The revised 1/700 Tamiya Yamato has many corrections on the original release (Which I am building). One is that they have added blast bags to the 18″ guns. But for those of us with old stock, or building some other model without blast bags, there is a solution. It requires some Blu-Tack, skill, and believe me, much better results can be achieved than what I will show here (Instead of skill, I got Fat Fingers:-)
Here’ the two pieces that combined will form the gun.
Assembled, you can see the gapping holes around the barrels
Roll some Blu-Tack between your fingers and flatten it out into a tube-shape so its about 1 1/2 inches long, and wrap it around the base of the barrels.
Then pull the barrels through the turret. The Blu-Tack will hold the barrels in place, and a small amount will protrude through the turret. This can then be shaped with a toothpick to make a convincing enough looking blast bag. Blu-Tack can also be painted.
Blu-Tack is very forgiving, if you botch it, just pull it out and start over.
In this article I will show you how I upgrade the big gun barrels on 1/350 scale ship models. More often than not, the barrels that come with the kit are not very realistic looking, and in some cases they can be hideously bad. This is obviously very disappointing, as the rest of the kit is quiet good quality. I have developed a very simple and quick way to make those barrels look a little bit better.
In the “Scratch Building Supplies” section of your local hobby store, you will be able to find some brass tubing, which is perfect for replacing those solid chunks of plastic. Try to find some that is as close to the diameter of the molded plastic guns as possible. In this article I am replacing barrels on Tamiya’s 1/350 Prince Of Wales, and a length of 3/32 rod looks right for the job here.
To get started I will use a set of vernier calipers, or some other device for measuring accurately to find out the length of the section I will be replacing.
To cut the brass tubing, I used a “Jewelers Saw” that I purchased from my local hobby store. It has an extremely fine blade and is great for precision cutting.
I secured the brass tube into a soft jawed wooden hobby vise (so as not to crush it) and used the measurement I took from the plastic barrels to mark out the lengths of brass I needed to cut.
Then it was time to get down to business and do some cutting.
Once you have your new barrels cut, make sure you check their length and shape so they are all identical.
To clean up the outside of the new barrels, simply twist/rotate them between your fingers while the tip is in contact with some fine grade sandpaper.
The inside of the barrel can also be easily cleaned by using an X-acto knife or scalpel.
Once your new brass barrels are cleaned up and ready to go, you can start to remove the old barrels. **IMPORTANT NOTE** – DO NOT remove the entire section, leave roughly 5mm of the old barrel in place as illustrated below. This is how we will mount the new barrels to the old frame.
Take your X-acto knife/scalpel and start “Whittling” away at the 5mm section we left behind, so it fits snuggly inside the 3/32 replacement barrels.
The trick here is to be slow, and patient. remove a little, then test fit, remove a little more, then test again. This is the best way to ensure a snug fit, and that the barrels sit perfectly parallel on the frame.
Once you are happy with the fit, and that everything lines up correctly, take your preferred glue and apply it to the 5mm section you have just “whittled”.
Once all barrels have been glued onto the frame, line everything parallel, and leave it to dry. Once it’s dry, you can spray your primer on the brass in preparation for the final color.
Disclaimer – This article is reproduced here from IPMS Stockholm without permission – I know this is a really bad thing to do, but SO many good articles have disappeared from the internet over the years, and I couldn’t stand to lose this one, so I have saved a back up copy of it here.
PLEASE Visit IPMS Stockholms original article by Omami HERE.
Replicating elements of nature in miniature is one of the more tricky aspects of modelling, requiring not only the “engineering” knowledge of a subject but also a bit of artistic sense.
For ship model builders such as myself, water base can really make or break a good model. In this article I would like to show you how to produce a realistic sea base for ship model, with rough water surface, surf and wake. I have perfected these techniques during my own project of modelling the IJN Task Force, Carrier Division 1. The Task Force consists of the aircraft carriers Kaga and Akagi steaming side-by-side on a single base.
Before we begin, let’s consider the qualities of our subject.
Despite of what we all know about water, deep water basins seldom look transparent, especially when seen from a distance. Rather than that, water has colour and forms a glossy, highly reflective surface. These qualities of water are especially appropriate to replicate in scale, particularly when dealing with ship models in smaller scales such as 1/700.
Having performed this most basic analysis, let’s move to a step-by-step description of how to produce a convincing sea base.
This is a simple easy guide on how to make the best encodes with the smallest file size in Handbrake without having to know or understand all of the settings. Just copy my settings and you’re done!
**NOTE** – These settings are for Blu Ray Video ONLY – If you want to convert DVD Video see the tutorial HERE.
My Rant – (If your not interested in my rant, scroll down to where it says “Lets Get Started”)
Circa 2000 I got really pissed off at DVD’s. You start watching them, get relaxed and into the story, and when you least expect it they skip or freeze. Sometimes they even crashed completely. In my experience, the damn things were so unwatchable that I swore I would never buy another one again. Blu Ray has been around for a while now, and it started to feel like time to try again with this new technology. I did my research, and found a player that will play all regions (Regional Encoding – one of the stupidist restrictions in the history of technology), and made a somewhat hefty investment in starting a Blu Ray collection. I purchased all of the Marvel Movies, Agents Of Shield, Alcatraz, and I had been hearing a lot about Arrow, so I purchased a Season 1 and Season 2 box set for $80 AUD. I got through Episode 1 and 2 ok, but at episode 3 the old DVD issues appeared. To cut a long story short, EVERY one of the 8 discs in the set crashes about halfway through, and the last 2 episodes on each disc will not play at all. I cant believe the movie studios get away with it. Can you imagine how many bad discs there must be around the world? Again, they drive us to action that they deem illegal.
