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

[Guest]

Another drawing has surfaced!

[ATTACH]487412[/ATTACH]

This with thanks to someone on Missing-Lynx. It’s actually a scan from a book about the LCA, Assault Landing Craft: Design, Construction and Operations by Brian Lavery, but that goes for silly money, so I asked the person who mentioned it, to scan it for me (The above is a reduced-size version, because the forum would not like the full-size one. You can download it here if you want — note that it’s 7.7 MB, though.

Anyway, this looks like a very early plan — my idea is that the [ICODE]39[/ICODE] in the drawing’s number, 2/1215/39, is the year it was made. The drawing has various details different than in the late-1942 plans we already had. Importantly, it doesn’t have the machine-gun position on the port side, which clearly makes this a very early boat. It also doesn’t show the round engine deck hatch which is known to be a later modification, has three slatted benches rather than only the centre one like that, and the floor in the bow passage is the type with the kink in it, that I took to be a later modification. What I now think happened, is that this floor caused too much water to flow straight into the troop compartment, so they lowered the floor and added an armour plate below the doors to keep most of that water out. That plate, BTW, turns out to be hinged so it can fold down and doesn’t form a trip hazard like I thought it would be — or so I only noticed when I looked more closely at it in the bow detail drawings.

[Guest]

I said I saw no good reason to deviate from the plank width in the Gecko floor, but now I do On the drawings, the planks are 9 inches wide, or 6.5 mm in 1:35 — much more than the kit’s 4 mm. I had also overlooked the baling hatches, so I scribed new planks on the other side of the replacement floor plate:

[ATTACH]487561[/ATTACH]

And because the forward half of the main floor in an LCA is not flat, but Gecko’s part is, I also had to correct the height of frames 6 through 11 underneath it:

[ATTACH]487562[/ATTACH]

These are just bits of plastic card, 5.5 mm high like the ribs I didn’t correct. I still need to bend the floor to fit, but not yet because I don’t want to find out later I need to scribe or cut more bits to go on it.

[Tim Marlow]

Starting to think it might be easier to scratchbuild it Jakko…..

[Guest]

I will end up scratchbuilding most of the interior, by the looks of it … However, the hull shape seems to be spot on, if I put it on the drawings that I printed out at 1:35 scale, and that is the hardest bit, at least for an armour modeller like me I’m sure that if I built model ships from balsa then I wouldn’t even bother with a kit — but then, I would probably also not be as concerned with getting everything right as I am now

[Tim Marlow]

It’s less of a kit, more an aid to scratchbuilding then LOL…..

[scottie3158]

Jakko,
Great work on the corrections.

[Guest]

Thanks I decided to go for the armoured engine room bulkhead, so here’s the start of it:

[ATTACH]487745[/ATTACH]

This is just the back of the bulkhead part, to which I glued a sheet of 0.25 mm plastic card, trimming it to size only after doing so. I then engraved the lines to make the individual armour plates as well as the L-profile at the top, and will now need to add rivets, once I work out where they have to go

On the starboard side of the hull, I also scribed the planks, because I don’t think there would have been raised lines between them:

[ATTACH]487746[/ATTACH]

I just held a steel ruler firmly along the moulded-on lines and used a Trumpeter scriber (like the Tamiya one, but smaller). Now I only need to remove the raised ones without obliterating any detail …

[Guest]

When working on this model tonight, I got two songs (well, song titles) in my head …

And

This is a very strange model. The hull shape and size seem to be just about perfect, everything else appears to have been designed by someone working from photographs using a ruler marked in centimetres but not millimetres.

As a result, I ended up doing this:

[ATTACH]487817[/ATTACH]

That is, after cleaning up the scribed planks (scraping off the ridges, then running the scriber through the seams again to clean them), I removed all the bolt/rivet heads and the little ledge that indicates the outline of the armour plates on the hull sides.

The reason to go all the way there is because everything is wrong Since Gecko put the steering position in the wrong place, the front edge of the armour plate is too, because the two line up. However, I then noticed in the drawings that the seams between the plates are also in the wrong places, not to mention that there are not enough seams anyway. Plus: these plates were bolted to the outside face of the hull, but Gecko has moulded the hull thickness the same for both the wood and the armour — only the little edge is thicker. So I will cut new plates from thin card, stick them to the hull, and then recreate all those nice little bolts and rivets … Because why not?

[Guest]

Turns out the rear edge of the armour is also in the wrong place — it looks like the whole armour plate is the right length, just not correctly located on the hull. Therefore, I chiselled and scraped away the rear edge better than I had when I expected it to be covered with my new plate, and extended the scribed planks a little:

[ATTACH]487862[/ATTACH]

Then I measured the length and height needed using a piece of paper taped to the hull, which turns out to be 250 mm long and 35 mm high. I cut two pieces like that from Evergreen 0.13 mm sheet — it should be 0.17 mm or thereabouts, but who’s going to measure? — and taped one to the hull:

[ATTACH]487863[/ATTACH]

Taking care to get it fairly tightly against the kit part, with the bottom edge right where the moulded-on edge was and the front and rear edges at frames 3 and 22. I could then run liquid cement along the top and bottom, pushing the plate down from rear to front to ensure it would conform to the hull shape. After removing the tape, I could also glue the front and rear edges, then repeat on the other side:

[ATTACH]487864[/ATTACH]

It’s far easier to glue them down first and only cut them to follow the line of the hull top after the glue dries, than to attempt to get that right first.

[Andy the Sheep]

There's always something to learn from your builds, Jakko.

[Jim R]

So much to correct but right up your street. Excellent information on scribing. I'd never heard of a scrawker but it's a great name.

[Mickc1440]

Such great attention to detail

[minitnkr]

Thats the sound my reversed blade makes when I scribe a line in plastic.

[Guest]

Thanks all

There's always something to learn from your builds

And I don’t even start out intending to make it educational

Excellent information on scribing. I'd never heard of a scrawker but it's a great name.

Neither had I — I just have two tools that appear to have that name I would highly recommend getting one, BTW, if you envision yourself doing more than very small amounts of scribing lines in plastic. Far easier to use for this than a needle or a knife blade in reverse.

[Guest]

Continuing on the inside, I put a crossbar into the hull at the front of frame 3, at the correct depth to take the rear end of the front floor (taking into account the thickness of the plastic I was going to use). Then I made floor from 1 mm plastic card, scribing eight planks (rather than ten like Gecko’s floor) and filed the front and rear edges to fit into the hull before glueing it in place:

[ATTACH]487963[/ATTACH]

It’s too wide on purpose, but in retrospect it would probably have been better to make it the correct width (39 mm) and have the side walls extend below the floor.

Those side walls were made next:

[ATTACH]487964[/ATTACH]

The main reasons for doing so were that I had made the floor wider, but mainly because the ventilators (the little round thingies) are on the surface when they should be recessed. I scribed the planks (4.5 mm wide) before punching the holes for the ventilators, and then added the inspection hatches and the bits of strip to which the pulleys for the bow ramp will be attached later.

With the ventilators cut from the kit parts and glued in place:

[ATTACH]487965[/ATTACH]

And the bow with the walls and decks in place:

[ATTACH]487966[/ATTACH][ATTACH]487967[/ATTACH]

I shortened the decks by sawing off the part that stuck behind frame 3 before gluing everything in place.