THE PIRATE GALLEON - A WORK IN PROGRESS REPORTMore than fifty years ago my grandfather build a scale model of the sailing ship "Wappen von Hamburg" in about 1/80 scale, all from wood, brass and other raw materials. At that time you couldn't go into a shop and buy a kit or order ready built detail parts on the Internet, everything had to be made by yourself. The best example are the guns: every single one was turned from a single brass piece on a lathe. Unfortunately, the finished large ship model had no protection at all from dust, as there was non glass case, and when I found it some years ago, decades of dust had assembled everywhere and the ship was in a sad and partly broken state. So I decided to keep the interesting parts like masts, guns, railings and detail parts to use them later on a new ship model I planned to build for my pirates.
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All parts have been cleaned, sandpapered flat and washed in warm water with some dish washing soap.
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Now the serious work starts: glueing the main two part rib. As all parts are resin, only a good two-part epoxy glue will be the tool of the trade! That means a lot of hardening time in between, so it's also time for the one or other glass of good scotch ...
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After gluing all the (many) ribs together, the sides of the ship were glued and then carefully clamped together. A highly delicate proceedure as resin is very fragile and will break easily. But it worked ...
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After glueing all the rather largish gaps had to be filled and partly resculpted with Milliput.
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Connections betwen the back part and both the sides had to be filled with heavy amounts of Milliput and and carved afterwards to regain the wood structure.
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Between sides and all the three deck parts filler pieces were glued and fixed with needles during curing.
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The rather simple rails were replaced with wooden parts from a shipmodeller's supply. All wooden parts were pinned and epoxied to the resin, as this is a wargames ship and will see a lot of handling on the decks.
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First detail parts from my grandfather's ship model; everything was cleaned with my motor tool and a small nylon brush. Looks nice ...
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On to the guns. The resin cast pieces were hard to clean and several of the cannons were miscasts and beyond any repair. So I choose the hard way using the old wooden guns of my grandfathers ship and added wheels cut from round wood strips.
