PORTHOLES ON MINIATURES
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For some years, the only solution I could find was to simply put them on in Indian ink using a fine pen. Although they could be made quite unobtrusive on small scales, I still found them unsatisfactory for the simple reason that they were not quite round. |
During my last thirteen years at sea, when ship’s were beginning to be fitted with teleprinters, it did not take me long to realise that the perfectly round holes punched in the paper recording tapes would furnish me with a bottomless pit of portholes. Not the holes themselves, but the round pieces that were punched out and fell into a collection tray in the machine. These tiny white paper disks came in two sizes, the larger ones, which formed the coded telex message and the much smaller ones which were simply there to take the sprockets of the driving wheel. These discarded disks were known collectively as “chad,” and millions were produced by each teleprinter during the course of a voyage. When I first began using them as ports, I laboriously painted each one black before sticking it on the hull. Eventually, I filled a pan with black cold water dye and tipped a bag of chad into it, mixing it into a porridge like mixture. Then I emptied the lot onto a large sheet of paper and placed it in the tropical sunshine (Preferably when in port on a calm, windless day). When dried out, the chad all separated again, but kept its new colour of black. The handling of the ports is easier than you would imagine. Place a tiny spot of glue on the hull where the port is to be. Empty some chad on a piece of white paper and pick up each piece by sticking the point of a scalpel in it. |
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Another method is to wind fine wire round a needle, slide it off and cut wire rings from it with a scalpel. Stick them on the model before painting. After painting, twist a 2B pencil in the middle. This will give a shiny look to the port. This method looks good, but the wire rings are more difficult to handle on small scales. |
Photographs of both models (neither of which is still in my possession) are shown below. Note the smooth, wind filled sails on the training ship. Sails are particularly difficult to get right in a miniature – but that is another story! |
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