Building Containers

Although the model looks great it still looks too much like a tanker with the large expanse of open deck. I decided to try my hand at scratch building cargo containers. After calculating the dimensions to make it in scale I found a rectangular piece of balsa wood that was the correct size. To fill the porosity of the balsa so I could glue onto it, I painted it with a few coats of varnish. I next cut 5 pieces of .020 sheet styrene to cover it and glued them on with white glue. After the glue dried I filled the seams with squadron green putty and sanded them smooth. Using a straight edge and a pencil I laid out the container shapes on the styrene. Tamyia tape was then used to randomly mask off containers for painting. Since the majority of containers seem to be a dark red color, I used Hull Red acrylic to paint the block. When the paint had dried overnight I remasked the randomly masked areas and painted them different colors. A Black Sharpie Marker and a straight edge was used to draw the lines which would identify each container. As a final touch, I used prizma color pencils to simulate some of the markings seen on containers. The whole thing was cemented to the deck with 5 min. epoxy.