In order to watch the show I paid $80 for – I was forced to rip the discs to my hard drive. There are plenty of tutorials out there that show you how to do this, so I am not going to cover that here. Once I had ripped the episodes, each file was almost 6GB in file size. I set about trying to reduce the sizes and found thousands of different ideas and methods. It is a topic a lot of people are very passionate about. Factors like TV size, Viewing distance, hardware, drive space restrictions and a plethora of other concerns are all valid. But if you are like me, and just want to reduce your episodes to a more manageable size, whilst retaining most of the quality, here’s how to do it.
Lets Get Started
PLEASE NOTE – This method will produce very nice quality 1080p videos, but may take 2 hours or more to process each hour of video, so my advice is to let run whilst you are sleeping each night.
Once you have ripped your Disks to MKV files with Make MKV, Open Handbrake (You can download the latest version for free HERE) then press the source button and select the file you want to convert, or if you want to do a batch of files, select the folder that contains all of your ripped MKV’s. Handbrake will import them all, but you will only see the first one. Now it’s time to make some adjustments to the settings.
All of your settings should look like the above screen grab – Click it to enlarge.
2. Click the button that says “Video”. Make sure the video codec is H.264 (x264)
3. The frame rate should be “Same as Source” and Constant Framerate should be selected.
4. Check Constant Quality and adjust the slider until the RF number goes to 25
5. For the encoder options, slide the preset slider to Very Slow. Trust me, it takes a while, but the quality is far superior, and usually yields a smaller file size. Unfortunately it is a trade off for speed vs quality. Like I said, run it while you are sleeping.
6. Leave “Fast Decode” unchecked.
7. Set Tune to Film
8. Set Profile to High
9. Set Level to 4.1
10. Now click the “Picture Settings” button in the top right side of the window.
A new window will open. Change all of your settings look like this
11. Whilst in the picture settings window, click “Filters” and change all of your settings to look like these as well
12. Now you can close out the Picture Settings window and select the “Audio” tab in the main window.
I am a real Audiofile, I love the Dolby Digital and DTS 5-7 channel audio tracks in movies, so I select “Auto PassThru”. But, if regular 2 channel Stereo is ok for you, you can configure that in this area if you want. I figure you are converting a Blu Ray, so you might as well have the best sound quality as well. Just select the Dolby Digital or DTS sound track from the drop down window, and choose “Auto Passthru”
13. Click the “Subtitles” tab and select none
14. Click the “Chapters” tab and make sure “Create Chapter Markers” is un-checked.
15. You are now ready to start encoding. If you are only doing one file, just press the “Start” button and Handbrake will start encoding. If you are doing a batch of files, open the File Menu and select “Add All Titles To Queue”
16. Press the “Show Queue” button to see all your files waiting to be encoded
17. Press the “Start” button and your encoding session will begin.
Using this method I have been able to shrink each of the episodes from about 6GB in size down to about 1.3 to 1.5GB in size, retaining the full 1080p resolution and DTS sound track. The picture quality is very nice on my 42 Inch Samsung LCD TV. I play the files off my WD TV Live Hub and connect using HDMI cables. If you have a larger TV and notice some artifacts or “Blocks” in the picture, tweak the RF number slightly to 24 or at most 23. Adjustment here affects file size and quality considerably, so tread carefully and use small increments.
The quickest and easiest way I have found to keep my video library under control is by using an automatic file naming tool called Filebot. You can view the website HERE.
From the creators website:
FileBot makes organizing your movies and TV shows a breeze! We’ll automatically match your files with information from various online databases. How you want your media files to be named and organized is completely up to you. Our groovy format engine supports pretty much anything!
What I like best about it is being able to customize the output in anyway you please. I arrange my files in folders, so I have no need for the show title to be in the filename, I just like the season and episode number, as well as the episode title. But you can make your filenames include pretty much anything you want by adjusting the output formula.
Heres My Filebot Formula {s00e00} - {t.replacePart(' Part $1').replaceAll("&", replacement = "And").replaceAll("'", replacement = "").replaceAll("!", replacement = "").replaceAll(",", replacement = "")}
Also from the Filebot website, here are some sample naming options:
{n} [{y}] {vf}{af}The Man from Earth [2007] 720p 6ch
Filebot is free to download and use from their website HERE. MAC USERS – If you try to download Filebot through the app store it is not free – It costs $4.99US, but you can get the latest version for free from Filebots Sourceforge file repository HERE. Just open the folder for the latest version and download the app.tar.gz version of the file.
I’ve just stumbled upon a GREAT and FREE file renaming app for Mac users called NameChanger.
Add the files through the GUI or drag and drop files directly onto the App. These original filenames show up in the Original Filename column. See how the names will change as you type in the Renamed Filename column.
Next select how to change the file names:
Replace First Occurrence
Replace Last Occurrence
Replace All Occurrences
Wildcard
Append
Prepend
Date
Sequence
Character Removal
Regular Expression
As text is entered into the appropriate text fields the resulting filenames appear in the Renamed Filename column. As you type each row is updated to reflect the changes you will make.
Finally click the Rename button, and all your files will be renamed as displayed. You will be informed of any files that could not be modified.
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Assembled, you can see the gapping holes around the barrels
Roll some Blu-Tack between your fingers and flatten it out into a tube-shape so its about 1 1/2 inches long, and wrap it around the base of the barrels.
Then pull the barrels through the turret. The Blu-Tack will hold the barrels in place, and a small amount will protrude through the turret. This can then be shaped with a toothpick to make a convincing enough looking blast bag. Blu-Tack can also be painted.
Blu-Tack is very forgiving, if you botch it, just pull it out and start over.
And here is the finished blast bag painted.
