THE STERN CASTLE
As I’ve mentioned, the Black Pearl has a very unique stern castle. I’ve covered the ornamented relief on the top backing of the stern. Now on to the stern castle itself. Originally I was going to scratchbuild the edifice out of sheet styrene. But the more I kept looking at the Ultimate Black Pearl from Zizzle, the more I kept wondering if I could somehow transplant the sterncastle of the Zizzle ship to our Playmobil ship.
A few problems presented themselves. The whole reason I made a copy mould of the stern relief was to avoid cutting up my Zizzle ship. Using the stern castle would completely defeat that purpose. Secondly, the Zizzle ship’s stern castle was actually WAY too big, or at least way too tall. Thirdly, it seemed it would be difficult to somehow get it to fit the contour of the very angular Playmobil stern. Lastly, the Zizzle plastic is very heavy, and I was worried how it would affect the 3286’s stability once mounted.
In the end I decided to go ahead and hack up the ships to do a kitbash. First, the 3286 lost its stock windows to make room for the new stern gallery:
Then I hacked the stern castle off of the Zizzle ship, after which I had to use a lot of trial and error to cut it down to size to fit the 3286, including having to add more styrene to fill the tricky parts near the roofline. I had to fashion additional decking for the bottom of the protruding gallery as well:
The windows, like the 3286 windows, lacked actual window panes, so I cut some out of transparent plastic to fit, and glued them in place using waterproof silicon window sealant:
I wanted the windows to be opaque, so I spray painted the backs of the panes lightly with flat black, but not enough to completely block out the light. Additionally, I planned to add interior lighting, so I added thin white styrene to the windows to act as light diffusers:
Test Fit:
Oh, and after I got it all fit the way I want, I took it back apart to give it a coat of flat black paint, and did a light coat on the roofing to give it an aged/worn look (you can still see the gold on it, but muted). The real Black Pearl ship has more carvings on the stern gallery, but, I admit, I was too lazy to sculpt new ornaments, so I just painted the ornaments on by hand. Kinda sloppy, but I was really tired by then. I might redo it later (or not) :p
I still have yet to add the stern castle sprites (12 gallery supports sculpted in the shape of bare-breasted mermaids holding the gallery portion up with their arms--- it’s amazing how much sculpted detail went into the real Black Pearl in the movie that we don’t even really notice because the film edits are too quick for our eyes to catch all the subtle nuances and details). I’ll post pics when that’s done.
Next up: Aft deck & Quarter Deck Mods…
