The Ship Model Forum

Introduction
Hello everyone!
Just like so many others, I fell victim to the Trumpeter Nimitz too. The subject is so amazing, that I figured, I will do my very best to make it look good. Even great! But the more I built, the more mistakes I noticed with the kit. The fact that some of them are very major, and that a lot of fellow modelbuilders overlooked these, I decided to correct just about all of these, to end up with one of the most accurate Nimitz builds in this scale. Because of the on-and –off nature of this project , my work so far has spanned 4 years (4 winters to be exact) and still counting. Because of the long time spent on this ship, I noticed my skills improving, I learned lots about new materials, techniques and of course the actual ship itself. During the build I will point out a lot of the mistakes made by Trumpeter, and hopefully offer a solution to the problems. I'm still fighting some grey-areas in the project, because it’s hard to find pictures of the era, I am doing my Nimitz in .
The materials
..........Now let's see what I purchased to go into battle:
-of course: the only available 1/350 USS Nimitz
-both the ULTIMATE SET and REFIT PARTS PE from White Ensign
-2 sets of Airwing PE from White Ensign,
-2 sets of Airwing PE from Gold Medal Models
-Gold Medal Models' US nuclear carrier decals
-Airwing and deck equipment decals from Starfighter decals
-lots of Evergreen styrene strips, sheets and rods
-Tom's modelworks' Tomcat PE
- Goffy models' Carrier deck tractors.....they are expensive, but worth it for the detail...
-different size incandescent lightbulbs
-PE, resin and plastic crew members from 4 different manufacturers (Goffy, Eduard, Tamiya, White ensign)
-CIWS sets from pacific models
-extra aircraft from both Trumpy and Tamiya
-a DVD full of useful images from Floating Drydock ( highly recommended)
-Extra fine railings, doors and ladders Photo Etch sets from White Ensign …I think that’s it…
So with all these, my Nimitz will have a lot of money thrown at it. Now let's see if I can manage all this into something impressive. I know of some great modelbuilders, who used a lot of these parts on their carriers, finished them in their lifetimes, AAAND didn't end up in a mental institution! Something to look forward to..

The kit
Even my first impressions of the kit were mixed, but mostly not very positive. The more digging I did while researching the actual ship, the more disappointed I got, regarding the quality and accuracy of the kit. But of course, so many months into the project I am accumulating a nice list of things I screwed up, while on my way to "perfection".. I will point these out as well:).

I had failed at finding the "accurate and crisp details" described by many other modelers. There are many parts though. Too many. Similar parts and angles that have been molded in one single piece by other company’s carriers, are made of up to 2-3-4 (5000) pieces here. And they don't fit together all that great... This kit was definitely inspired by the idea, that the more parts it consists of, the more detailed it must be...I will die not knowing why -for instance-an A-6 Intruder in this scale has to consist of 15 parts...for the level of detail these airplanes offer, it's just not worth the insane parts break-down...Anyway, after 2 weeks of research, I found that if I actually want to end up with a "politically correct" Nimitz, I would have to modify, throw out, scratchbuild, cast, or buy aftermarket well over 60% of the parts of the kit. And that's if I just wanna make it look like it REALLY did in 1975...so I right away decided I won't do all that…but most of it:) My model will represent the Nimitz the way it looked in 1986(or so). This means a lot of extra work on top of what already needs to be done.


The Island
I began with the Island of the ship . A lot of missing detail here. For starters: the windows....What windows?-one could ask...yeah, the windows had to be installed. I used a method where you take a thin, and possibly scratch-free, piece of clear plastic, and spray it with clear green. It has to be very thin and light, and just the right shade. (My windows turned out a bit too green.)Then remove the "spacers” between each window on the kit parts.( I left the center one in, for support, but narrowed it down a lot), then I installed a piece of copper wire directly below the window line. It serves 2 purposes: imitates the handrail found on the real ship, and is support for your "window" strips, which you must cut to size and shape. After all window pieces were in place, I used pieces of spare decals painted in the colour of the island to be cut up into thin strips to form the dividers between windows. I did this because: 1: they are staright. 2: this way you don't risk accidental removal of your glued-in window pieces when trying peel the tape from masking these tiny lines, 3: any light from behind will come thru your windows, but not the window-frames between them. After this, the build is straight forward for a while. There were 2 more, somewhat major, changes done to the windows and bulwarks. The first of these is this little "box" protruding from the starboard side of the island on the level above the navigation bridge. It was too shallow and didn't have windows on all 3 sides. It had to be extended and it needed windows all around. By the way, does anyone know the name and purpose of this area? Can't find the anatomy of the island on the net... Then there was a lot of re-construction regarding the bulwarks. These were changed a few times on the actual ship as well. The kit is pretty accurate when it comes to the island, especially if your ship is gonna be pictured in the seventies. Unfortunate for me, I had to do extra (home)work to get the looks up to 1986.

