Like Drit, I'm working on raising two little girls.. They definitely keep me busy (but I find they complain more when I paint them )
Painting boats has been REALLY slow for the last year-ish. But around Christmas, I went on a FUD conversion spree and primed a bunch of UK and German ships from Roe's store. I'm 90% done with two favorites: Kent and Graf Spree. If I ever get around to finishing those, Prince of Wales is next. So much to do, so little time........
Hi all, By the way, on the hot/cold thing, the time in the hot water needs to be a couple of minutes to totally heat through the plastic. The time in the cold water only needs to "shock" the plastic, so can be 10 or 20 seconds or so. The REAL KEY is to leave the model tied down to the ruler (or other metal) for at least a day. I found if I didn't do that, about half of the attempts would re-banana. When I did leave 'em for a day or so, my success rate was almost 100%.
Bringing over another post on the subject from the old forum, resurrected here for the bi-directional banana:
HMS Halcyon, the bi directional banana.. I am down to just a handful of my RN fleet that I'm trying to get painted by the end of the year. HMS Halcyon seemed a bit problematic because I hate to paint ships that are banana'd and this one was pretty terrible - bent in two directions:
Uck. So, how to unbend? I used two thin sheets of aluminum and twisty-tied them together with the banana-boat sandwiched in-between:
Once locked in, a 30 second dip in boiling water, 2 minutes in ice water, then overnight at room temp. This took care of the lengthwise bend. Next, to cure the banana in the other direction, retied to the same plates, but bottom down:
Another round of hot/cold then sit. Bingo-bongo, un-banana'd Halcyon! With paint:
At some point, I will probably change to a lighter color deck, but done for now. This is probably the most fanatical I've gotten over repainting a shrimp boat! Enjoy!