28mm Armored Cruiser, detail, details.......

    Now that all the big stuff was done I had to set about providing some of the eye-candy that makes bigger scale models fun, details. This includes stuff like doors with handles, ship's boats, cranes for the ship's boats, smokestacks, and so on. Knowing that this isn't a true scale model but rather a caricature of one, a lot of fussy little details got swept aside or reduced to incidental appearances and I had to go for playability over delicacy of detail.

I started out with the easiest one; doors, I cut about a dozen out of thin card

and then mounted them in likely locations about the ship

I tried to make sure that there was access to all decks trough proper doors,

I am lazy and wanted to avoid having to make ladders

each area of deck can be accessed through a doorway

a thin strip of card creates the appearance of a hinge

German warships were notorious for the large, heavy cranes they carried

so I knocked up a couple of them, novelty miniature spools were

 attached to provide the appearance of a winch

levers made from scrap paper added to the effect

and a reinforcing rib helped cover my less than exact cuts

more thin card provided the frame of the armored conning tower

and the edges of the gunports

testing out ideas for placement of cranes and smokestacks

candy tubes make excellent smokestacks

but they can be a pain to glue as the plastic in resistant to most glues

the deck just needs some boats to be complete

to ensure a good seal you need to abrade the surface with some coarse sandpaper

 and drill a hole through the bottom so you can make the glue flow inside

squirt the Liquid Nails up into the hole until there is a decent-sized ball of it inside the tube,

then spread some on the abraded end and attach to a base

if you look carefully you can just see the glue oozed up into the tube.

     Railings are next, I think that I have worked out how to attach them without creating too much of a problem. Stay tuned!

      Enjoy,   John