The Ship Model Forum

This one by Rick Cotton seems to have the deck gaps filled well:
http://www.modelshipgallery.com/gallery/bb/bb-55/350-rc/rc-index.html


That list of 'reviews' though definately needs to be updated from a 10 year old looking format, I think my eyes were about to pop out of my head trying to read it.

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of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most
....I think the carpet monster got that too!

I am also confused on the Measure 32 scheme. It appears that there are two oppinions that I can find, One says its Navy Grey, Pale Grey, Haze grey, and the other says Ocean grey, Light grey, and black Of course the memorial itself looks like its Navy/Haze/pale grey(and obviously the decks are not deck blue as it sits now). Which is it?

I am getting ready to start building one and am using this drop dead georgeous model by Richard Sliwka as inspiration:


http://www.modelshipgallery.com/gallery/bb/bb-55/350-rs/rs-index.html

He even talks about the blue/black thing, but I have seen the actual ship in Wilmington and there is no black to be found anywhere. Richard's looks exactly like the actual ship as it sits, even the two-tone gun barrels. I have been researching this and have not seen one single color picture depicting this ship with black in the scheme, so I am going to go along with what actually exists.

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of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most
....I think the carpet monster got that too!

Hi , try this lot 1944 refit Pugot Sound.

http://www.modelwarships.com/reviews/sh ... 55-rh.html

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Simple but effective.

Wow that thing looks the business. You can see though even at this scale how the colors flip-flop based on lighting, like the deck looks gunship grey at times, the pale grey goes 'powder blue' and the navy looks like black:

http://www.modelwarships.com/reviews/ships/bb/bb-55/96-scratch/p4/sup1.jpg

I could see confusion based on old color photos back in the day. I still think its pretty amazing at 1/350 Richard Sliwka actually painted the barrel tops on the mains and got the center starboard 5" turret painted half navy/half pale. Both of them rock, I cant wait to get mine in now, I got two fresh rolls of masking tape ready

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of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most
....I think the carpet monster got that too!

It is all down to lighting, thoughs are the WEM PAINTS recommended by John, I went to see the ship and took my own pictures, she is not painted exactly right , the stacks are wrong for a start, my model is more accurate for 1944 refit. ARH

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Simple but effective.

Yea I was just looking at the current pics of the memorial, its a little off. I also just went through the entire 1/96 build, man that thing is friggin awesome.

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of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most
....I think the carpet monster got that too!

Thanks for the comments, Ron Smith has found a paper that said she was painted black, in this refit I have my doutes as to that colour, the photo in the DATA 1 book in colour to me clearly shows a black water line and a dark blue hull, to me if the hull was black , why did the black water line not blend together with the hull.

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Simple but effective.

From September 1943 through September 1944 she was 5-L, 5-O, Dull black. There are in existance 6 original color negatives that are known (three are listed in the indexes but are missing...note that would make 9 negatives if those three weren't missing).....of them 5 are from the same series of photos taken by the Steichen unit in November 1943 (all three of the missing negatives are in this series). At that point the paint has been on her 2 months and there is NO question it is black. This does include the infamous 80-GK-101 with red streaks in the sky.......the other surviving negative of the series also has those streaks. There is a note attached which states "Red streaks in sky due to contaminated processing roller, rest of photo unaffected and judged good. E. Steichen". Anyone who claims to see a "blacker waterline" for that period is blowing smoke, not a single photo shows any significant amount of boot topping. What they ARE seeing is flat black paint that has been on the ship 2 months, 6 months or 9 months depending on the exact photo. You can literally compare them and see the effects of exposure to the sun and salt of the south Pacific on the paint. What they claim is a "blacker waterline" is nothing more than parts of the hull wetted by wave action. Flat black paint with 9 months of sun fade and salt encrustation will appear lighter than flat black paint that was water on it. The telltales for this scheme are bedspring SK radar, lower starboard bow panel is black and she has a deck pattern.