Well, I hope that I managed to point out enough mistakes done both by Trumpy and myself to inspire people to see that building this baby just out of the box, doesn't do justice to the USS NIMITZ:)...

Happy modeling

Laci

Here are some more shots of the island, the last image showing it the way ot looks right now. There is more detail on the way ....

Since my previous article I have been working on a few different areas around the hull and the island, but made the most progress on the stern area: here are the results.
I'd like to open with saying one good thing about the kit, so we're off to a good start. And that is: if you are building your Nimitz to be from the years: 1975-80, then the stern parts in the kit actually give a pretty accurate rendering of the real ship! Unfortunate for me, my Nimitz will be from 1985-87. By deciding on this, I also "signed up" to do a lot of scratch-building, because during the 1982 refit the entire stern, along with MANY other areas, was redesigned and had a lot more stuff added. Reference photos are very important, and luckily this subject is well documented. Shipmodelforum contains a lot of helpful images, and so does Carrierbuilders.net. DEFENSEIMAGERY.mil is a site where you can search military pictures by name, and more importantly, by the year. (whenever the website is actually working, plus the resolution of their images is not very big). However, the best quality pictures for the era I am modeling, came from the Nimitz-class DVD from FLOATING DRYDOCK. Excellent purchase! Combining the photos on this DVD and the photos available here on the above mentioned sites, you just can't go wrong! Except if, like me, you buy the DVD AFTER the stern is almost complete....
The Stern
Because of all the changes I had to make, instead of trying to build onto the existing parts, I got rid of all the Trumpy ones, and scratch-built the entire thing from ground up. (Correction: I actually used the floor-piece:)). Because the stern area actually goes beyond what part C9 suggests, I extended the detailing to whole width of the ship. The biggest addition to this area in 1982 or 3 was the CIWS sponson, that has since been removed sometime in the mid '90-s. This piece was a little tricky to build because of the little openings on it. But some really thin styrene helped me out.
In the late '80-s there was also a small crane located on the stern, so I included that as well. But only after I finished most of the stern and received the above mentioned DVD, I realized that this crane is not positioned in the right spot, or looks as accurate as it could...So I broke it off after taking these pictures, and I started rebuilding another one.
Overall I am happy with the results. Now the stern just needs some sailors, a CIWS, weathering, and some other details I can only add after the flightdeck is secured to the hull.

Happy modeling!

And finally: here is a look at what the kit stern parts look like, and what it can look like, if you throw those away and spend some time on scratchbuilding a new stern

HULL-part I
The HULL is such a huge task, that it will be dealt with in at least 3 different articles. Kind of in a “pre-flightdeck” and a “post-flightdeck” way, because there are soooo many areas here that I can't work on until the deck is secured onto the hull.

Now, that I have a pretty good collection of reference photos, and REALLY started comparing those with the kit, more work started to pile up.....surprisingly though, I seemed to be the only guy among carrierbuilders I talked to, who is not at all satisfied with this kit. Strangely, there are some modelers who even glorify this kit. I just can't bring myself to doing that, and to back up my mostly negative thoughts about this model, here are some of the things I started changing. (surprising how much extra work I need to do on a "really great" kit).....
I began working by the bow, going along the starboard , and around the stern to the port side.

The bow was pretty accurate to that of the actual ship. I removed the catwalks and made sure that the side of the forward deck piece and the side of the hull became one nice, flat surface to accommodate the PE catwalk and stairwells later. I made an extra joint in the flightdeck to both: be able to start building the bow-section, and to allow myself to treat the rest of the flightdeck as one piece, because this huge surface also becomes the ceiling for my hangar. For the intended detail in there (pipes, lighting, I-beams etc.) I need the pieces pre-joined. But that is for much-much later...

Well, the starboard side was actually not bad, as far as accuracy goes... The area ( slanted /protruding section) just forward of the #1 elevator on the hull has all the detail molded on incorrectly though. (In contrast, Trumpeter actually did a really great job on this area on their 1/700 Nimitz). Some of these details needed some attention. Also the replenishment station between elevator #1 and #2 needed modification due in part to the kit being inaccurate to begin with, and in part to me wanting to represent the ship's '80-s looks. Eventually all replenishment stations and sponsons were (or will be) deepened, given 3 walls and a ceiling, and lots of additional details, such as firehoses, life-preservers, pipes, doors, electrical boxes, railings etc.

