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Change in method of mounting the railings. I marked the holes with a dressmakers pin fitted into a pin punch. I didn’t bother putting glue into the holes and then drilling out as the drill did not give a clean hole in the card. The hole was perfect just using the dressmakers pin. After...

Rigging & Railings. Here is the rigging. It was done with DMC embroidery cotton. This came six stranded. I separated the strands and used single strands. I first put some PVA on my finger and then ran the cotton between my finger and thumb a couple of times to seal it. I then super glued the...

Here is the secret to the railings. https://mikebmodels.blogspot.com/p/railing-and-ladder-jig.html

Now for the railings. These are the thinnest railings that I have made so far. I measured from the railing template drawing supplied and the stanchions came out at 0.6mm and the rails 0.2mm, all copper electrical wire. There will be twelve sets of deck edge railings, six on each side of the...

Progress to date:-

THE STAND I had to make the stand now as the hull had to be inverted and supported on the bow and stern parts of the deck and this had to be done before I could carry on mounting the rest of the deck structures. Here is a diagragm of the proposed mountings. The rib mountings were made first...

I thought that the turrets would be easy because of their size: think again. First, the barrels. After trial and error, I came up with a satisfactory way of forming the barrels. 1 shows the barrel as cut from the card. Then, the barrel was rolled loosely around a 2mm skewer or dowel (2 & 3)...

Hi Sebret, The stay wires were from copper electrical cable and the main crane cable was from some wire seals that I had lying around. You can duplicate the cable by using several strands of thin wire from multi-strand cable and twisting them to form a "rope" profile.

Here is a picture of the cranes mounted. I just have to paint the copper stay wires grey.

Here is a picture of the searchlights and cranes. The crane jibs were reinforced with some pieces of balsa inserted into the ends and superglue dripped onto the ends to make them rigid. when dry, the ends were sanded to shape.

Here are the masts completed except for the rigging which will be done in the final stages. I have designed the stand to fit onto the internal hull ribs. I will show details when I start to build them.

I am beginning to enjoy the build now. The hull was my baptism by fire. I made many mistakes but I also learnt a helluva lot! Compared to the hull, the superstructure looks as though it will be plain sailing (excuse the pun!). So far, I have found a few errors in the part sizes but was able to...

I also wanted the 138mm gun turrets to swivel. The instructions say to put pins in the centres of the top and bottom of the turrets to enable them to swivel but this would have been a mission to align the deck when gluing it over the turrets. A far easier and simpler solution was to make a...

Sides and decks. Before commencing with the sides and decks, the twenty two 138mm gun positions had to be made. My first attempts were terrible, the gun mounts were too fragile. After some trial and error, I finally decided to clad the gun mountings with 0,5mm edging veneer (the kind you use to...

Cladding the bottom of the hull. Now comes the exciting part! To start with, never having done a card model before, I am going to scan each part that I am not sure of and print out a draft copy. I am going to practice the assembly with these copies to get the hang of it and when I am familiar...

Thanks guys for the comments. I must say, the main reason for the quality of the build so far is the superb fit of the card parts supplied.

Upper hull framework The upper hull framework will be completed using the same method but instead of assembling the framework on the supplied paper template, I will transfer the frame positions of the upper hull paper template to the upper side of the card of the lower hull and glue 2mm...

Lower hull Tip:- a piece of glass is great when a flat surface is required for gluing the hull elements. To make it easier to glue the lower hull elements, I cut some tongue depressors into 2mm strips for rib guides. I then cut them to size and glued them onto the lower hull...

The Courbet was built in 1910, served in WW1 and was recommisioned for WW11. My Dad says that he served on the Paris first, attaining his gunnery certificate and he then transferred to the Courbet on which he sailed to Portsmouth with the Free French and joined the British navy. This is the...

Laminating frames Let me start by saying that an Optivisor is a godsend for accurate cutting of the card frames. Because of the exorbitant cost of spray adhesive, I decided to use a gluestick to stick the scanned copies of the frames to the card. I then roughly cut out the frames (A) and then...