From September 1944 (the Puget refit ARH mentions) until sometime in 1945 she wore the second Ms32/18d. The clues are a bowl shaped SK-2 radar and the lower panel on the starboard bow is grey not black. No color photos of this scheme have been found to date. Now is where you need access to the original negatives, not books, not prints and sure as hell not the ship as she is today. Approximately half the photos of her in this scheme are on film that did not exist until 1948, they are copy negatives and since each generation of duplicate negative increases contrast they are useless for determining the original tonal values. Of the prints that exist from original negatives that are well lit in the areas of dark hull color and boot topping there is little or no contrast and in several spots the hull paint is darker than the boot top. There is a further clue, she does not wear a deck pattern in this scheme and her decks are far lighter than her darkest camouflage color (some claim it to be 5-N)......photos of her repainting her earlier Ms21 which was overall 5-N with solid 20-B decks show the fresh 20-B to several shades darker than the fresh 5-N (I know both are fresh because I can see the deckapes painting and see where they have already painted or have yet to paint).

All the high angle photos of the later scheme allowing clear views of the deck and adjacent areas of dark hull color are from her refit and immediate post refit trials in and around Puget Sound Navy Yard. The deck is *much* lighter than the darkest camouflage color. There are known to be 54 photos of her later scheme, all are B&W and 38 of them are in or around puget Sound. There are no high angle photos of sufficient quality once she rejoins the fleet to compare deck color to camouflage color.

The real US Navy camouflage design sheet from BuShips specifies 5-L, 5-O and dull black. And the final bit of information rarely understood, boot topping as applied by the yards in drydock during major overhauls is a semi-gloss plastic compound; camouflage paint is just flat black paint.....the boot topping *is* going to look slightly darker in most cases due to simple reflectance effects.

Furthermore, yard fresh 5-N against yard fresh boot topping has at least fives times the contrast difference shown in BB-55's Puget Sound photos between her yard fresh boot topping and her yard fresh camouflage paint.

As for not replying on the ship as she is today.....the pattern is not quite correct, it is symmetrical (the real pattern was not) and the paints are modern "equivalents". After hearing some of the games NASM directors have played with paint schemes I do not trust any museum to get it right.

For more you'll just have to subscribe to NRJ and read the summer issue. Note I *do not* quote any books here, all my sources are original photos, negatives and text records at NARA and NHC.

lol I don't think anyone would doubt who that 'guest' was

So should I do black or navy for the trumpy NC with the LR pe?? The LR kit has the SP-2 radar if i'm not mistaken. I like the idea of the navy better IMO.

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of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most
....I think the carpet monster got that too!

The LR PE set is for the post 1944 refit so you have two choices, the later Ms32/18d and Ms22 (you can do bright decks in Ms22 scheme from the time she is halfway through the Panam Canal in late 1945 through 1946).

It's your model, paint how you like but be aware 5-N has very weak arguments for it based on current, original source evidence. But if they allow a paint sample to be lifted (say next week) and it contains all the layer of paint back to her #5 standard navy grey and the appropriate layer for her later Ms32/18d does turn out to be 5-N I certainly won't argue it as long as I get a sample to examine under a real microscope with halogen ring lighting.

Takne from any area above the main deck where the darkest color is, they should be:

#5 SNG
5-O (Ms12 mod, may also be 5-H or in some very specific spots 5-N), should be two layers at least
5-N two layers from her Ms21
black 2 layers from Ms32
5-H Ms22, possibly two layers
several layers of post-war grey
whatever they have on her now and any primers applied

Heh, I was poking around and found the huge arguments on ShipCamouflage.Com Maybe I should of ordered the Kuznetsov instead....

Not to revisit any of the arguments, but IMHO, in the shipcamoflage picture, I clearly see blue in the pic you were all arguing over based on the stack greyscale(the ymw pic)

http://www.yankeemodelworks.com/images/bB55color2.jpg

BUT

on the navy history site, the same picture in a different tint I would say black

http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/images/k00001/k00101.jpg

And you can even see how much Ron's model can flip-flop under certain lighting as well:

http://www.modelwarships.com/reviews/ships/bb/bb-55/96-scratch/p4/sup1.jpg

So who knows, I may just do postwar grey untill you guys figure it out, I can always build another one...

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of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most
....I think the carpet monster got that too!

I accidentally posted this in the main forum, but supposed I should be asking it here!

