Trumpeter TRU03719 Plastic Model kit

Product Information

I traced the general outline on the sheet using my previously modified Trumpeter rudder as a template. This provides a good shape while allowing exact alignment of the pintles to fit the kit. The rudder outline was snipped using scissors to get a rough outline that was refined with a hobby knife and smoothed using a coarse flex file. As promised on one of my original posts, this will be a bit of a sporadic build while I finish my Niagara.

The same piece was replicated for both port and starboard. I then filled the midline seam with Tamiya putty so that it will disappear when primed.

Some additional hull details need to be attended to, but I can’t put off drilling out the portholes forever… Shown my Kit in General chat area of BM, please lets get some Titanic modelling done here ... its a big passion of mine, really is. Drilling out the portholes alone on this hull will take some time (I intend to light the hull, as well as embellish the included LED kit for the superstructure). Anyway, here is a picture of the model as she sits on my new work-table the kit is about 4.5 feet long so it takes most of the desk space, once I've "finished" the hull, I may move it to a side table so I can do sub assemblies and other projects at the main table.

Went to see Cameron's Titanic upon its first day of cinema release, had heard so much about it, this was a must see for me, always been a bit of a history buff for this subject I suppose. Despite the fact they will be largely invisible once the ship is complete, I am determined to try and represent at least some of the interior areas. My first attempt has been on the port side Private Promenade. Rather than just print out a drawing or photo of the area, I decided to try and replicate, as best as my skills would allow, using Evergreen plastics. I laid down some tape and traced the edge. The tape was then transferred to a piece of card paper and cut out. Earlier in the build I was having trouble with the MK1 rudder. I was way too small, didn't fit right in the model and looked out of sorts. If you choose to use Trumpeters recommended Cocoa Brown, don't because it is too brown. I added a 50% bright red mix and got it right the second time unlike the below first attempt.

(with LED's)

For the largest diameter I used the nearest size tubing and filed a beveled edge using a large coarse file.

Using a larger bit, I drilled out the portholes to accommodate 1.5mm fiber optic filament. Much improved. There is a terrific PE brass solution provided by Mini-Brass that will produce an excellent result (as evidenced by many build logs out in the ether), but I didn’t go that route. It seemed to me that using PE would make those plates stand out as elements not belonging to the rest of the hull. Essentially, I worried that the brass plating with the overlapping seams might be TOO accurate.Before adding the bolt flanges, I cemented some half round strip to the pintles to give them a cylindrical shape… These Ash Places and their outer doors were not symmetrical between port and starboard. Trumpeter got that right. The doors are in the right spots on either side, but inexplicably they’ve added a third narrow door on the port side that leads to a phantom Ash Place. Regular drills and rotary tools have high RPM that creates too much plastic-melting friction… This drill is just right for the job at hand. Its about 5ft long, we all knew it was gonna be big, but not quite that big ... holy cow, its about 5ft long! It was almost released about 2 years ago but there were some bow important accuracy issues that needed corrected, finally the kit is out and I have mine ... where I'm going to put it I do not know? but I'm going to have a lot of fun building and super detailing this model ... Oh yeah. Once the initial shape was roughed out, a small file was used to set the final edge and level the surface. Medium grit flexible files were used to smooth the surface as I went along.

The window frames fit very exactly into the frames. Now I just have to figure how to get the "glass" cut. I may try to use my wife's Cameo cutter. Using small diameter lengths of rod, I created as closely as the scale would permit, the wooden divisions, doors and window frames.

Bachmann Trains (USA)

Finally, I added .010 x .030 strips to represent the butt laps between strakes. I thought this would match closer to the kit versions. Overlapping the styrene strakes (as in actual practice) seemed to me to be out of scale no matter how hard I tried to make them look like the Trumpeter versions. As @Tsm209 noted in an earlier post, there are discrepancies in how some folks think the rudder anodes should be represented. Robert Read shows a “double-wide” version rather than what is seen in most historic Titanic photos. It may be that Mr. Read has access to other photos and/or documentation that he used to source his drawings.