Trumpeter TRU03719 Plastic Model kit

Product Information

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. Unfortunately, this kit does suffer from underbody inaccuracies that seem inherent in all of Trumpeter’s 1/200 single molded hulls. I’m no expert on the injection molding process but it seems to me that it introduces limitations on the types of curves and angles that can be achieved in a plastic kit of this size. The kit designers had to make some practical compromises… In addition to the kit portholes, I needed to add a few that were missing or needed to be relocated. These locations were marked with a green Sharpie pen and some Tamiya tape laid down to help with alignment.

RMS Titanic Model Research and Tech hosted by Zeno Silva and friends. You’ll find Bob Read, Cyril, and Vasilije all contributing here.Similar procedure as I worked outward for the next plates. I would slightly overlap the styrene and cut them square. I then painted it up, electing to use some of the colourised images of the Olympic promenades and do the lower panels in a green. This photo is after the initial coats of white, brown and green and the Trumpeter PE provided window frames went in. Still some touching up to be done after the initial paint drys thoroughly and probably once I get a new script for my glasses, as I think my eyesight has deteriorated since I started this. This helped to set the outer diameter tightly into the porthole and centered the innermost tube properly…

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). I'm not. rivet counter, and am not going for total accuracy, just something to see through the windows that is a representation of what the areas may have looked like based on drawings, pictures, etc. This view of the Olympic prior to launch gives a good sense of what is needed. As Roger pointed out earlier – The kit is very far from reality. The Olympic class ships do, however, look very different in their under-counter plating than what Roger showed on his model. Specifically, these ships have “centerline plates” (Robert Read’s term) that provide strength across the theoretical midline and anchor the additional outboard strakes. These are solid plates with no midline seams. Yup. I got so caught up in the flow of building out the strakes and balancing them against each other and blending in with the kit plating that I neglected to include one of the strakes! To make the correct plating pattern, I’ll likely need to undo everything I’ve done. The spacing would need to be reset starting with the critical first centerline plate near the hole for the stern post. Anyway, on to now and my passion for Scale Modelling, always wanted to build a scale model ship, love to build Aircraft and Model bikes ... but Nautical stuff had always eluded me.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. I’ve done a cursory comparison of Mr. Boyd’s notes to some of the Titanic profile views available online and almost everything appears to align. There might be a small discrepancy on the port side superstructure where a door and window on the kit need to be removed and are not identified, but otherwise all good.

I will work in some Mr. Color paints for the more unique colors. I feel equally as comfortable with their line of paints as well. Obviously most (all?) casual observers seeing my completed model are not gonna know whether the portholes are all correctly located, or any extraneous doors are included, but it gives me satisfaction knowing that a little more effort put things right. An extra layer of LED's added between the Hull lighting and where the kit's supplied lighting starts off. Overpainted warm white LED's with Tamiya clear yellow to give it that Victorian feelI had some concern that these might require pre-drilling some smaller centering holes to keep the bit from drifting and creating obvious misaligned ports across the side of the hull. For those who can stomach Facebook, there are several terrific resources utilized by the Titanic community: The kit comes with LED lighting, although it's very bright white and not really appropriate for the incandescent lighting used in 1912. The Facebook threads have talked about ways to either replace them with warmer white LEDs, or possibly give them a thin overpaint of off white or tan paint to warm up the colour.