The Ship Model Forum

With the Columbia/ABSD project now running its last quarters and mostly waiting for painting I am eager to open some new boxes. Liking the size of the Zuikaku I wanted again a large carrier and I was naturally drawn to the Trumpeter Essexes, especially after reading the review over here http://www.modelwarships.com/reviews/ships/cv/cv-09/350-trump/essex.htm. I found one in the store around the corner and after reading a bit about it I found out that part of these ships are built on a different hull. So I ordered USS Hancock, one of the long hulls too, and as I had a Pontos set for the first one, I got the Ticonderoga set for the second too. I even found an offer on Ebay to buy six extra sets of Hellcats and some Helldivers too, while I still had a set of Corsairs in the stash for a long time. I go no extra Avengers but some might be in the Princeton leftovers, and I got Masters torpedoes. Let's see how the kits turn out, I put Essex on the left and Hancock on the right.

You'll wonder why I combine two of these behemoths, it's just to economize on building time. All these hangar ports to be cut out can be done at once, or painting the airwings. And it's a good occasion to compare both kits.



CV-9 Essex:

















CV-19 Hancock:



















You'll notice I dismissed the Trumpeter Hancock paint scheme because they made an error and included another ship's scheme. It will off course be painted in this scheme in stead:



Never saw a trompe-l'-oeuil like this on a ship. Let's compare the hulls of these kits.



CV-9 got one uninterrupted casting, opposed to CV-19 including the Ticonderoga-kit separate bow. A seam will be the result of that. If I would decide on a full hull, both models have a different base part. But I'm used to do waterline models now.





The long hull has a contadictory short deck, caused by the firing arcs of the extra 40mm Bofors on the weather deck. I believe the position of the 3d elevator had to be changed according to Pontos.









The short hull only got three airplane sets, while the long hull has 4. Also, the Essex got Dauntlesses, these seem to be out of date and can probably be swapped for Helldivers. I'll speak of the upgrades in the next posting.

In this posting I'll mainly talk about the Essex upgrade set, the Hancock one is quite similar though it arrived in a smaller box. In the pictures, I put them together with the wrong kits.







Again lots of PE. This is just one of two sets.



Pontos is getting its resin from Veteran Models. A lot of it is in the bag, even with very fine and fragile detail.



Turned metal parts and a chain like I found in a lot of ship kits lately.



A multi-segmented wooden deck .



The whaleboats wih a wooden deck.



Masking and rubbing decals for signal lines.



Decals for an entire airwing.







Large instruction papers, also for the deck masking.



Instructions for the airwing decals, with recognizable insignia.

I also ordered 6 sets of 72 figures at Ion Models, like those of the Columbia project:

https://www.scalemates.com/kits/ion-model-u350-002-us-navy-carrier-personel-and-pilots--1439332
https://www.scalemates.com/kits/ion-model-u350-001-us-navy-chilling-on-deck-1-350--1411673

I hope these 400+ men arrive in a healthy state next week.

For such a project, the right books are needed.



Very popular with Essex builders, costing about 90 euros but it comes with a unique map collection.



A list of the ships in class.



If I had these AA plans for Zuikaku, it would have been easier.



3D plans of the main guns.



Period pictures captioned in English and German, with English trasncription. Technical data like power train, armamant, radar etc.



Airwing with all paint schemes and identification signs.



A lot of info on a small space. It could do with some breathing room.



Even if you're in the necessity of having to land a plane on one of these ships, this book is a must.



All aerial variants are drawn out in 2d.





Maps in colour and somtimes provided with tactical schemes. These can be taken out of the book.



The rigging and the development of some of these ships can be seen. The authjors decided on the rather unpopular 1/400 scale.



I alsop bought Norman Friedman's American Carriers. Mainly a description of the design processes and history.

Steve Backer wrote about the modelling aspect of this class.

The Yorktown book shows some more recent history of the sister ship that was turned in to a museum.

Wow, not one, but two aircraft carriers!!!
Sure I will follow this topic!!! I've always been fascinated by the old aircraft carriers!!

Welcome on deck, Edoardo, I hope to be able to keep on going with these two behemoths on my bench.



Hancock needed its bow attached, so that was taken care of first.



