by Christian Bruer
1/700 HMS Triumph (Kombrig)
HMS Triumph and her sister HMS Swiftsure where intended for Chile, but before the ships where completed Chile has no longer requirement for the ships and so both ships where commisioned in 1903 for the Royal Navy. The fast ships joined the British Channel fleet. With their light desing an their main armament of four 25,4 cm guns they were no match to the rest of the fleet. Both were transferred to the China station were they served until the outbreak of the World War I. HMS Triumph still in reserve in Hongkong was manned by gun boat crews who served on the Jangste river. She took part in the operations against Tsingtau and in the hunting for Admiral Graf Spees ships. In late 1914 she went back to the Mediterranians to take part of the invasion fleet to engage the Dardanells. On 25th Mai 1915, during a shore bombardment of Gaba Tepes she was hit and sunk by two torpedos fired from U-21.
This was the first pre-dreadnought I have ever built. Missing some informations I asked Jim Baumann and by the way I would like to say thanks for the information about the ship and its history! The Combrig kit is nicely detailed and clean casted with a lot of parts. The only thing I missed where the parts for the torpedo net instalation. I wanted to build HMS Triumph in her 1914 configuration with some differences in the rig and with opened casemates. It took some time to rework and rebuild the parts to get the attempted results. I tried some new methods, using paper and foil for creating railings and supports and so on. For more details I used some parts incl. railing of different GMM sets. Now I know there is an excelent WEM set for WWI ship model. I will use it on an other project. To create the shrouds I used the ones from Saemann Ätztechnik. Painting was done with WEM Colorcoats: AP 507 B Medium Grey. Weathering was done with oil and acryl colors. The deck was hand painted using acryl colors in different brown and grey shades. Rigging was done with streched sprue and the crew is from Eduards pre painted sets.
To show another ship on the display I decided to build the small harbour tug out of Combrig's British Habrour Set, another nice model of this fine company.
The display was made of my typical wooden base, the water was made by Frank Ilse's method with some color and silicone.
