Howdy folks,
Time for another episode in the life of this cross-eyed, idiotic model builder who spend half his time crawling around on the floor on his hands and knees looking for minuscule brass parts that snapped off his tweezers and went sailing to God knows where. I have a wood floor up here in my loft and let me tell you, that's almost as bad as carpet when it comes to looking for parts.
I do have some more photos to show you but I'm going to wait till later in the day to post them. What I want to do right now is to try to answer some of the questions Innes posed and to make a few asinine comments of my own, which I am prone to do more often than not.
OK Innes, here goes:
#1: I looked all over creation for simulated studded chain for the paravane chain and never did find anything that I considered acceptable. What I ended up using was just regular chain that I bought from Micro-Mark. It's 20 links per inch, which is close enough for government work as far as I'm concerned, plus it's already black. Unless you get down close with a magnifying glass you can't really tell if it's studded or not. Here's the link if you're interested:
https://www.micromark.com/Miniature-Cha ... rk?chain=5 #2: A couple years ago my niece bought an old console TV, wanting to make a wine cabinet out of the enclosure. I helped her gut the thing and in the process I noticed that the TV chassis had a bunch of coils (inductors) that were wound with extremely fine wire. I ripped out a couple and saved them, wondering if I could use this wire on my ship. This is what I used to attach the paravane chain to the bow. I drilled a tiny hole through the bow protrusion ( I think it was maybe .3mm), then cut a length of this wire, fed it through the end link of the chain, doubled it over and fed it down through the hole I'd drilled. I pulled it tight (gently!) and touched the underside of the bow protrusion with a drop of super glue. Once it dried, I trimmed off the excess wire from underneath and applied a drop of red hull paint to hide the wire ends. Since the wire was sort of a reddish bronze color, I used the tip of a needle to put a tiny drop of flat black on the part holding the chain. Note that I also used this wire to wind around the cable reels.
#3: If I'm not mistaken, I seem to remember Jason using .01" x 02" Evergreen strip for his deck lip. I seem to recall reading in the "Calling All Iowa Class" thread about someone mentioning that the lip was about 6" high, meaning that .01x.03 would be more realistic. That was what I used, and the method I used to apply it is mentioned some pages back in this build log. As for the top cap, I bought a spool of #22 copper wire (.025"), put one end in the vise, and pulled on it until I thought is was about the right diameter. I think I stretched it to about 125% of it's original length. If I had it to do over, I probably wouldn't do this. That damn wire was a sonofagun to glue in place and there still are places where it doesn't look good. Instead, I would use Evergreen rod. I didn't because I wanted a continuous length and didn't want any butted ends. As to size, I'm not sure where I saw it - either in the Iowa tread or from the TFD plans, but I seem to recall that the actual cap was 5" in diameter, which would be .020 in our scale. Maybe Hank can correct me on this.
#4: Yeah, Jason did a great tutorial on assembling these little bastards. I see Lloyd saved a copy and is sending it to you. Let this be a lesson: If you do start a build log, I would seriously recommend you posting photos here directly instead of linking them from an outside source. There is so much valuable and worthwhile information on the Iowa thread that has been lost due to external photo sites shutting down. I'm trying very hard to make sure what little bit of help I can offer will be maintained.
OK, I think I've rambled on long enough and, hopefully, have helped you a little. If you can afford it, I would seriously recommend you visiting TFD (The Floating Drydock) and ordering a set of Tom's blueprints for this ship. You really don't need the 1:96 set, the 1:192 set will help you tremendously. It's just that at 76 years old, my eyeballs ain't what they used to be! Also, if you want to do any extra detailing, his digital book on this ship is a great help, as is Kagero/Stefan Draminski's book of 3D drawings. Take this with a grain of salt, though, because I've found a few errors.
Also, a couple other things I would recommend is to check out two build logs in particular; Kelly Quirk's (
viewtopic.php?f=59&t=155426), and Wojtek's (
viewtopic.php?f=59&t=165366&hilit=Wojtek&start=60). Each one has a lot of close-ups and shows a lot of detail. In fact, I copied the pictures from these logs and put them into Word documents where they are on my desktop and I can get to them easily.
Next, I would advise you to go to Pontos' site and download all 14 sheets of their instructions to your computer. They download as pdf files and once you do this, you can blow them up to 2 or 3 times normal size. Maybe you can read the tiny print on the sheets that came with the set, but I need something bigger. Here's the link to the Pontos' site:
http://pontosmodel.com/html/23002f1.html Just click on the "Manual Download" and save each page.
OK, I'm gonna shut up now. If you have any other question, Innes, feel free to contact me by PM here or at my E-mail: phydeaux99 at att dot net. Good luck and have fun on your new project. It's a long haul, but it's an enjoyable hobby.
More pictures will come later. Right now, my Better Half wants my attention, and you know who takes priority!!!
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I promised I'd be back to post some pictures, but I didn't think I would be this late. I swear, this damn ship is going to make a wino out of me before I finish it. I took a couple more pictures and as I was moving over to my computer, my shirt-tail brushed across the stern, taking the crane and depositing it on the floor - in 4 pieces! Luckily, I was able to find all the pieces, but it took me an hour and a half - and a half a glass of wine, to repair the damage. 