This kit arrived battered like the real Hancock, with a hole in the box. Some stuff had shifted in it and the chocks were sheared off this hangar deck part, also causing circular engravings in the deck. Though slightly visible this needs some repair.



http://www.shipmodels.info/mws_forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=97425&p=919517&hilit=pontos+essex#p919517

Pontos wants you to relocate the rear elevator in all ships to starboard. I measured a 3,5 mm offset. This only matters if you want the elevator shaft to be open, which I will perform on the Hancock.



Then the interior deck also needs some filling up of the panellines.



I needed to remove the hole in the deck entirely with a circular saw.



I first thought of being able to reuse this part by enlarging the cut and shifting the hole part to starboard.



The edge was close to the cut, so there I had to remove an extra part.



This could then be moved to port. Remark the lack of interior detail in the hangar ceiling.



I had to move the hole to the exact outline of the wood deck position.



I had to abandon the removed deck part, as the shape of the elevator hole had been changed by Pontos. The PE part 605 would decide the shape of the plastic deck hole below.



This part seems to be faultily designed by Pontos. The elevator hole is not in the middle of it, the deviation is 0,4 mm. Because of that, it's visibly tainted and useless. And I have two of these, in both Pontos sets (and probably the Yorktown one I don't own) you get this. You can't even replace them with other brands if you had them, because of the reshape. Therefore I had only one thing to do. But what a bummer for this 150 euro + set, I hope it remains an exception.



Cutting this part out of aluminium sheet is no cheese cake. It has different etch lines running around rounded edges. The center had to be cut out without creasing the edge and all burrs had to be filed off. Sadly I will have to make a second one for Essex.



But I think the replacement will not be conspicuous, if there will also railing on it around the hole.



A Greenstuff 2mm ABS plate was pre-drilled to reconstruct the deck.



A 10mm wood drill was manipulated to shape the rounds.





Fixing the components to the deck.





The wood part will fit to this, now the inside still needs to be finetuned. I think Essex will have the elevator up.





These are the 420 sailors that will go to action stations.

Wow! This will be an ambitious project!

_________________
Martin

"Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday." John Wayne

Ship Model Gallery

Thanks, Martin! In any case, it takes a thorough preparation, like the procedure I'll demonstrate in this post about the Hancock hangar doors.



I decided to remove the hangar doors completely. This was performed with a circle saw and a pointed milling tool.



I couldn't even leave them half open, because of the thickness that exceeds the walls of the kit.



The only downside is that these gates are also textured on the inside, so I have no preformed scratch materials that directly improve the situation. I have the Evergreen ridged plate that is about 2/3 thinner and less conspicuously paneled, but it's only one-faced. And I had still the PE hangar doors of the Dragon Princeton, but these are also one-faced and only fitting a few smaller ones of these gates. So I'll probably have to full-scratch like in the first step.



All of these gate edges were filed straight, with some of the sprue removed to facilitate this.



Compare to the untreated Essex-sprues. If my replacement gates are a successful, it will get the same treatment.



On the inside, the large door shows some fine detail like the gate control switch, but also some unexpected holes and ejector pin marks that will be in plain view if both of the gates are completely opened up. The transverse girders on top are also completely absent.

Let's start with the airwing, having cleared the table from ABSD sprues.



An extra set of Trumpeter Avengers and some Princeton leftovers make up for an impressive array of airframes.





Of course I'm installing the cockpit in at least half of the planes. I ordered some WEM sets for that.







So I can't close down the cockpit, but I can fix the wing base.

Good,you have resumed the thread! Following it!!

L'Arsenal informed me that the cockpit interior sets I ordered needed to be restocked, so I went on to adapting some other plane type next.



The Helldiver right wing was a bad fit, it has an offset of the upper half. Someputty was needed.





The Avengers would not stay dry-fit so they rolled over.



The different bow sections. Essex's bow is short and round. Hancock's hangar deck did not fit very well. I even had to remove a millimeter at the rear part.



These clamps are also needed to make it fit.



It's not that urgent in Essex.



The adaptation that is done to make the Pontos deck correction correspond to the hangar deck. 4mm are sliced off the elevator floor and moved to port. In the mean time this is also done to Essex, though the elevator there is not lowered.



If you open the hangar doors, you'll notice that under the island the doors do not match the interior door wells. Some small corrections are needed there.



Strangely there are no locator holes to most of the walls. Best place the stern part first and make the rest fit to that. I noticed some obstacle in fitting the deck to this, but the elevator seems to match to my correction.



