ethanb
New Member
I've been trolling ship-building sites for years, checking out all of the amazing work in wood and plastic and finally decided to break the seal and get to building one of my own! I am a big fan of the Pirates of the Caribbean series and as far as licensed copies go, the Zvezda "Black Swan" is the closest representation of the Black Pearl and from reviews I have read; it is a really well put together kit. I have a decent amount of modeling and painting experience but this will be the first ship I have ever built so I am excited to put my skills to the task!
I received the package in the mail early this week and after gathering resources I was finally able to start the build last night.
First note is this will be modified as much as I can to match the movie version and hopefully from your wonderful advice I can make it more accurate as a ship as well. I saw a couple diagrams of modifications that need to be done so I will just start at the beginning with a brief overview and then move right to the build.
Mainly with the kit we are talking plastic. So the sails are injection molded, beautiful but horribly out of scale; so those will have to go.
Next, the rigging and blocks are mostly plastic with few exceptions so I really want to make these from wood parts and thread. What size blocks do I need for 1/75 scale? 2mm, 3mm? Then I need to figure out how many! I am new to the ship field so terminology and numbers I will learn on the way.
Finally the cannon will be upgraded and some actual kit parts will be changed and modified.
Fist off, the quick shots of the kit parts themselves
So on to the first step: The major discrepancy of this kit is the rear cabin area. The stairs and the actual cabin wall are nothing like the movie so I tackled the wall first. I am a 3D artist as far as career goes so I took a picture of the original part and measured it out with calipers, transfered the image to my 3d modeling program and rebuilt the wall. Then using my 3d printer I made a prototype the part and if fit on the first go around!
Last night the print had cured well enough to assemble the basic decks as you will see in the images below.
The Original part:
The actual ship:
The 3D modeled part in the printer program and our printer:
My first test print to make sure the scale was right:
The official scratch built part:
After that I installed the major decks and glued them to the hull:
Here you can see the new part in place:
And here is where I screwed up already! So I wanted to get a base coat of paint on the decks and my plan is to build up from raw wood to the colors you see in the reference above. You can see they made the ship look like it's been through quite a few stains and paint jobs. So to base coat I went with a light tan and then planned on adding black ink to the recessed areas to bring the grain and plank lines out but forgot to seriously dilute my ink! so now I have planks that are seriously old and rotted out! I will fix that next...
So aside from getting a true first coat of paint on and adding the remaining deck pieces I am going to tackle the stairs next, which also have to be built from scratch since the kit parts are straight and don't have the curve like the reference image above.
Also I noticed my images are coming in as thumbnails? There are so many ways to post to forums; if anyone knows how to get attachments to show full size let me know so ya'll don't have to click on every single one to zoom in.
I received the package in the mail early this week and after gathering resources I was finally able to start the build last night.
First note is this will be modified as much as I can to match the movie version and hopefully from your wonderful advice I can make it more accurate as a ship as well. I saw a couple diagrams of modifications that need to be done so I will just start at the beginning with a brief overview and then move right to the build.
Mainly with the kit we are talking plastic. So the sails are injection molded, beautiful but horribly out of scale; so those will have to go.
Next, the rigging and blocks are mostly plastic with few exceptions so I really want to make these from wood parts and thread. What size blocks do I need for 1/75 scale? 2mm, 3mm? Then I need to figure out how many! I am new to the ship field so terminology and numbers I will learn on the way.
Finally the cannon will be upgraded and some actual kit parts will be changed and modified.
Fist off, the quick shots of the kit parts themselves
So on to the first step: The major discrepancy of this kit is the rear cabin area. The stairs and the actual cabin wall are nothing like the movie so I tackled the wall first. I am a 3D artist as far as career goes so I took a picture of the original part and measured it out with calipers, transfered the image to my 3d modeling program and rebuilt the wall. Then using my 3d printer I made a prototype the part and if fit on the first go around!
Last night the print had cured well enough to assemble the basic decks as you will see in the images below.
The Original part:
The actual ship:
The 3D modeled part in the printer program and our printer:
My first test print to make sure the scale was right:
The official scratch built part:
After that I installed the major decks and glued them to the hull:
Here you can see the new part in place:
And here is where I screwed up already! So I wanted to get a base coat of paint on the decks and my plan is to build up from raw wood to the colors you see in the reference above. You can see they made the ship look like it's been through quite a few stains and paint jobs. So to base coat I went with a light tan and then planned on adding black ink to the recessed areas to bring the grain and plank lines out but forgot to seriously dilute my ink! so now I have planks that are seriously old and rotted out! I will fix that next...
So aside from getting a true first coat of paint on and adding the remaining deck pieces I am going to tackle the stairs next, which also have to be built from scratch since the kit parts are straight and don't have the curve like the reference image above.
Also I noticed my images are coming in as thumbnails? There are so many ways to post to forums; if anyone knows how to get attachments to show full size let me know so ya'll don't have to click on every single one to zoom in.
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