Seeing Double, a pair of scratchbuilt 1/200 British A class destroyers

 

drawings were much easier to find (and of much better quality) than the Dauntless project

       Another chapter in The Housemartin's endless efforts to exploit my free time; this one is entitled "The Destroyers". He needed two British "A" class Destroyers to go with his light cruiser for the Operation  Ironclad campaign. Nothing fancy about the construction, just my usual foam-with-card-glued-over-it method. Fortunately (unlike the Dauntless project) there are plenty of drawings and photos of A class British destroyers so figuring out the details and placement was a simple task.

 

scaled-up template glued down on a slab of blueboard

 

and cut out, the cut was rather rough, I can't cut worth a darn using a template

 

then I sliced it lengthwise to get two hulls

 

this really made me notice how ragged the template cut was!

 

forecastles, I cut these freehand after tracing the outline onto some blue board

 

and there they are, glued in place

 

and sanded a bit to get a better match

 

the con, and the position for the forward superfiring gun

 

a quick layout check

 

then I completed the rest of the deckhouses

 

once I had the con roughed in I added the flying bridge and railings

 

once assembled onto the model the outer edges of the flying bridge will gain wire suppports

 

looking OK so far

 

 making the midships AA platform,

 an oval of card and a strip cut to a width of 1/4" glued to the edge

 

normal wood glue works just fine

 

and there we are

 

because I hate measuring so much I'm constantly 

checking the look against the drawings

 

the midships AA platforms really were crooked like that,

 don't ask me why, they just were

 

then I made two searchlight platforms, just like the AA platforms,

 except this time the oval isn't canted at 45 degrees

 

next came four funnels, these are just rolled paper

 

a bit of trimming to the funnels to ensure that they are suitably raked

 

the sketch drawing and the two models

I'm still needing to make searchlights and torpedo launchers

 

and what it is supposed to look like when I'm finished