Tutorial | Sloop-of-War Conversion

This post is a sort of part 2 to the Converting a Brigantine post I made not too long ago. But, in the interest of each post being a complete bit of content in case this is the first one that you encounter, there'll be some repeat photos. The beginning steps are the same as you produce hulls for each ship type. 

The basis for my conversion comes from JJs All at Seas conversions. He does some excellent work on the 1/700 scale ships from Black Seas. For this conversion you'll need 2 brigs. The below image is from his video tutorial of this process that shows the cuts you're going to make on the two separate ships. The red on one ship and the blue on the other.

Two normal brigs

After the cuts are made: note that you do not make both cuts on each ship

I used a hobby saw to make the cuts. A mitre would have been handy to try to keep the cut at 90 degrees, but I didn't have one and so I eyeballed it. I got close enough, nothing some light sanding couldn't handle. What you really want to be careful with is making sure that the cut is perfectly straight across the ship, otherwise you end up with some wonky angles or you have to do more shaving than you'd like. 

Then you take the short bow and put it with the short stern and vice versa with the long parts. Now you have a smaller 14-gun brig and a larger 22-gun brig when compared to the 18-gun brig as standard. At this point it's up to you exactly what you want these ships to be. I've seen some people make cutters out of the 14-gun ship, but I chose to go with a brigantine. The larger ship will become a sloop-of-war, also known as a 6th rate. Set the smaller one aside, you can use my brigantine tutorial for what to do with it. 

 

To make this part easier, use plastic glue. It'll melt the join and make it a bit smoother and fill in some of the gaps. This isn't too much of an issue on the brigantine, but the sloop gets a pinched in waist that'll have to be filled in, so anything you can do to minimize that will help. While you're at it, bend the hull freeboard outwards where they meet in order to reduce that pinched in waist as well. 

I had some spare figureheads from the Merchant Vessels kit, so I took it and added it to the prow of the ship just to give it that little bit of extra detail. I had to sand down the the lower part of the figurehead so that the ship could still sit flush with the table. 

This part is optional, but for even more detail I added some stern windows since the basic brig sprue has a blank stern. I took a spare plastic frigate sternplate, and I cut it into 3 as you can see below: 

I glued that onto the stern, trying to keep in centered. I did bend the middle piece so that it fit the lines of the original brig. You can see where the plastic was stressed to make that bend in the photo below, but don't worry it won't show up at all once you paint. 

At this point, you could technically stop with the hull, but there were a few more things that I wanted to do. As you can see, there's still a bit of a pinch at the waist, which is a telltale sign that the ship has been converted from two other brigs. 

I took some greenstuff and added it to the waist to fill this out. You'll have to do a bit of sculpting to get the planking back, but I just ran the edge of an xacto knife on the planking that was already there to act as a guide. I added some greenstuff to the freeboad as well to cover the join and help bulk it out. I added a very small amount of greenstuff to the seam running along the deck as well. 

While I had some greenstuff mixed, I took a little bit and filled in the gaps left between the stern windows after I cut them. 

Finally, for the most optional of optional steps, I decided to add a raised quarterdeck. I took an unbuilt brig deck to trace out the shape onto styrene, then carved planking into it and glued it as shown below. I cut some thin strips of styrene and added it to the railing and then sanded to get the shape I was looking for. Again, you don't have to do this. I'm making some American ship-rigged sloops as well and those will have flush decks. 

The masts are fairly simple as well. Since the brigantine only used one mizzenmast to make both masts, we have the 3 masts needed to make the full complement for the sloop. The mizzen and fore masts will be made exactly the same as a normal brig and will take the same positions. For the mainmast, I took the spare foremast, cut it and added some plastic rod to make it a bit taller. 

The mainsail is difficult to source if you don't have spare frigate sails lying around. You can print out a set of frigate sails and then trim to size, or make one out of styrene and paint to match. I did have some spare sails from other kits, so I went with that method. The ratlines are easy as many kits come with the frigates and brigs acetate ratline sheet without needing to use them all, so if you have a decent size collection of Black Seas they'll be readily available. Something I didn't take photos of were the channels where the ratlines will connect to. You'll have to cut very thin strips of styrene and glue them to the sides, then sand them to work for you. With that you have everything you need to make a sloop-of-war. 

I painted the ship using my standard Royal Navy colors. If you're not super confident with how your greenstuff sculpting came out, you can hide that by not highlighting the area when drybrushing, since the black paint hides a lot of those details. 

Paint goes a long way with making a conversion cohesive, so if at any point you feel like it's not coming together, prime the model and see if it looks good. 

I hope that's helpful to anyone looking to make this conversion, let me know if anything needs clarification. 

-The Space Dinosaur