Finishing Touches

A flag comes with the decal sheet but, in this case, it was the wrong color and a bit too small to use. A Dutch flag is pretty easy to make so I made one out of paper and mounted it on a flagstaff of styrene rod. A last check for shinny spots from the super glue and touch ups with some clear flat acrylic and I called her done. This was a fun model to build. I found quit a few photos on the Internet to use for painting and detailing guides. Also learned a bit about ro-ros' and container ships.

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.

Mounting the Model

I used a plain piece of oak for a mounting base with 3/8 inch basswood cut into short lengths for keel blocks. After gluing the keel blocks in place I drilled a hole through one for the mounting screw. Some oak stain and a few coats of varnish and the ship is ready to mount. Since orange seems to be a signature color for this ship line, I painted some sheet styrene orange and applied the kit supplied decal for a name plate.