Thunderchild (6): Ship's ready.

Ready to meet the tripods.

Well, Thunderchild is ready for her launch. The last things I had to make were the cables, the davits and the lifeboats. The lifeboats were a little tiny but came together very well. The davits were somewhat harder, I had to find the right material. In the end I settled for this very thin bendable wire I had somewhere. The lifeboats were attached with a drop of CA.

no lifeboats yet, no davits either, but the guns and cables are there.

one lifeboat.

As usual, the small blemishes and roughness of the work seems atrociously apparent on these macro photos.
But of course what you see here is so much enlarged that you could hardly see it with the naked eye.

I always love to do some small depth of field shots with these tiny models.

Then, the cables. I thought at first I shouldn't do them because in this scale stuff rapidly looks too thick. But I was fiddling with some leftover iron yarn from the Tripod's tentacles and realised I could twist the yarn in the opposite way to free a couple of thinner strings. Maybe that would do. So I untwisted a piece of string and re-rolled the obtained thinner strings. They became quite thin and didn't look bad at all. I CA'ed them into place.

Lastly, some smoke. What is a sailing steam ship without smoking pipes? Again, Fiberfill is your friend here. Just pluck it a little, make it a little thinner here and there and roll the ends on one side into points to stick into the chimneys.

Mirror waterline. That soon will change.

And there you have it. Thunderchild on its way to be heat-rayed. Next step: the build-up of the diorama. I will make a more elaborate tutorial out of it, so if you want to know more on that, check out the page with the tutorials, the 'how to water-diorama' will be up soon.

PS. The diorama already has been finished, but I leave that post for now serving as a cliffhanger for tomorrow.

See you tomorrow!
--PK