by Vladimir Yakubov
1/700 Russian Torpedoboat 106 Luga (Scratchbuilt)
In the 1880s many navies subscribed to the Jeune École school which said that small and cheap torpedo boats will be able to defeat enemy battleships using torpedoes. This led to a large number of torpedo boats being constructed around the world. Russian navy, having to contend with the power Royal navy and their battleships, became the Jeune École fans out of necessity – they couldn’t afford to build battleships at the pace that the Royal Navy was building them, so they invested in torpedo boats, with over 200 being built. One of them was torpedo-boat Luga, later simply given the number 106. As with most of these boats its career was very uneventful, this particular one being scrapped in 1910, some of the other ones were converted to the minesweepers and used in WWI.
The construction of the model started from the piece of wood – I was cutting the base for a different model and had about 7cm long piece of wood left over. I didn’t want to throw it away, so I looked for a model that would fit on it, and remembered that WSW kit of Potemkin came with a little torpedo boat. I wanted to build a simple model by adding some details to the kit, but once I compared it to the drawings I realized that it didn’t look anywhere close enough to them. Suffice to say that the real ship’s dimensions in 1/700 scale were 55mm long and 5.5mm wide, while the model measured at 53mm long and 8mm! wide. Needless to say the proportions of the ship were completely screwed up. The only thing that was left for me is to scratchbuilt it using the WSW hull as a billet.
There were 4 four ships in the class, I’ve decided to build the #106 because I found a high quality photo of it, which showed me the details that needed to add. The hull was sanded to the correct dimensions (or in other words completely redone). The smoke stacks were built from hypodermic tubing, while small details were all done from pieces of styrene and photoetch. The 37mm 5 barrel Hotchkiss guns were done each from 8 pieces – 5 barrels were done from the stretched sprue, which I held together with my fingers and put a drop of plastic glue on them. Once the glue dried I cut off the needed length, added the breech from plastic rod and the shoulder rest from the WEM Askold PE set. The mount came from Combrig’s 47mm gun. The ventilator head was taken from the spares box. Railings were used from Lion Roar. The ship was painted with PollyS acrylics, numbers were done using the rail road dry transfer decals and weathering was done using the pastels.