The elevator guides (parts A1, 2, 8, 9, 11) are very basic, but are good enough to add more detail onto. It didn't take too much time to make them look a whole lot better. Just some styrene and stretched sprue.( and lots of references, which I can't stress enough). I am "overdetailing" the #2 elevator area, because this is going to be the only elevator in the lowered position.
On the USS Nimitz, the shape of the Sea sparrow sponson on the stern/ starboard was unchanged until the early ’90-s at least, so I just used the kit parts here… This was all the work for the starboard side, in a nutshell. It went relatively smooth until this point. But the ship has a PORT side too. But first of all I had to start with scratchbuilding, because the '85 refit also saw the shape of the aft/port Sea sparrow sponson changed quite a bit. The #4 elevator area looks O.K., but forward of that, the slanted overhang is the most inaccurate area of the entire kit. I am not kidding when I say that NOTHING is even remotely at the right place, or is the right size. In addition, there are a few things molded on there that were never present on any of the Nimitz-class ships. Let's see a "damage assessment":

-Sponson 6 (the first big opening on the hull forward from elevator #4) had to be moved ahead a whole 32 millimeters,or, an inch and a quarter. Also, this sponson NEVER held a motorboat, as opposed to what the instruction indicates. Those type of motorboats are stored in the hangar of the carrier on a large trolley, similar to the one included in the kit....so, sponson 6 was stracthbuilt entirely.

- The motor whaleboat sponson (second big opening in the hull on this side): Creating this little gem used up a lot of styrene and, requires a bit more explanation: it had to be moved back 20 mm-s, and it is actually a 2 storey unit, and the motorboat doesn't just hang from the ceiling, but is also rested on a swiveling scaffold, that can be easily built using some stretched sprue. Of course, the type of boat that Trumpy supplies for here is, again, the wrong type: you will need a small, US Navy whaleboat, which were standard on most US Navy vessels for many decades. Since this kit doesn't come with anything like this, I borrowed one from a USS Missouri kit.

-The indentations that are supposed to represent the screens for the walkways are just about all in the wrong location and are incorrect in shape and size.. I had to use many photos to determine the exact position of these. Maybe it's just my insanity ( or let's call it dedication)(yeah, that's much better) taking over, but I also cut and drilled these out, shaped them, and started gluing in PE mesh, to give these openings a more realistic look. Since then I checked my work on these and I am not happy with the results, have to figure out a better way of gluing these in.....

- Then there are those 2 identical openings between sponson 6 and the motor whaleboat sponson. Now, these 2 "platforms" are not shown on ANY pictures I have seen, but the first good photo I found of this part of the ship was from from 1978 ,and it definitely didn't show these, so I filled them in.

-After navigating thru this overhang, and moving further forward, yet another sponson had to be scratchbuilt to accommodate the CIWS system that was added onto the USS Nimitz during that "notorious" '82 refit.

There are far more things wrong with the kit regarding the 2 sides of the ship, and I will get to those in another article. All the things I mentioned above took me about 4-5 weeks to change. Since then I started working on the Hangar deck....Lots of work ahead.... but now it's summertime, and it's time to be outside

The sponsons on the port side should look something like this...

The summer was waaay too nice to be indoors and be working on this monster. But for the last 2 months the cold weather allowed me to get back to my Nimitz and I took on the hangar this time.
Here is a weirdly positive thought: there is nothing bad I (or anyone:)) can say about Trumpy's hangar because it's non-existent. So instead of correcting all their mistakes, I could build e-ve-ry-thing from scratch. It was nice of Trumpy to provide the hangar floor at least. But it comes with those awfully huge tie-down points. I sure filled and re-drilled those. Luckily there are a lot of "blind-spots" on the hangar deck, even with all 4 doors fully open, so I didn't have to apply the same level of detail to every square inch in there.

