The Ship Model Forum

Hello:

Every day on my way to school, we drove by Pearl Harbor and I would see the Arizona Memorial out there. Since college, which is now about 25 years ago, I've wanted to build a model of Battleship Row. I gradually collected the kits over the years, and thought that maybe when I retire I'll have the time and my skills are better. But I've noticed that my eyes don't focus as well as they used to, so maybe I should start working on this now while I can still see things reasonably well.

This will be a LONG process...at least several years. Finishing the Enterprise is still at the top of the list, and I want to finish off an F-8 and build a Tomcat too. I have a 1/700 Price of Wales that I've been using to test some new (to me) techniques on, and I really want to get onto the 1/350 USS Texas, just to name a few things.

To kick things off, here's a picture of the stash. Most of the kits are the Hi-Mold resin kits. These are quite impressive, in these kits reflect the unique differences between Maryland and West Virginia at the time of the attack, for example. They never made Nevada and Oklahoma, so I got the HP Model kits. USS Vestal is from Corsair Armada, and there's even a little resin tug boat in there too. There's a lot of PE that I still need to get to supplement what comes with the kits, and now 3D printed parts are available which are a fantastic new option.

Mike

Hello:

Here is what things look like outside of the box.

The grey Arizona is the Dragon kit. I'm building it mostly to check how the colors look on the models, and maybe test out other things. I recall reading that it has lots of issues, which in this case I don't mind. I'll use the Hi-Mold resin Arizona to match the rest of the models.

Mike

I'm looking forward to this. What kit are you using for the Neosho?

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-Abram
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I get the feeling this is for Battleship Row anchorage exclusively... Note the absence of Pennsylvania. But I'd love to get one of those myself.

- Sean F.

Hello:

The plan is not to include Pennsylvania as she was across the harbor in dry dock at the time of the attack, and including the dry dock area increases the scope of work by a lot. As it is, the display fits fairly well on a 10" plank of wood about 6.5' long. One could also include the quay in front of California where a carrier would sometimes dock, to add a bit of variety. But we're used to the pictures of the attack and where everything was on that day, and that there were no carriers in Pearl Harbor at that time, so adding a carrier might be confusing.

Regarding Neosho, I'm using the Hi-Mold resin kit. I plan on doing a mini-review of each kit as I am unable to find a review for many of them.

Mike

In lieu of actual progress, here is a brief review of the Hi-Mold USS Neosho.

The instructions are somewhat minimalistic. One sheet, printed on one side only, with a sketch of the parts (with a few crossed out). Below the parts list is, I think, the painting guide, which is about as simple as possible since she was all gray. The other side has a diagram of the ship, with the parts labeled to show you where things ought to go. There is also a box showing six parts you're expected to cut out of sheet plastic or similar material for decks on the ship. In Japanese, they say to glue the diagram directly to the sheet and then cut it out.

I think the instructions are detailed enough to get the job done. I'll need to refer a lot to reference photos for finer details, and especially for the rigging, as she had a number of cranes.

Here are pictures of the resin parts. Aside from the hull, you get the decks for the amid-ships bridge area and the rear area around the funnel. You also get the funnel and gun tubs, as well as the truss structures that hold up searchlights (?)...I'll try to replace those with photo etch. I think the gun turrets are for her sister ships who had enclosed gun mounts later in the war; I don't think Neosho had enclosed mounts at the time of the attack.

The kit hull looks pretty detailed. There is a block at the stern that isn't there on the real ship. There are also a lot of pipes and such, given that she was an oiler, that aren't molded in nor mentioned in the instructions.

Mike

They threw in 2 sprues of small plastic parts. I think the only plastic parts are labeled 'E' in the instructions, and are the search lights. Otherwise, these sprues are a good source of spares for other projects...like the life rafts on the battleships.

As I recall, this is the only Hi-Mold kit that I have where they threw in the sprues of small plastic parts. I don't know why they didn't do this for the other kits as well.

There is a small bag of cast metal parts, secured to the inside of the box. It's mostly the 5" guns, but also the anchor, two masts, and four things that look like they might be boat davits. The details captured in the casting looks very good, such as the elevation gear under the 5" guns.

The kit gives you the main vertical parts of the masts (M4 and M5), but that's it. The four derricks are left to the modeler, as are the various beams/derricks/poles that attach the the M4/M5 mast parts.

USS Neosho (AO-23) https://www.navsource.org/archives/09/19/19023.htm

I'll bolt each ship down to a plank to make handing the models easier and to minimize damage to them. I did this for the 1/350 Enterprise, and it's saved me a lot of work and grief. Since the hulls of the ships are solid resin, I can drill and tap a hole right into the resin itself, without needing to glue in a nut or something like that.

I started with Neosho. I put the holes in two places where the hull casting is relatively thick and that will be covered later on by other deck parts. I drilled out the hole for an 8-32 tap, then tapped the hole. It doesn't show well in the photos, but make sure to put a generous bevel around the ID of the holes to have a gentle start of the threads. I labeled the threads and the spacing between the hole centers as a reference for the future.

Mike

I'm using the Dragon 1/700 Arizona kit to test paint colors. In the attached photo, I'm using Vallejo pale blue gray for the 5-L, London Gray for the 5-D, and Deck tan for the wood decks. On the hull aft of the deck break, I tried the paint I'm using for 5-N on my Enterprise kit...which looks a heck of a lot like the London gray I'm using for the 5-D but slightly darker. If Arizona was indeed painted blue, as some argue, the 5-N may have been very close to 5-D and it could have been hard to tell the difference.

