Battleship Row in 1/700

[mconnelley]

Hello:

The dimensions I show came from the "Bridges and Superstructure Deck" drawing. Otherwise, I'd have no idea where things ought to be, other than (I assume) symmetric about the centerline.

Mike

[mconnelley]

Hello:

I've been working on the stern catapults for Nevada, Oklahoma, and most recently for Arizona. The Tom's PE has gone together smoothly, but it feels like the brass of the Arizona detail set is thinner and more flexible than the brass of the Nevada/Oklahoma set.

Two gotchas:
- On the Nevada and Oklahoma kits, I just realized that the spot molded on the hull for the catapult is off-center by about 0.5 mm. I might fill and re-drill these holes.
- The Arizona kit has a ring molded onto the hull. It looks to be well centered, but rather tall. I think I'll cut it down.

Mike

[mconnelley]

Hello:

I started working on the PE railings for 'clover leaf' platform...I think this is for the search lights on the main mast of Nevada/Oklahoma. I tried to bend the PE so that the curves and especially the sharp bends would be in the right place. This mostly worked, but by time I got around towards the end things were off by maybe 1/2 mm. So then I had to straighten out the bend, and re-bend in the right spot. Next time I'll probably forego the pre-bending step and start from a straight piece of PE and work my way around. But the result looks pretty good. One down, maybe 9 more to go?

Mike

[JIM BAUMANN]

Good work so far

for your platform railings,-- wrap the railing AROUND the edhe of the patform

it keeps the platform near sale in thickness

Railing on top of Platforms will make the edge look overly thick

Hope to help

Jim Baumann

[Themongoose]

Loving this project! Nice work and tons of good source links in here. A thread we�ll probably come back to again and again.

[mconnelley]

Regarding the railings: I've tried putting the railing around the outside of the platforms rather than on top. Most of the time, this has worked fairly well. Not sure how I got into the habit of putting them on top. There are some cases where I'll still put the railing on top of a deck, but for cases like the 'clover' platforms on Nevada/Oklahoma/Arizona, wrapping around the outside works well.

A little update on Arizona:
I've been working on the funnel: drilling out the cast in grill cap and adding the PE part. I'll put some dark black paint (I have Black 3.0) down in the hole and use a black-gray on the top for some contrast.

Also, I couldn't get the platforms on each side of the funnel to align without cutting the walk way between them. So I cut the walkway, glued down the two platforms in the right place, then filled the gap in the walkway with some sheet plastic.

Mike

[mconnelley]

Work has recently focused on Oklahoma and Nevada, specifically the superstructure area. I glued the gun director platform to the bridge part, and the rangefinder platform to the top-front of the bridge for both ships. Then we start getting into the differences between the two sisters.

Here's a picture that shows the two together, Oklahoma on the left and Nevada in the right background. The things to note at this stage of construction is that:
1) Nevada has a square-ish platform above the bridge with a wall around it, while Oklahoma has a 'clover' platform with railings
2) The platforms on Nevada (both fore and main mast) are lower than on Oklahoma. On Nevada, they're level with the top of the funnel, whereas on Oklahoma these platforms are well above the top of the funnel.

And here's a picture of Nevada coming into dry dock after the attack. I'd like to point out:
1) We get a clearer view of the square-ish platform above the bridge with al wall around it, unique to Nevada
2) The tall skinny things sticking out of the top of turret #2. Possibly periscopes?
3) A wall above the bridge, between the gun director and the front range finder. Oklahoma does not seem to have this. Some models of Nevada miss this detail, but the new Tom's Modelworks kit does have this feature...which I used as a reference since I couldn't find a better photo of the area than what I show here.

Mike

[mconnelley]

1) To get the platforms at the right height, I improvised a height gauge from a pair of dividers and a combination square. The drawings reference heights above the waterline, which I've converted to mm in 1/700 scale. I set the height of the pointer using my calipers, then transfer that height with the height gauge to the model. This tool will be REALLY useful in getting things to the right height, and also to a consistent height from one ship to the next. Eventually I'd like to make myself a better height gauge, but so far this is working well. Don't worry that the fighting top is a bit crooked...I'll fix that later!

2) With the height gauge, I've gotten the two tripod masts 'roughed in'. In this picture, the rear legs of the fore-mast are still plastic rod, as I used that to get things roughly in place before putting in brass rod (which the main mast has). In this picture the platforms are at the right height. On the main mast, the two fore legs don't quite get to the matching holes in the deck, as I still need to adjust the fit of the rangefinder platform a bit. Getting the tripod legs to fit was quite the ordeal, as the holes in the platform aren't in the right place. I would test fit, see where the legs landed on the deck compared to the holes in the deck, file out the holes in the platforms a bit, and repeat. Once it's all fitted, I'll need to fill the holes in the platforms.

3) A closer shot of Nevada. I've added the things that stick out of the top of turret #2 (also did this for Oklahoma already). The wall above the bridge is there in sheet brass, blended in with putty. The railing around the front range finder has one low bar, then becomes 2 bar above the bridge and around the gun director.

