Landing Craft, Assault — Operation Infatuate I, 1 November 1944 (1:35 Gecko kit)

[Jack L]

Love that idea for the rivets!

[Guest]

I must say it makes things a lot easier for domed rivets. It’s not needed for flat ones, as you can stick them down either way up anyway.

Oh yeah, forgot to mention that I also remade the small ribs, by sticking two pieces of 1 × 0.5 mm strip together to get 1 mm square. Also, if you’re building an LCA without the buoyancy aids between the frames, you need to add one of these halfway between every pair of frames.

[Jim R]

That gave me the idea of colouring one side of the plastic I used with a blue marking pen:

Another one for my little book of good ideas. My RP Toolz rivet maker goes down to 0.6mm and at that size it's very hard to identify the domed side.
Glad to see you getting back to where you started :thumb2:

[Waspie]

With so much having to make yourself, it does beg the question why doesn't the kit manufacturer look at the detail?

I ask as a novice to this ere modelling lark!!

[Guest]

Another one for my little book of good ideas. My RP Toolz rivet maker goes down to 0.6mm and at that size it's very hard to identify the domed side.

Mine goes to 0.5 mm, because I bought a normal punch-and-die set of theirs and then some loose “spare” punches (as I recall, they were all of €3 each!) to save on the expense of a full set that would come with a die plate you don’t actually need if you already have one. However, as I showed earlier in this thread, I broke my 0.6 mm domed punch And RP Toolz doesn’t sell direct anymore, I found out some time ago, so I also can’t just order a replacement from them.

Glad to see you getting back to where you started :thumb2:

I kind of have to, don’t I?

With so much having to make yourself, it does beg the question why doesn't the kit manufacturer look at the detail?

That’s the eternal question … You would kind of expect manufacturers to do their research, but it seems they did it only partly here and guessed at the remaining details. I must note here that much of the research shown in this thread isn’t mine but comes from someone else who has much more of an interest in landing craft than I do. However, if he can work all of this out, and I can interpret a bunch of things he didn’t spot too, I would expect Gecko to be able to do that too. A lot of this kit comes across as, well, lazy, though. Missing the fact that the floor curves up, I can sort of see — the drawings are not all that easy to read (but then, I would think people making CAD drawings for kits can read drawings …) — or mistaking the size of the door opening for the size of the door itself, OK. But there is no reason I can see for things like the steering shelter being in the wrong place: it lines up with the frames! How hard can that be to get right, especially since the locations of the frames themselves are spot-on?

[Guest]

This is the kind of work where you’re happy you’ve invested in a good-quality guillotine tool:

[ATTACH]489114[/ATTACH]

22 triangles of 6 mm along the two right-angled sides. I cut a strip, 6 mm wide, and then used the tool to cut it at 45-degree angles from two sides. Glueing them in place was actually the hardest bit, because it’s difficult to hold them in place while trying to get the glue on them I put them just behind the frames, though I’m not 100% sure that’s correct: I still can’t tell which direction the cross-section view in the drawings actually looks in But on the real boat, these were nailed to the frames to reinforce the corners, so they were either in front or behind them.

[stillp]

they were either in front or behind them.

Probably just depended on the guy doing the job Jakko.
Pete

[Guest]

That’s more or less my idea too — or at least on the shipyard that built them, anyway. So it’s really a case of “prove me wrong”

[Mini Me]

Jakko, it's your model and all's well. :thumb2:

[Guest]

A variety of factors caused this model to go into stasis for a bit, but I’ve now continued (partly caused by having had to order paint for the railway crossing, and that hasn’t arrived yet ).

[ATTACH]490820[/ATTACH][ATTACH]490821[/ATTACH][ATTACH]490822[/ATTACH]

Mainly, I closed the gaps in the floor and added the rear plates to the steering shelter and machine-gun cockpit. Take my advice and cut your floor plates to already fill the gaps between the frames, rather than having to cut and stick in separate pieces like I had to.

The blue paint is Tamiya XF-18 Medium Blue, which (probably) isn’t the right colour for an LCA, but it’s close enough that it will do for the areas that may be out of reach to an airbrush later on.

[Ian M]

You are giving this the all or nothing treatment I can see

[Guest]

Pretty much … it won’t be 100% accurate, but far more so than Gecko made it. And, joy of joys, elsewhere we’ve just worked out that the front ramp is about 3 mm too tall — and thus, the opening for it is probably 3 mm too deep I need to do some careful measuring in the drawings to see if I need to correct it by sticking in a new front floor. Again …

[Jim R]

Very good Jakko. Coming along a treat. It's definitely more you than Gecko.

[Guest]

Very definitely So far I think I’ve used … the hull, the engine room bulkhead (in reverse), four door handles, the two forward decks, the box that the steering wheel sits on, two rings, and the seat from the kit. Oh, and four vents cut from the kit’s front passage bulkheads. So that’s twelve to sixteen parts, depending on how you count, that came in the box …

[Guest]

Here is what’s wrong with the bow ramp:

[ATTACH]490867[/ATTACH]

On the real thing, the ramp is 2 feet 11 inches, or 35 inches, high, which makes things easy for us: 1 inch, or 25.4 mm on the model. Gecko has made the opening for it 28 mm already (the top of the ramp should be where the seam is between the hull and the deck), and if you measure the kit’s ramp part (C1), it’s 28 mm as well — when the real ramp of course overlapped the hull to provide a watertight seal. From the real construction drawings, the opening should be 24 mm high in 1:35 scale.

The red line in the photo is where the bottom edge of the ramp should be, and the blue line indicates the correct location of the bottom of the opening in the hull. Now for the tricky bit, can you actually fit the forward passage floor so that it meets up with the height of this blue line?

[ATTACH]490868[/ATTACH]

Yes, you can. The red line here is the floor at its correct height, while the blue lines indicate the fully open door, which of course needs to clear the floor. (The plastic card strip on the floor represents the lower section of the armoured doors, which hinged down. This is 4 mm high in 1:35 scale, so the lower blue line is at that height above where the strip would hinge.)

I think I shall be constructing yet another front floor …