sovereignhobbies

Thanks for the feedback folks. On second glance the example I chose of KM02 may cause some alarm given how bad it was and the almost doubling of black needed to get near the target... That was not the fault of the colourant. We actually had a mechanical failure in the dispensing machine which led to that. Each of the 16 colourant cannisters has stirring paddles inside driven by an electric motor through a reduction gearbox to convert a relatively high RPM motor into slow turning paddles with enough torque to stir fairly thick colourant liquids. The teeth had stripped on the gears of our T21 bl

This is the power of marketing for you. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of consumers are clueless about what most of the words on the packaging actually means to them as consumers and are certainly unqualified to make remarks about which aspects of the paint chemistry makes them better or worse for most tasks a paint might be used for. That's not a slight, it's something manufacturers capitalise on! The word "acrylic" is the biggest marketing buzzword going. Acrylic resin isn't a paint binder. It's a polymeric resin. Acrylic resin alone is absolutely useless, and furthermore

I did that then decided I absolutely hated them to the point where I all but gave up modelling. I'm not claiming those who like acrylics and water dispersible ones in particular are wrong for liking them, but I will claim that plenty people do not like being told what their preferred paint chemistry should be lest they be considered some sort of luddite. I will state that I never had so many persistent and frequent airbrush and paint adhesion failures as I did when trying about 6 different brands of acrylics wondering why I had gone from a reasonably proficient modeller to having one disaster

Ah yes, I was one of them. What I actually shared was some stats showing the very large proportion of Nazi model kits produced relative to subjects which were available to model as compared to numbers of model kits produced relative to any other nations' subjects available to model. Glad it amused you though... An argument I see a lot, which makes much more sense the less one knows.

Now available https://www.sovereignhobbies.co.uk/collections/royal-navy/products/royal-navy-ran-rcn-and-rnzn-draught-marking-decals These have gone down beautifully with just some Mr Mark Setter.

How about this folks? We are working with the superb Decograph in Ukraine for these Royal Navy and Commonwealth draught markings. I've just received the attached photos before they're posted to us over the next couple of days hopefully (Vitali and his team live in Zaporizhzhia which has been a particular target for military munitions and they're working under very difficult circumstances and have been beset with power cuts - so it'll get done when it gets done). The resolution is very impressive. I've enlarged a crop of the 1/700 decals - the smallest scale - and added dimensions. One could be

For anyone who hasn't seen this done before, silk screen printing uses a separate screen per colour so additional colours cost more money to make. The minimum batch size for the company I'm liaising with (and I'll be more than happy to name them once everything is formalised) is 100 copies, but the paper size is larger than one sheet of decals as we modellers know them. The designer has to maximise use of the paper and after printing the 100+ copies is cut down into individual decal sheets. This is the current layout. It's changed quite a bit as I've been discussing with the compan

To give the best chances of this being viable I've been rearranging the layout of what I'll get on each copy from the silk screen printing process. To use up dead space in the paper we'd be paying for anyway I've rejigged some quantities and included 1/400 scale and 1/600 scale in small quantities (but it'll be at least 100 copies each as that's how this works) This is what you'll get on a sheet. 1/200 is slightly different as the market is smaller and bias towards large ships at present. 4 sets of black, barred and left aligned markings, and 6 sets of whi

This is something we've designed and hope to make available as premium quality silk-screen printed decals. It's now gone about as far as it can just spending our own time on it, so thought we'd gauge interest from you all prior to ponying up the hard cash to have a run* printed. Well? What do you think? *1/200, 1/350 and 1/700 scales are planned. IF these are a smash hit sales-wise AND we can be convinced there's genuinely a market for some other scales THEN we will consider making something not shown here.

Hi all, whilst clearly well intentioned the above is a series of approximations diverging ever further from a dubious origin. 250-N was darker than 20-B and both were substantially darker than Intermediate Blue. These are original colour photographs of USS Wasp CV-7 wearing rather faded 250-N. The careful observer will spot fresher stain near the bow though which are substantially darker than the rest. Even the faded stain elsewhere is darker than the Blue Gray paint underneath the wings of the TBDs and SB2Us on the flight deck. The insignia date this photograph to prior

And here's the link to the Gallery post which I've fixed also:

Hi Gareth, sorry it took me a while to look in here again. Sadly the guy from Village Photos just disappeared and broke most of my build threads from the past several years. I've no idea what happened to him - perhaps he took ill or worse during COVID, or perhaps he just thought "sod everyone, I'm moving to the Bahamas". It's annoying, but there's no point getting upset about it. I had been meaning to rebuild this thread for a while so your post has given me the motivation to do that so I've started rehosting all the images and relinking them all. It is a bit of a scutter as we say in parts of

Not to be argumentative, but in many cases there is a way to prove it one way or the other - there are lots of surviving administrative records in The National Archives which do just that. Unfortunately there are no reliable published resources on this subject, because hardly anyone can be bothered with the tedious (and expensive) work of primary source research and instead just fabricate/regurgitate/embellish as applicable to pad out a book and it will be published and people will hand over their money and just assume there is substance behind it. However, all that said, as above there i

I've just read back the last page and see it's HMS IVANHOE. I can categorically state that she did not have a wooden deck. The 9 members of the I class were the first users of trowel-on deck compositions Semtex, Supertex and Aranbee. I know one was grey "the colour of dry asphalt", one blue and one brown but don't know which was which nor which of the three brands went on which ship, so you have some latitude there to choose. Also it was only marked walkways - the rest of the deck would have been dark grey non-slip paint. Latex deck compositions were not to be painted. As for anti-

Sorry I've been away. Destroyers would seldom have wooden decks - that was more a cruiser and larger class thing. Destroyers tended to have steel decks and stuff overlaid which changed depending on timeframe. Corticene early on, cork matting around gun mounts sometimes, trowel-on latex type non-slip compound from around 1941 onwards but it's class and ship dependant. The I class for instance were built with the latter from the outset as the first guinea pigs. As regards anti-fouling, everyone assumed they knew it was red until last year. It turns out there was around 17