I can't stand it

Attaching thin, acrylic rods to stands and keeping them vertical has been a challenge for me this past couple of weeks, but I have finally hit on a 'system'.

The six lengths/heights of stand that I am making: 500, 400, 300, 200, 100 and 33.3 mm (box purely as a 'backdrop' for the photo).

It began with a calculation.

Two posts ago, I was seeing how high I could go. I had put together a stand or two for each length and found that I can go up to 500 mm long/tall—600 mm was too unsteady. That’s good enough, I reckon. I wanted to know how many of each length that I could produce, so calculated lengths x number and came to this distribution for the 80 x 1 m lengths of rod that I have.

Lengths (mm)	Number	Total (mm)	1:20 000 (m)	1:20 000 (ft) approx.	Represents
500.0	50	25000	10000	33000	Very high altitude
400.0	50	20000	8000	26000	High altitude
300.0	56	16800	6000	20000	Medium-high altitude
200.0	56	11200	4000	13000	Medium altitude
100.0	54	5400	2000	7000	Low altitude
33.3	48	1600	23*	75*	Wave-top
		80000

* 1:20 000 is a nominal vertical scale so that these stands relate to sensible altitudes, but the 33.3 mm ones I consider to represent 20–30 m (at 1:700).

This should be enough stands for each altitude.

I was pleased that I did the calculation as not only did it work out how to divide up the 1 m lengths, but it has awoken me to the size of the ‘challenge’. Making those thin, rods stick to a horizontal base is quite fiddly and tricky. I thought that I’d try to do a few at a time, two or four, but if you divide 314 by 'a few’, you get a big number. I'll be making them for months. I will need to construct at least ten a day, every day, so that, hopefully, I have them done in a month.

It had been 'fun and games' to get the d@mned things to remain vertical and at 90º while the glue set. Leaning them against boxes, other boxes or things to wedge them vertical. "This is gonna be a nightmare", I thought. I threaded one through a hole in a steel square (carpentry) that I have, which lead me to a sudden epiphany. What if I make small holes in a piece of wood and use it to hold the tops of the rods straight?

Using empty cardboard boxes, lengths of plastic, and a carpentry square to try to keep the b@stard things upright and vertical.

I got a piece of scrap wood from the garage, drilled 2.5 mm holes, supported it in the middle with some of those empty boxes from the clean-up of my table and then was able to hold the plane stands vertically.

Solution inspired by using the hole in the carpentry square. I drilled holes in a piece of soft pine, initially 2.5 mm, later increased to 3 mm as the former were too tight, spaced at 60 mm intervals since the bases that I have made are ~50–40 mm square-ish. The result reminds me of a test tube rack.

Now I am in business and am able to do 16 stands at a time. That number ‘built’ each day should mean that I can reach the target of 314 within three weeks.

Keeping 'em straight and steady and also much, much easier to 'construct'.

I can stand it after all. Just have to work out now where & how I am gonna store the stands when not in use.

With a production line started, I am able to do some painting of the 1/700 ships and my long-neglected figures in addition to construction of stands. Did a bit of each on Friday and yesterday and will do some more today.

21 Hearts

Like most democracies in '24–'25, we had an election this year. Two in fact, state and federal. In the federal election, the more recent of the two, we found ourselves in a new seat. This happens from time to time because of changes in population. First time for a seat that I live in. In this case we, in the west of the wheatbelt, were combined with some suburbs of the eastern Perth hills to form the new electorate of Bullwinkel. Not an obvious agglomeration in terms of lives and lifestyle, but you get that with boundaries in anything. Not to go into any of that, I want to focus on that interesting name of the seat, 'Bullwinkel'.

When I saw it, I wondered from whence it came: an amazing and wonderful woman named Vivian Bullwinkel. Turns out that I was not alone in being ignorant of her and her story, but no more.

I was intending to look it up then, on the ANZAC Day weekend, I heard an item about the naming of the seat on 'Sunday Extra' on Radio National. This lead me to search for more and I found a moving biography on the Virtual War Memorial website.

