15mm LCT Scratchbuild

Hi folks,

Very slow on the blogging front of late, mainly due to lack of any painting or other work. However, last week I decided to re-focus my lack of painting mojo at the moment and do something constructive with my time.

Since I've managed to get Dave D and Martin into the whole Normandy FoW thing, Dave in his usual style jumped in with both feet and broadened the scope... He picked up some DD Shermans and some landing craft for his Yanks, and has been doing some coastal defences as well. Doing the landings is always something that's interested me, but was something of a future project - possible tied in with my distant idea to do the Rhine crossing (Operation Plunder). However, Dave's enthusiasm was infectious, and while on holidays I thought how cool it would be to do a 'proper' landing battle - not just with dribs and drabs of stuff, but have the whole thing be properly busy. There was also an idea for possibly doing a convention game at some point. I thought a big landing craft would look properly cool, but no one seems to make 15mm scale LST's (Landing Ship, Tanks).

Having seen the work the Mark has done over at House of Hengist, I spoke to him about scratch building a LST and he gave me some pointers. Last Saturday I took myself to Hobbycraft in Teeside Park with a bare bones idea, and came back with an expensive load of balsa wood.

As of today, this is what I've gotten done:

Now, let me say that this is a bit of a 'gaming token' as far as LST's are concerned. It's no specific mark or model, more a composite of a couple of different designs adapted to fit my based tanks and vehicles designed to look like an LST. So while I've tried to keep it to an LST style, it's not going to win any awards for accuracy when it comes to model boat building. I did the sizes by eye and the rough shape from looking at pictures online. I know that might offend some people, but to highlight this is the first scratch build I've ever done, and the first model I've ever built using wood and plasticard!

To give an idea of scale, here it is with a Battlefront LCA (Landing Craft, Assault) in the hold:

And here it is with a selection of my tanks:

So it's a big model! About 15" long and 5" wide. I started with some hand drawn plans:

Which, with some building experience, I would alter slightly before trying again! I then cut out the base and built up the shapes I needed:

Before using some wood filler to cover up my poor woodworking skills:

Once this was sanded down, I started on the detailing:

Which eventually lead me to the idea of doing the railings... we'll see how long these survive for!

And finally, with a bit more filler to smooth out some of the rougher areas, we have today's model ready for a coat of PVA and some spray paint:

I used all sorts of bits from my bits box to add some details, such at the ladders and such. I had nothing to try and represent the 20mm guns with, so I picked some of my larger plastic .50's, added a German half track gun shield and build up with plasticard. Various other spares went into the model, including tank exhausts, pioneer bridges, Cromwell deep wading exhausts and panther rear hull sections. The railing is pins and beading wire, the smoke stack is a cork wrapped in plasticard. The mast is various gun barrels...

At the moment, I don't know that I'm going to do much more modelling wise. A coat of watered down PVA needs applying to harden up the wood and prevent the paint being sucked in. I also want to look at converting a couple of crew figures, but I will see how I do with that!