I know this has already been discussed a bit, but I just picked up an old copy of Battleship At War and wondered what would be required to convert the Trumpy NC to the Washington. Pretty much any point in the war would be OK, I don't have a lot of conversion experience.

Thanks!

BD

If you want to do her later in the war it's pretty simple. I haven't paid attention recently so I'm probably missing some details, but I remember determining that one platform on the forward top that North Carolina had Washington didn't.. and that there was a minor difference on the bridge level with Washington having a 20mm where NC had a searchlight or something similar.

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Tracy White -Researcher@Large

"Let the evidence guide the research. Do not have a preconceived agenda which will only distort the result."
-Barbara Tuchman

Capt Dave Schue very kindly let me take sand paper to a five inch mount to see if BB55 was sandblasted after the war or if the Measure 32 paint was still buried under years of repainting. After standing for an hour in the hot southern sun I got back to 1947's Haze grey layer, then hit the yellow primer. She was probably sandblasted before her 1947 Measure 13 paintjob.

Things looked bleak but then Kim Sincox of the BB55 said she seemed to remember a crewmans diary where he mentioned the 1943 pearl harbor repaint. They are an incredibly organized museum, and she produced a file in a few minutes with a letter from the crewman and a color photo copy of his dairy, which reads, "We got our new cammo today, Black, light blue and dark blue."

Obviously the kid was looking at Black, pale grey (his light blue) and Haze grey (being darker than pale grey would look like dark blue). I was shocked as I had been debating my pals Ron Smith and Steve Wiper for a long time on the color scheme. Even the offical BB55 line was Navy Blue. I doubt they will repaint her black, but they might. I would prefer thay spend their money protcting the artifact. Which, by the way they do a great job of.

So thats it. A 17 year year old sailor, who when asked today has no memory of the color change, wrote it in his diary. For the sake of Privacy I cannot post his name here, but I do have a photo copy of his diary page and will be changing the drawings in my book when it is reprinted late this summer.

As for the repaint in 1944 she was most likly repainted black and the Navy Blue would not have covered the black as it faded, and late war photos of her in measure 32 don;t seem to show the kind of splocthing that Navy blue painted over black would do as it faded.

I was wrong. Ron Smith and Steve Wiper were right. Nice detective work Ron...

Take care all...
Randy Shoker

I think the Washington always had the bedspring and not the SK2 radar.

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of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most
....I think the carpet monster got that too!

I put the above post up a couple a days ago when I got back from the BB-55 and did a quick post late at night. Below is a rewrite of the prior post that I am posting in several places with a few corrections to my original post.

Hello All,

Here is my new view of BB-55’s Measure 32 s after a trip to the battleship and more info from that naval detective Ron Smith. First a little background. If you have followed this debate so far you know it centers around BB-55 color scheme specifically her measure 32 pattern worn in 1943-1944. Conventional wisdom holds that she wore a measure 32 that consisted of 5-N (Navy Blue) 5-H (Haze gray) and 5-P (pale gray). Recently researchers like Ron Smith have suggested that her 1st version of measure 32 was actually Black- was most likely 5-O and 5-L (ocean gray and light gray).

So to find try to find out what the actual colors were I enlisted the help of Dave Scheu, director of BB-55. Our first plan was to hope that the ship had not been taken down to bare metal and still had her Measure 32 paint buried under layers of her post war paint.


Capt Dave Scheu very kindly let me take sand paper to a five inch mount to see if BB55 was sandblasted after the war or if the Measure 32 paint was still buried under years of repainting. After standing for an hour in the hot southern sun I got back to 1947's Haze gray layer, then hit the yellow primer. She was probably sandblasted before her 1947 Measure 13 paintjob.

Things looked bleak but then Kim Sincox ( museum Services Director) of the BB55 said she seemed to remember a crewman’s diary where he mentioned the 1943 pearl harbor repaint. They are an incredibly organized museum, and she produced a file in a few minutes with a letter from the crewman and a color photo copy of his dairy, which reads, "We got our new cammo today, Black, light blue and dark blue."

