. I still need to base up the JMS/Antics ships to match…

Finally, just for something else to do, I’ve got some more impossibly tiny airplanes based up! In this case, that scourge of surface targets including shipping, the Luftwaffe’s dreaded Ju87 Stuka, five of them all on 25mm wide plexi hexes, more broom bristle for their flying stands. Primer and paint on them in the next week or so, hopefully.

Stuka! Wee tiny little Stuka, anyway. A 1/1200 scale Stuka has a wingspan somewhere around 12mm across.

We are moving in the second half of March, however, so there might be a temporary slowdown of production and posting as our lives get packed up and moved across town to our new condo!

Historicals, Tutorials, WW2 Naval

Masts & Booms

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More detailing on 1/1200 scale ships with plastic broom bristle. I’ve added cargo handling booms to the masts and kingposts of two of the Antics 3d printed merchant ships.

Booms in progress, the Fort-type freighter foreground has four booms on each large mast and a boom at each kingpost midships. The Ehrenfels freighter in the back has one boom per main mast and I haven’t done the booms at either bow or stern kingposts yet.

For the mostly vertical booms at the kingposts and on the Ehrenfels I drilled holes into the deck with an absurdly tiny drill bit; the horizontal booms on the front and back decks of the Fort are just held in place with a dab of superglue at each end. On the Fort freighter I also put a radio mast immediately aft of the bridge.

The new detail all painted up.

I did the Fort freighter’s booms the same base grey as most of the ship, and the Ehrenfel’s the same ivory/off-white as her upperworks and deck. The plastic broom bristle takes ordinary acrylic hobby paint just fine.

Family portrait of the four ships I’ve added detail to so far. Left to right, we have an Antics 3d print O-class RN Destroyer, a Figurehead pewter RN Hunt II-class escort destroyer, Antics 3d print Fort/Lake type freighter, and finally the Antics 3d print Ehrenfels, a German blockade runner of early WW2 fame, all with their various topmasts, tripod masts, booms, and such done in broom bristle.

The other three Antics 3d ships will all get at least a few cargo booms, and at some point I need to pull out my main collection of Figurehead pewter ships and do the masts on those as well. The Figurehead ships come with pewter masts, but they’re terrifyingly fragile and I’ve mounted exactly none of them so far to any of my Figurehead collection!

A Word on Tools

All of this detail work was made much, much easier (really, was made possible, full stop) by an off-the-cuff purchase I made just before Christmas – a pair of inexpensive Excel brand “Slant Pointed Tweezer” superfine curved tip tweezers. Far finer than the even cheaper drugstore tweezers and well worth it if you want to do this sort of detail nonsense at 1/1200 scale!

Fine curved point tweezers. Well worth the $12 CAN at my awesome local hobby store.

Handling the super thin plastic broom bristle by hand is awkward and frustrating; the stuff is hard to even pick up off a cutting mat. I’m fairly sure I’d have given up on this detailing very early if I hadn’t snagged these at my friendly local hobby store.

Historicals, WW2 Naval

Masts with Broom Bristle

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A bit of experimenting today with plastic broom bristle for masts on 1/1200 WW2 ships. I’m happy to say it works well, although as expected at this tiny scale, it’s more than a little bit fiddly!

Side view. Foreground is the tripod mast on the Figurehead Hunt II destroyer escort, behind that is the Antics O-class destroyer with new topmast, and a piece of unused plastic bristle on behind that. Click for larger.

The bristles are harvested off our very ordinary kitchen broom and are some sort of black plastic. I’ve used them to mount 1/1200 airplanes and for 15mm and 28mm vehicle radio aerials in the past, and the thought of using them for more gamer-resistant ship’s masts than white metal or 3d printing would allow for was, I felt, worth exploring.

It seems to work quite well! The plastic broom bristle takes superglue nicely and is easy to work with. You can put a bend in it easily, which I had to do for the tripod mast on the Figurehead Hunt II destroyer escort, it cuts easily with a razor knife or precision hobby nippers, and I already know from previous uses that it’ll take paint just fine.

Rear view. The tripod mast on the Hunt II (right, on the craft stick) is very slightly cockeyed. I haven’t yet decided if I pull it off and trim it (or build a new one, if yanking this one off the ship ruins it…) or just live with it. Nevertheless, the basic idea works! Click, as usual, for larger.

Next up, I need to decide how many masts and booms and such I want to add to the various Antics 3d printed merchant ships I’ve been very slowly painting…