Silkspan and Paint

This weekend I silkspanned and painted Nassau's hull. Sorry, but I am not going to take step by step pictures for these activities. Silkspaning is fast, wet work that I didn't want a camera around... and if you don't understand how to paint then you should probably not be building a ship! However, I did include a few tips (including low odor dope replacement) and some pictures of the hull after it is finished.

This is part of my series of posts on building SMS Nassau. However, this post really applies to any warship. If you are just learning how to build a Big Guns warship and are trying to learn how to build the hull I recommend you read the following articles as well. Together they will walk you through the prep work needed to skin your ship. 

• How to Mark a Fiberglass Hull
• How to Cut a Fiberglass Hull
• Skin Edging Installed (optional)
• How to Skin a Ship - Part 1
• How to Skin a Ship - Part 2
• How to Skin a Ship - Part 3

Silkspanning Tips

If you have never used silkspan before it is basically a tissue-paper like product. You place one coat of it over the outside of your hull's balsa skin. Most people use dope to both apply the silkspan and to paint the hull. Dope is miserable stuff with fumes which will drive you out of your shop. Years ago I experiemented with many, many ways to apply silkspan before settling on the technique most of us now use in this club.

Create a 50:50 mix of tightbond wood glue and water (by volume). Cut sligntly oversized patches of silkspan. Place the silkspan against the hull and paint on the water/glue mixture to the outside of the silkspan. It will draw through and pull the silkspan tight against the hull. Smooth out any wrinckes and let dry.

Painting Tips

I am not going to tell you how to mask, spray, etc.. There are lots of articles on that if you need it. The only Big Gun specific question I can think if is: how many coats should you have. The answer is as few as possible. I usually put a light mark on the hull in a few places and paint until they are just barely hidden. That is usually a light coat with another touch up pass.

There is one side effect of this: you can't paint the whole hull one color and then paint the other colors over that one. For example, you can't paint the whole hull gray and then paint the bottom red over gray. However, you do need to have a little overlap to get good coverage. That overlap should be as fine a line as you can make with the tape. In the below picture I have painted the gray top of the hull and have started masking it to paint the bottom red. (The gray at the bottom is the unskinned fiberglass hull)

Color Selection for Nassau

Tom Tanner in the IRCWCC has one of the best reasearched article's on German Imperial Navy paint colors you will find online. You may find other articles but I will also bet they use Tom's post as a reference. I really recommend that you look at that article. However, on the off chance Tom's article ever disappears I have added a couple of its images below so we will have a copy.

Now I know what I should be using. How does that compare to the colors I used with Lion... as expect not well:

I found a really awesome site for comparing paint colors So I started comparing what I could buy locally to what is historically accurate to see what colors I wanted to use. I learned a long time acount that painting clean edges on balsa is easier said than done... so I don't want to mess with painting the boot. The black pinstripe stays.

It turns out that Clay Brown does not really match the browns available in the Testors and Model master lines. So I am going to stick with red because it is what people are used to anyway.

The Light Sea Gray has way too much brown and way too little blue. The best match I could get locally was Model Master 1720 - Intermediate Blue. Unfortunately they were sold out... but I can usually get it. I also found that the RAL 7001 Silver Grey is hard to match locally. I decided that I would shift the color pallete darker and and use the complimentary Intermediate Blue and Gunship Gray colors.

Paint Goes On

Here are some pictures of the Gunship Gray going on.

Here is it with the red

Looking at the bottom