Obviously the kid was looking at Black, pale gray 5-P (or light gray 5-P See below) and Haze gray 5-H (or Ocean gray 5-O). I was shocked as I had been debating my pals Ron Smith and Steve Wiper for a long time on the color scheme. Even the official BB55 line was Navy Blue. I doubt they will repaint her black, but they might. I would prefer they spend their money protecting the artifact. Which, by the way they do a great job of.

It gets better, or worse depending on your point of view. If BB 55 was indeed painted black and not 5-N, then the other two colors in the Measure 32 pairing was most likely 5-O and 5-L, not 5-H and 5-P. Remember, Measures 31, 32 and 33 are not only color combinations but they have specified "total reflectance" ranges they have to achieve.
Ron Smith kindly pointed this out to me and I do believe that he is correct given color pairings were the key in all camo schemes. Then Yesterday Ron dropped a bomb, he pointed me to a Nav history design sheet for BB-55 that Naval History has on their web site that says the colors are Black, 5-o and 5-L. I almost fell off my chair.

A close study of this Naval history design sheet shows a very similar pattern to what she actually wore. It is called Measure 32v.11 18-d. It seems very likely that the version the crew painted on at pearl was an attempt to follow this sheet. Ron’s excellent article in the most recent issue of the Nautical Research Guild also talks about the deck pattern of the first Measure 32, again it does not follow the design sheet exactly, but the photos show a deck pattern, at least prior to her 1944 repaint on the west coast.


Bottom line is this, I don’t know for sure and now BB55 does not know for sure. Based on what evidence we have she was probably black and with 5-O and 5-L,. That would explain the diary entry.

So that’s it. A 17 year old sailor, who when asked today has no memory of the color change, wrote it in his diary. For the sake of Privacy I cannot post his name here, but I do have a photo copy of his diary page and will be changing the drawings in my book when it is reprinted late this summer.

Until the Curator can find a piece of paper that states the original work order and paints used at Pearl Harbor in the fall of 1943, there will always be a bit of uncertainty as the actual colors used. But I think Black, 5-O and 5-L would be the best guess. I am going to try to get a hold of one more crewman that Kim thinks might know or remember, but all memories fade with time. It will be interesting to hear his thoughts.

As for the repaint in 1944 she was most likely repainted black as the Navy Blue would not have covered the black as it faded, and late war photos of her in measure 32 don’t seem to show the kind of splotching that Navy blue painted over black would do as it faded.

The deck pattern seems to be gone after her 1944 repaint although it still seems to be on turret roofs.

I was wrong. Ron Smith was right. Nice detective work Ron...

Take care,

Randy Shoker

Thanks for the post Randy, I waited to comment until after you made the correction.



Is that what that noise over the phone was?



Most ships don't match the design sheets 100%, crew jobs tend to differ more than yard jobs.



Just looking at the photos on NHC and Navsource should have been enough to prove she had a deck pattern.



Using prints from original negatives, not copy negs on Eastman Safety Film (not available until 1948, excellent detail rendition at the price of increased contrast......that's called in depth research kids) and comparing the tonal difference between the paint and boot top where it's well lit and still in Puget's yard area against other original negative prints of known Ms21 (5-N) and those boot tops (similar lighting conditions and still in the yard) BB-55 does not show near the contrast difference between boot topping and 5-N. Some of the Puget photos of BB-55 show the paint to be as dark or darker than the boot and the original negatives show the inverse, which agrees with the positive prints.



Decks and turrets roofs were usually painted after all the heavy yard work was done and the ship had made her post-refit trials and calibration runs. Once she's back in the fleet high angle shots are few and poor quality. It appears she got deck blue on her #1 & #2 mains with light grey on her #3 main but no pattern. Also the secondaries with the darkest color adjacent to the roof appear to have that color on the roofs, not deck blue and it applies to both the early and later version of the scheme.



Thanks! Now to get those as painted design sheets to you.

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How do I get the pen to write here? Now my screen's all smeared with ink.........

The paint guide shows the funnels to be the same height, I hope that is not the case for the actual model when completed.

Has anyone completed this particular kit?

It would appear to be so, unfortunately. Here's the model that was on display at a show some time back:

http://www.hlj.com/product/PITW-94

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