Old tape makes the walls flush to the hull.



Here I added my own set of locator pins to straighten a warped piece of wall.



Now the port side was built up.



You get some detail like the hangar door roll covers, but also a lot of ejector pinmarks to fill.



Another downside of the Pontos set, I hope one of the last I will discover, is that you only get 8 PE watertight doors of each kind, while you get about 4 different kinds it is impossible to use the same type on the full stretch of hangar walls. I will be able to do that with my two sets combined, but it means I can't build the ships with the same type. And strangely Pontos did not retouch hardly any of the kit doors on its instruction manual, or indicate any of the doors with a number but one?



This is the final wall part, also containing 3 door locations.

The displaced rear elevator was also corrected in Essex, though you won't see that from the top because I leave the floor on the deck level. Therefore I did open up the side roller doors.



I think Trumpeter messed up the left and right roller door cover parts, because I did have to adapt all of these parts to the correct door width. Because of the inclined shapes, I had to scrape at the rollers on the inside.



In the Essex model there was no need to remove part of the hangar deck, so now there's a minute difference in the distance from the rear deck to the island.



This one also closed up at the rear.



I deliberately caused these CA glue stains.



They're there to level some sneaky sink trenches.



After sanding the stains, the walls should be level again and can be painted later on.



For some reason Trumpeter made the deck a fraction thicker than the provided space in the hull. Therefore some walls that extend to the deck inside will show a crevice.



A comparison betwen the two ships with the deck dry-fit.



In the Long Hull carrier Hancock, the shorter deck will uncover these AA director barbettes.



Essex will be finished less translucent than Hancock. Any gates I decide to partly close up, will be replaced with the Evergreen ridged plates to make them appear thinner.

Good, progresses!! you are doing a great job

All seams from the deck parts are filled.



The starboard wall has a large seam where I can fit in an Evergreen strip.



Both ships needed this.



The hull and wall seam is completely sanded flat.



I did get part of the cockpits, but I hope the second set can still be furnished.



This large part of wall should be sanded flat too.



At the long hull first hangar door, a bad fit was encountered after correcting the position.



The Trojca plans are wrong about these doors, they were copied form the short hull plan but this was a total redesign. In stead of one large door there are three small doors. Trumpeter had this right. I needed to remove a bit.



This wall corrected, I could fit in the AA gun sponson.



Pontos has some very nice boat cranes but the parts are not mentioned once in the manual.

Next is the replacement for the stern superstructure parts.

















This is still a dry-fit and of course I need to make a second one for Essex.

Well, seems you did a good assembling job with the pontos parts

Only a few parts broke of it, but I think they are better replaced with wire.



The stern armament of the Essex differs like the front. Also, the starboard emplacements encountered in Essex are absent in Hancock, but no instructions are given on how to treat the remaining locator holes for them. So I filled these up after checking the reference pictures. Typically these holes would need to be drilled as an option, clearly they forgot that while making Essex.





The rear deck reinforcements are placed in Hancock.



All walkways are removed. Now the deck edge can be sanded, it was cast quite coarse on some locations.



Essex's stern is now also transformed.







There are small differences between various ships, like the positions and extent of hanging galleries.



I built the front deck reinforcement then, making a glaring error by selecting the CV-14 Ticonderoga deck part in stead of the CV-9 one. The distance to the front hanger wall is larger, anopen space I even noticed while placing the large brass plate. But I assumed this was identical in both kits. In fact, the Essex brass plate is 10mm longer. I was obliged to correct this mistake later on.



The deck supports are first outlined on a tile.



Some clamps ensure the correct position on the plate.



Lots of small perforated brackets are added that will only be visible in case you would build e.g. a listing Franklin.



Here the error was discovered and rectified, leading to at least half of the latticework to fall off again. But I was at least happy the brass plate got removed without plying, taking the extra hour for repairing the lattice as deserved punishment.





Two longitudinal passageways can be prepared with the Bug.



The transverse passage must be completed with MasterTools.



The part is well shaped for this tool.





Now only the support beams were to be reinforced, something that went without error.



All seems to fit well.

Now Essex is compared to Hancock in the front deck support structure.



Here 5 rows of perforated girders are to be inserted.



There is a more rudimentary catwalk under the deck. One part seemed etched wrong.