Statue of Vivian Bullwinkel unveiled in August 2023

We went to the play "21 Hearts" last night. It is about "Vivian Bullwinkel and the Nurses of the Vyner Brooke" and is on a tour of regional WA. It is moving, uplifting and well acted. It was written by WA author and playwright, Jenny Davis, produced and performed by a small theatre company, Theatre 180, and performed entirely by five wonderful actresses who take the roles of numerous characters. Brilliant and powerful.

21 Hearts is the centrepiece of the Australian War Memorial’s commemorative program marking the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. (Australian War Memorial)

This is wonderful for a small company, for a play largely about nurses in the Second World War and for one from WA to get such prominence. 

Highly recommended to readers who are 'over east', or international visitors, who are going to be in Canberra in July or early August.

Findin' me table, paper planes & entertainment, information or inspiration?

Findin' my table

We postponed our game last Sunday, Julian not wishing to bring the 'flu from his place to mine, which was thoughtful of him. I will admit now that, when we first made the plan, I was a little worried about being ready, especially when it involved clearing my table, getting and constructing another two ships, painting the three ships required, painting the planes and making stands for them, but I took the bravado approach, rather than the sensible one. I won’t do that again. No more planning games unless the necessary figures and/or models are already in place. Never too old to learn the bleeding obvious, hey? (Cue image at end of post).

Before: a mix of work bench and storage area.

I used the ‘stay of execution’ to take my time clearing my table and finding sensible places to put the boxes of figures that are ‘in progress’. I now have a clear table (save for the ships yet to construct and my 'basing station'), emptied a drawer to receive constructed ships and rationalised, organised and labelled boxes of the figures that are in progress to safe and accessible places under the table and around the edge of the room. Yippee!

During: most of those boxes in the foreground are empty, many went to the recycling bin.

After: a table! New resolution, only 'stuff' being actively worked on and easily removed can go on top. The tabletop is old doors, hence the female toilet symbol :).

Cleared drawer to store ships. Looks like I'll get about 14 in there. 

For July the plan is to do what is ready to go, a ‘Denmark Strait’ re-dux using Seekrieg. A carrier action using same to follow, likely in August. We can assess in July to make sure that it can be ready to go long before the event!

Paper planes

I need nine TBD Devastators from Yorktown and then 12 from Lexington for the attack on Shokaku at Coral Sea. I have four TBDs from the kit of Yorktown. Tamiya and Trumpeter produce stand-alone sets of 1/700 planes, but there are no TBDs available at the shops or on-line currently. What to do? Make my own.

The basis: a painting guide for a model kit of a TBD from all angles

Reduced to size, printed and constructed. The first two test models at left beside one of the four from the Yorktown kit.

Flying high, with added plastic 'propeller spin'.

I am pleased that the small pieces of fridge magnet worked to 'stick' plane to base.

I have begun construction of stands for the planes. Julian has cleverly used wild oat stems for his. They tick many boxes for me: cheap, using easily available material, light and strong. The only, slight negative is the golden colour. I wanted something less visible and as thin as possible, so purchased some clear, acrylic rods, 2 mm in diameter. It's amazing. Once more nature wins. Lignin and cellulose is far lighter and stronger than man-made acrylic, but I have decided to persist.

I bought 1 m lengths and wondered whether I could go that long (high). Nuh-uh. The best I can do is 600 mm. I have settled on seven heights (lengths): 600, 500, 400, 300, 200, 100 and 33.3 mm. While the intention is to use a ground (sea) scale of 1:700, this does not work for the vertical; 10 000 m altitude translates to some 14 m! I decided that if we use an arbitrary 1:20 000 vertical scale the first six lengths can represent 12 000, 10 000, 8 000, 6 000, 4 000 and 2 000 m, respectively. The last is for 'wave-top' height, at the ground/sea scale of 1:700 it is 23.3 m, so okay for the 10–30 m in reality, the weird length is simply to get three per 100 mm.

Paper planes on the first of the 600 mm and 500 mm length rods. Note the lean.

View of the planes.