4) Just a nice picture of Nevada (foreground) and Oklahoma (background) together. More work on Oklahoma coming soon.

Mike

[ModelMonkey]

Looks great, Mike!

Have popcorn in hand....

[mconnelley]

Work has been continuing on Arizona, with a brief detour to work on Prince of Wales. I used Prince of Wales as my first real experiment in rigging. Overall, I think it's going ok for a first time out. I tried using gum arabic to secure the lines, but that didn't seem to hold, so I've been using superglue. All of the lines used to be taut, but one in the middle has slack now for some reason. I suspect that the fore-mast isn't glued in securely enough, and the plastic masts have enough flex in them to make it difficult to keep all of the lines taut. In the future, I'll try to have metal masts that are stuffer than plastic. I did 3 lines on one side of the mast then the 3 on the other side, but it might be better to alternate. I'll add more rigging to PoW as time/interest allows to get more practice.

On Arizona, I've been starting on the boat crane and turret catapult. The kit boat crane is a solid cast resin piece, whereas you can see through the PE part. It took a bit of fiddling, but I got it fit in place and aligned.

Mike

[mconnelley]

The turret catapult is mostly done, and dry fit in place. I used pictures of the model of Arizona at the USS Arizona Memorial as a reference since I couldn't find a good photo showing quite where things went. There is a platform on the aft end of the catapult that I can't find on the PE fret, even though it's shown in the instructions.

When I dry fit the catapult to the turret, it looked great...until I looked from the side. The tilt is way off...mostly down aft but also to the starboard side. I suspect the problem is that the PE set is made for the Dragon kit, whereas I'm using 3D printed turrets. It'll take a lot of filing to level it out. Inspection with the height gauge shows that the aft end is at the right height, and the forward end is too high. So rather than adding shims under the aft end (easy to do), I should remove material from the forward end (hard to do).

Mike

[FFG-7]

look at sheets 3 & 8 of Arizona's booklet of plans for the placement & orientation of #3 turret catapult.

[mconnelley]

Just some eye candy. Please disregard the F-4 in the background...

Mike

[Dan K]

Very nice............

[mconnelley]

I'm really excited to get a bunch of 5"/51 caliber guns from Kraken Hobbies. Specifically, 70 of them. Each battleship has 10 guns in casemates, and there were 7 battleships, thus 70 guns.

One thing I find really annoying is that many models of these battleships present the casemate guns like they're turrets. For these resin kits, the superstructure deck is a solid block of resin and the gun barrel is often represented as just a short length of wire sticking out the side. This makes it either look like a turret, or some weird piece of wire sticking out of the side of a ship.

Also, having grown up near Pearl Harbor, it gets hot. I suspect that they'd have things as open as possible to get some breeze through the ship so it wouldn't be so hot living in a metal box in the Hawaiian sun. So I'm going to open up the casemates and put the 5"/51 guns in there.

Mike

P.S. To the left of the 5" guns are the *tiny* 50 cal machine guns

[FFG-7]

don't forget all those 5" 25cal aa guns.

[mconnelley]

A particular pet peeve of mine are the casemate guns, as they're often depicted in kits as if they're turrets. Having bought the 5"/51 guns, it's time to make the casemates.

The first step is to cut out pockets in the bottom of the superstructure deck to make room for the guns, and so that visually there's an open space in the superstructure. To do this, I made a fixture block with two 6-32 tapped holes to bolt the resin superstructure deck to. I drilled two holes in the deck, positioned under the conning tower and under the funnel, to pass the bolts through. I clamped the assembly in the vice on a Bridgeport mill, and used a 3/16" end mill to cut the pockets. I zero'ed the Z-axis DRO by touching off on the bottom side of the resin part (now facing upwards), then plunged in about 2.2 mm very slowly. Then I moved around in XY slowly to open up the pocket.

Mike

[mconnelley]

Here's what it looks like with the superstructure deck set in place, and black primer painted into the pockets.

I used 0.003" sheet brass to make the low walls that go right under the gun barrels. My first attempt was too thick, as I made them about 1.2 mm high whereas 0.8 mm is more correct. I pulled them off, cut them down to 0.8 mm thickness (as seen in the left-most casemate), and put them back in. Now the five casemates on the port side are all done.

Mike

[mconnelley]

Hello:

As part of the casemate effort, I started putting together the 3D printed guns. Here is the first batch of 10.

I had originally planned to have a thin brass 'floor' glued to the underside of the superstructure deck part, to have a place for the guns to be glued to. For reasons I don't understand, those brass parts wouldn't stick to the superglue. So I think I'll just glue the guns to the 'ceiling' of their pockets...maybe with some shims if needed to get them to the right height.

Mike

[mconnelley]

And some work has been done on the turret catapults for Nevada and Oklahoma. As original, they seemed to be quite tall, with a fair amount of space between the underside of the catapult and the turret range finder. Photos show that there is no space there. So, out came the nippers, and a lot of trimming and test fitting later, I had the catapults lowered and relatively level.

Mike