But it could be plied after all.



The fit of these is better than the Hancock passageways, where the railing had to be bent to go around the support structure.





While reading some reference I found Tracy White's comment that the hangar deck catapult didn't belong in any of these ships. It was not hard to remove it.





Some AA tubs were to be replaced.



The replacement deck edge PE strips are a nice addition, but nowhere is indicated where material shoyld be removed to make the doors and fire station hatches accessible. I first use simply drilling.



Then some enlarging of the bore hole.



This is not really satisfactory, more of the base plate should be removed.







The Trumpeter logo and trademark is removed from the hangar ceiling. The lettering was so well conserved I decided to keep this as an alternative to PE ship naming sets.



The Hancock open elevator well is filled to the scratch metal edge part.



That reminded me of the hangar floor in Essex, that remains visible through the side doors. I removed the cutout again and opened up the well.









After that, it could be reconstructed.



I neglected to copy the Pontos elevator well shape on the Trumpeter floor, so now a part needed to be added again.



If this had to be open from the flight deck level in Hancock, the well neede to be walled up. The deck is only 2mm thick. I cut a plank of 4mm to get to the necessary level.



At first I made a wrong assumption of the wall shape and made it a copy of the flight deck elevator edge.



The truth is more complicated, how did I have to change it to this?


(foto Navsource: https://www.navsource.org/archives/02/09.htm )

Lots of tubes and rods for the transmission of the safety railing system were to be included, so I used wiring for that.





A picture from Boxer showed the front side of the well, it seems the motor for the railing is found there. The structure is simulated with WEM railing.


(Photo Navsource: https://www.navsource.org/archives/02idx.htm )

I didn't adapt dech thickness, but the other details are now all present.

Really great work on those elevator well edges Steven!

And very nice bling under the decks too!

This is again a very ambitious project, but as usual with quick progress.

That's some exquisite detail you've added! Nice job!

_________________
ICBM Address: 44:78N 063:63W

Ex RCN, HMC Ships Gatineau, Athabaskan, Charlottetown, St. John's, Montreal, Charlottetown, Summerside, Montreal.

Thyanks Marijn and NavyShooter! Today some more blingbling, but most of the work was carving out the catwalk doors in the deck edges. Because often the doors almost touch the upper edge, this is now done with the circular saw tool. That's causing a lot of scarification to the underside where no PE plate is added, and also the floor under the doors and hatches falls out. Therefore each of the steps below had a cosmetic retouch phase. Therefore it is an advantage that the deck is divided in 3 parts, it can easily be turned in the direction of the cutting tool. Only problem are the extending PE parts, making a dry-fit of the deck necessary.









Another nuisance are the 20mm-galleries with their own set of PE parts. Because these determine the position of the PE for the deck edge, each of these comes in between the next part of deck edge to be cut up.



The resulting carnage is piling up on the cutting mat.



The rear side of Hancock got two hanging galleries, a port side tub and a catwalk.



Pontos did not give the instructions for the side tub in the Essex instructions, a good thing I have both sets. They did provide the same parts with a slightly different numbering.



Strangely I find some instructions for Yorktown CV-10 on the Pontos paper, that had it's own Pontos set, the one I didn't buy. This step does not equal Essex because it only got this tub on starboard late in the war, it's not even in the Trumpeter manual though you get the parts on the tree. You'd have to cut up the deck edge PE to mount it. But if I don't place it, I might also have to exclude the Corsairs...



For the bald hangar ceiling I still wanted some sort of detailing, though it will probably not be visible. I wanted this where you get a look through the hull to the other side:



I found no plan of that structure, but maybe I could insert some empty frets from the exterior deck supports?



The two sets had this fret, and I added another one from my Bismarck project.







At last the port side 40mm tubs for Hancock don't seem entirely correct, I shall have to cut these up too.

At this point some measurements were made of the models in comparison to different plans. First I measured the O/A length without the rear tubs. At the end I just measured the complete overall length with flight deck on them. I also compared the bow shape. It appeared that Hancock's bow will need some work to resemble the correct angle. Overall I measure Essex to be 10mm too long compared to Trojca, but almost fitting the Warship Data plan if the rear tub is not measured. O/A is hard to compare because none of the plans incorporated the rear overhanging 20mm galleries. I did a comparative calculation in Excel in the last image.