Bases ready for lengths of rods to be added. A 500 mm, 400 mm and 300 mm glued in place. The washers are to add ballast.

It has taken a while to get a system, but I now have one. The first challenge was glue. I tried Selleys all-plastics glue (essentially super-glue with primer), but it was not good enough. I have previously had good success glueing bits and conversions to figures with a strong PVA (Bondcrete), particularly if used like a 'contact' cement. That trick did not work for this purpose. In the end, it was good old Tarzan's Grip that has done the job. Interestingly, the same cement that I settled on for the 1/3000 Navwar ships.

(Several years ago, a friend's son who was studying engineering mentioned that there are two types of adhesives: those that bond to the surface and those that bond to themselves. I'd not thought of this previously, but recall this conversation often and have come to realise that more glue is a 'contact cement' than I had previously considered.)

The first 600 mm and 500 mm lengths that I glued are extremely wobbly. I may need to concede, use the 2 mm diam. rod for the shorter heights/lengths and purchase some thicker rod for higher altitudes. Or use wild oat stems for these! We'll see.

Entertainment, information or inspiration?

Jonathan Freitag over at Palouse Wargaming Journal recently posted another of his wonderful analyses from the Great Wargaming Survey. This one to do with sources of inspiration for games. Yoo-toobe and other online media came in tops at 25.41%, with books and magazines a close second at 20.84%. The data suggest that we over 50's prefer the books, while those 'whipper snippers' of 40-and-under like them vids. There's plenty more in Jon's analysis, plus mobs of comments, so check it out if you have not already.

This was interesting timing for me. In a related musing, I have been thinking about what I 'know'. Unlike Napoleonics, Great Northern War, American Civil War and, in recent years, much of the First World War, I find that I am still able to be educated by videos about the Second World War. I am wondering if it is because I am still very much on the trajectory of accumulation of the basic ‘facts’ and not yet at the stage of ‘the more I know the more that I realise I do not know’, or perhaps there are more, better quality and in-depth vids about that terrible conflict?

The Second World War was 'everywhere' when I was a boy. I likely have a better than average knowledge than the 'person in the street', but it is superficial in the extreme when compared with this eras for which I have read and invested time to try to get a deeper understanding. I have recently watch "Victory at Sea" (re-watched in this case), "Apocalypse D:Day", "Liberation: D-Day to Berlin" and "Clash of Titans".

“Victory at Sea”, circa 1950s, was bloody well done and holds up really well. Sensational archival footage, a compelling narrative, great use of music. All 26 episodes. The latter half of episode 16, for example, about the u-boat war is edge-of-the-seat stuff. Like watching "Das Boot" (the film), only it was real footage and events. The other three that I watched are modern series. I was worried that “Clash of Titans" would be "World of Warships" pap, but it was actually very good, I thought. Had far more contemporary footage and only a little bit of "World of Warships" vid. The other two docos are bloody well done, hard hitting with some amazing colourised footage, much with added audio.

Having watched these, some of the information ‘missing’ from my knowledge is:

- 866 Axis submarines sunk over the course of the Atlantic/Med. war. I would not have considered it to be so large a number;

- FD Roosevelt died while in office. I knew that Truman came in during the war, but had assumed it was a vote. I’ll excuse myself for this one on the basis that it was political and not military;

- there was a Maryland bomber. When I heard/saw it I was trying to work out if they meant a Boston or a Hampden, but looked it up…;

- the primary objective of Market Garden was the capture/destruction of the V1 rocket sites (true?);

- the deadly and near-abortive exercise 'Operation Tiger' (Slapton Sands) in April '44, only made public in 1984.

We’ll see whether videos hold up as a source of information as I read more, in particular with respect to carrier actions and the Pacific War. Already I am ‘coming along’ and am finding limitations, errors or simplifications in some that I am viewing (and reading).

Moving from the shipyard, it's back to painting: ships, planes and figs.

Loved this one, c/- Tony, Good Soldier Svjek's 'Tin Soldiering On'. I remain in denial. (Cue beginning of post).