One reason I chose the London gray is that it's a good color match to the 5-D color chip but it's a tad lighter. Since the 5-D is rather dark, I didn't want something too dark that would make it hard to see the models.

I don't really like the Vallejo deck tan. I like that it's mostly a gray, but I want a bit more brown in it, as it looks almost greenish to me. For comparison, the deck of Prince of Wales was painted in their Iraqi Sand color, which it a bit more of a warm orange tone than I prefer. I think I'd like something in between. And one more thing: PoW was huge compared to Arizona!

And speaking of deck colors. To get a sense of what colors a teak deck can be, I grabbed screen shots of the museum battleships around the country: The deck of Missouri is very dark, as is the deck of Iowa. Wisconsin and North Carolina (bottom two) have rather light colored decks. The deck of Alabama goes from light to dark fore to aft.

Photos taken around the time of the attack sometimes show the decks appearing as a lighter or darker color. I think it's pretty well accepted that Tennessee and Nevada had their decks painted, but it's likely the rest weren't painted. I suspect that part of the reason why some decks look darker than others is that the wood on those ships was just darker, as we see among the remaining battleships. For example, the deck of Arizona looks very dark in the famous overhead photo taken before she was destroyed.

I think the take away massage is that wood decks can have a wide range of colors, so it's up to the modeler to choose what they like. If the the color of the wood is affected by the environment, then we should look to the Missouri as she is actually moored on Battleship Row in Pearl Harbor.

Mike

FWIW, I used color photos of Idaho and Texas taken in 1941 as the basis for a deck tan mix. No doubt that the timing of the last holystoning of the deck would also affect appearance.

Continuing the mini-review theme, here's the USS Oklahoma from HP Models. Their kit of Nevada is very similar as one would expect, but does reflect the different platform on the fore-mast.

Starting with the hull, the turret barbettes are all cast with the hull, as are the anchor chains, a number of deck fittings, and the block at the base of the main mast. The tops of the barbettes don't have anything to center the turrets on then, so I'll add a center pin. I have already removed the cast-in steps at the deck break. The bottom of the hull is very flat, and looks like it was held against a belt sander.

The tan resin feels a bit harder than the resin used by Hi-Mold, and it was a bit harder to run the tap through it.

Here are some of the larger parts, such as the turrets, the casemate deck, and some of the larger superstructure pieces. They're all cast with a thin sheet of resin connecting the parts. I carefully cut them out individually with scissors, then filed the bottoms flat until the excess resin sheet snapped off.

The casemate deck on the Nevada kit had some damage, in that some of the 5" gun bulwarks had chipped and I have since repaired them.

The turrets are ok. On the plus side, it looks like the triple gun turret has the right spacing of the gun barrels (many kits have the guns too far apart), but they don't have a lot of details on them and the didn't capture the asymmetric range finder on turret #3.

BB-37 USS Oklahoma Booklet of General Plans (1941) (version 1) https://archive.org/details/bb37bogp1941/mode/2up
BB-37 USS Oklahoma Booklet of General Plans (1941) (version 2) https://archive.org/details/bb37bogp1941v2
BB-37 USS Oklahoma Booklet of General Plans (1941) (version 3) https://archive.org/details/bb37bogp1941v3

Most of the parts came cast on thin sheets of resin. Some are quite fascinating, where the parts stick up like fins from the main sheet of resin. One sheet has the 5" deck guns and numerous small parts like search lights. The other has the boat cranes, mast platforms, and such.

In the second picture, there is another of these complex sheets, but this one has a part for the superstructure that is a deck with two vertical posts on each side (supports the directors on either side of the superstructure). It also has the vertical pole of the fore-mast that sticks up from the superstructure. I found it very curious as to why they chose to cast these parts in this way.

The instructions leave something to be desired. One sheet is a technical drawing of the ship, which is helpful mostly due to the scarcity of details elsewhere in the instructions. Another sheet is a parts list, that tells you how many of a given part to expect, but not what these parts are.

The third sheet is an exploded parts diagram, that I would say can be taken as inspiration as to where the parts ought to go, but a lot is left to the modeler.

Note that it's entirely up to you to scratch build the tripods. The vertical poles were a bit bigger than the diagonal poles, and the specified 1.0 mm size is a bit thin for the diagonal poles whereas the vertical poles ought to be closer to 1.5 mm. The kit also doesn't have any photo etch. Also there's no mention of what you should do about the 5" casemate guns.

Oklahoma and Nevada had a few differences. Beware of the locations of the tripod platforms, as they were different on Nevada and Oklahoma, and the kits reflect this. One thing not reflected in the kit is that the birdbath on top of the main top was oriented diagonally on Oklahoma (corners facing fore and aft) but it was oriented 'square' on Nevada (sides oriented fore and aft). Another difference is that Nevada had the swept back yard arms, like Arizona, The technical drawing in the Nevada kit shows this, but the exploded diagram doesn't.

Hello:

FIrst, thanks to Dan his post of the color deck pictures, and FFG-7 for their post to the links of the drawings. I dug around that web site and found similar drawings for other ships.

I got an order for a bunch of 3D printed parts from Modelmonkey. This includes 10 mooring quays, the fighting tops for all of the battleships, and the turrets for Nevada, Oklahoma, and Arizona.

I've also included a shot of a pair of quays next to the Arizona for context.

Mike