Landing Craft, Assault at Walcheren

New main floor cut from plastic card, as the kit’s floor is rubbish. 

Kit floor on top of the replacement, showing how far too short it is. The floor on the real LCA started right behind frame 5, not halfway between frames 6 and 7. 

Floor with planks and baling hatches scribed. The planks are 6.5 mm wide (Gecko’s are only 4 mm), the baling hatches are 13 mm square, 5 mm from the centreline and 1 mm in front of the engine room bulkhead that will sit on the end of the floor. 

Corrected the height of frames 6 through 11 with pieces of plastic card 5.5 mm tall, because Gecko made them too low to accommodate their flat floor, when the real one curves upward towards the front (following the curve of the hull bottom, of course). 

The hull side has raised lines to show the planks, which I replaced by scribed ones. The moulded-on outline of the armour plate was also removed, as were its bolts/rivets. 

With the fake armour plates removed, I increased the length of the plank seams a little, because the new plates will sit slightly further forward at the rear as well as the front. 

New plates cut from 0.13 mm plastic card (they should be about 0.17 mm thick, but 0.13 is the closest I have), 250 mm long and 35 mm high, held in place with some tape. The front edge should be at frame 3, the rear one at frame 22 — Gecko has it about 2 mm behind both of these — and the bottom edge where the kit has it. 

Both plates glued to the hull, by flowing liquid cement around their edges. The top edges will be trimmed to follow the hull once the glue has dried. 

Replacement front floor, without a bend in it like the kit part has (that is correct for early LCAs, this is the later design). Also, only eight planks and not ten like the Gecko part has. 

Kit side walls for the front passage, with scratchbuilt replacements to fit the new floor as well as to give the correct depth to the ventilators (the little round things on the kit parts). 

Ventilators cut from kit parts and glue behind replacement walls. 

Walls and decks in place to make the front passage, 

The decks were shortened so they don’t stick behind frame No. 3. 

Engine room bulkhead with armour plate added (the Gecko kit has the earlier wooden version) as well as correcting details that are plain wrong in the kit. 

Making the rivets for the bulkhead, this happened: an 0.6 mm domed punch from RP Toolz snapped clean off 🙁 As a result, some of the rivets are domed and the rest are flat. 

What you need to do to the Gecko bulkhead to make it reasonably accurate. Even if you don’t add the armour plate, everything else it points out is incorrect on the kit part anyway … (I won’t claim absolute accuracy, but will say it’s close enough for my standards.) 

Bulkhead in place in the hull. 

Hull with floor and bulkhead. I had first curved the forward half of the floor a bit, then glued it down with tube cement and put some weights on it so it would actually sit against the ribs. 

Deck temporarily added because the bulkhead has tabs that go into recesses in the underside of the deck, so this helps it to go in the correct location. 

Templates for interior hull sides printed out (my toner cartridge smudges a lot 🙁) and glued to 1 mm plastic card with PVA. I determined the shape by cutting a paper template, then scanning that so I could open the file in Adobe Illustrator and draw a neat outline around it and print out two. 

Interior sides cut out and filed until they fit. These are there because on later LCAs, the spaces between the frames (ribs) were filled with blocks of “Onazote” (a rubber foam) or cork; for an early LCA, deepen the frames by about 1 mm instead, because Gecko moulded them too shallow. 

Lines scribed into the interior plates to represent the frames: I first drew the locations of the frames with a pencil and then scribed a line on either side of it. 

Underside of the deck part, where I removed the angle iron brackets because they were deeper on the real thing, as wellas slightly further aft. 

Drilling holes at a 45-degree angle: make a jig by cutting a piece of hard wood (not soft like balsa) at a 45 degree angle, then drill through it at right angles to the cut face. 

Stick the drill through the jig and lightly poke it into the plastic where you want to drill ( mark this spot with a needle or something first). 

Carefully pivot down to 45 degrees and press the jig firmly but accurately to the plastic with your other hand, then just drill as normal. 

This is necessary for the struts that will hold up the deck above the troop compartment. 

Port plate installed using mainly tube glue, because flowing liquid cement behind it onto all the frames would be difficult. This one is tight enough that it didn’t need clamping, the one on starboard did need that. 

What you can see of the hullside interior when you look into the boat from a low angle. 

Rear sloping floor added, as well as floors for the steering shelter (starboard) and machine gun cockpit (port). The “tunnel” in the sloping floor comes up much higher than on Gecko’s floor because it follows the curve of the hull. I built it by cutting a slot out of the sloping floor, so the tunnel is a rectangular box rather than having triangular sides stuck on top of the floor, because I find it easier to build that way. 

Frame inside the steering shelter replaced because the kit one is too shallow by 1 mm, and made a start with adding planks, reinforcements, etc. 

This side is mostly a mirror image of the other one, though I’m not 100% sure that’s actually correct. But lacking more information, it’s at least plausible. 

One step forward, and then one back again 🙁 I had made a major mistake in positioning the pieces of angle iron with the rivet heads on, and in adding the little horizontal planks, due to misinterpreting a photo of a wreck of a real LCA. Removing the wrong parts from the model proved impossible without taking out the whole front bulkheads and leaving scars in the sides. The little ribs I had added turn out to be from a plastic that cam barely be glued, so they just broke loose very easily. 

Attempt number 2. The rivets are blue now because somebody gave me a tip, which lead me to colour the back of the plastic card I punched them from, using a blue marking pen. This makes it easy to spot which way round they have to be glued to the model (because these are domed, one side is hollow, and that’s the side that should be glued). 

22 triangles, 6 mm on the right-angled sides, one glued just behind each rib. I cut a strip of 0.5 mm plastic, 6 mm wide, and cut it at a 45-degree angle from two sides to make the triangles. This is when you’re happy you’ve invested in a good-quality guillotine tool 🙂 The ones on Gecko’s floor are too small, BTW. 

More work done on the steering shelter and machine-gun cockpit, mainly closing the gaps in the floors and adding their back walls. 

Steering shelter, with Gecko’s seat fixed at correct height (about 11 mm above the floor). 

Machine-gun cockpit. The blue paint in this and the previous few photos is to cover areas that may be hard to reach with an airbrush later. 

Gecko’s next dimensional gaffe: the opening for the front ramp is 28 mm high when it should be 24 mm. The blue line is where the bottom of the opening should be, the red line where the bottom of the ramp should end up when it’s closed (Gecko’s ramp is 28 mm like the opening). 

The red line here is where the floor should be. The blue lines indicate the armoured door when it’s fully open, showing that it won’t bump into the correct floor. I will be making a second replacement floor, I think … 

Front opening corrected by by glueing a piece of 3.2 by 1 mm strip in it, with the top filed at an angle for the floor to sit on. The floor still sticks out, to be trimmed to size when the glue is dry. 

New floor made from 0.75 mm plastic card, filed down underneath at the back so it doesn’t sit too high. 

Side benches made from a lamination of two strips of plastic card (0.75 mm and 1 mm) and a piece of 3.2 mm by 6.4 mm tube. This is necessary because first, most LCAs had “closed” side benches rather than slatted ones like Gecko gives, and second, because my floor is curved like the real thing, and not flat like the kit part. 

Inward-facing sides of the benches filled with putty to get rid of the seams. This will of course be sanded later so it’s smooth.