DOORWAYS: After the "floor" I moved onto the doorways. Despite Asian (Trumpeter/Tamiya) model-manufacturing believes, the hangar doors aren't installed against the outer hull of the ship, instead, there are deep door-wells before you get inside the hangar. Even in the case of deciding on the doors being shut, these wells will have to be made to add reality to the model. The hangar doors provided can be discarded, because on the original ship the doors are solid, and there is no "corrugated" pattern on them (meaning those scribed vertical lines), their surface is smooth. Luckily, in this scale that means, that they can just simply be replaced with 2 pieces of styrene sheeting. After the doors and door wells were built, I made those red-yellow safety stripes on the bottom half of the oval shaped hangar openings. I had a hard time to figure out a good way to do this the best way. But here is what I came up with: since yellow paints cover very bad, I didn’t want to paint these. I used decals. Yellow decals for each lower curve. After that dried overnight I started cutting thin strips of red from leftover decals. LOTS OF THEM, and started applying them onto the yellow surface one by one. This way I could ensure that they were both straight and roughly the same distance from each other. This is insanely time consuming, but thinking of the end result kept me fueled, so I just muscled thru it, and I am not sorry I did. After these guys dried on safely, I just trimmed them back to the desired width. Afterwards just shot some matt clear over it. One thing hard to track down is the direction, in which these stripes are slanted, because it seems to vary from ship to ship and era to era.

WALLS : I used styrene for this. I found excellent reference photos of the hangar on the internet, but what I didn't find is pictures specifically from the '80-s. And of course all the Nimitz-class carriers are slightly different from each other .The hangar is no exception, so I did some improvising here and there. I hope nothing is too out of whack... The walls, the CONFLAG-stations and the doors that separate the 3 hangar bays from each other, are in the same location on all Nimitz ships.

AIRWING: Once the walls were done, I started building all the little things to bring the hangar to life. I used mostly Tamiya aircraft for this. They are correct enough in shape to end up on the hangar deck.
I never liked the idea of painting the canopies silver/chrome, or even light blue for display on the flightdeck, let alone the hangar bay, where there is no reflection off the sky . I think Glossy Black looks the most realistic. (You'll be the judge) . Some types of aircraft have their somewhat "usual" parking spots in the hangar deck, as well as up on the flightdeck. These are the helicopters and the Hawkeyes. When in the hangar, they like to "live" in bay #1, close to the forward wall. I also found that a lot of the times they store only cargo and motorized life boats (on trolley) in the back of the hangar, that fills up the aft area entirely. I will model my hangar this way. Boxes, replacement engines, barrels, weapons are stored here in heaps...

EQUIPMENT: I made modification to the hangar equipment as well. The forklifts got the biggest makeover. Neither the ones in the kit, nor the ones that come with the photo-etch set are correct .To end up with something close to the actual forklifts the Navy uses, the solution for me was to scratchbuild the top of the forklifts (using styrene and PE railing sections), and borrow bigger front wheels from Tamiya’s deck tractors from my old Enterprise, and used the parts of the forks from the PE set. I probably over-did it, but I even added steering wheels to all of them. Yeah, this is a perfect time for some name-calling...
Of course nothing really brings the hanger to life like "people" do. I purchased Eduard's pre-painted US carrier personnel fret, because it is incredibly detailed. But: it is also incredibly 2 dimensional. So I got Goffy Model's modern navy crew resin figures. While this company makes EXCELLENT deck tractors, their figures are suggesting that all crew members on a ships go around their business being bent over, or are fighting a bad diarrhea, or are already on the toilet. Awful positions to be in when you are wing-walking a 45-80 million dollar jet ....funny as hell though. I can use a few of them to drive equipment maybe, but mostly they are a waste of time and money.
I managed to save some time as well. I cut corners all over the place in the hangar, and this goes for the airplanes as well. I didn't even paint /decal/weather all sides or surfaces of the aircraft. But that won't be noticeable.
And I am willing to put so much confidence in that, that I even designed lighting in the hangar. I got some amazingly small incandescent bulbs from Miniatronics. Did I mention that they are AMAZINGLY small? 0.75mm in diameter. Those run on 1.5 volts, and got some bigger ones that run on 12 volts.
Now that the lighting is figured out, I glued the deck to the hull and I could resume operations on the stern and other parts of the ship’s sides.
Merry Christmas and happy modeling

Laci

more hangar shots

last hangar shots for a while

That's impressive. I'll be watching closely.

_________________
_________________
James

http://www.modelshipgallery.com/gallery/users/James-Guard/user-index.html

That is amazing!

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-Abram
ModelWarships Gallery Page
Joslin Models Facebook Page

I see, people are pretty quick to check out new posts here! That is great! Thank you for the kind words, I will do my very best not to dissappoint!


The flightdeck also didn’t make it without a facelift. Or several of them.
Once the flightdeck pieces had been glued together, I did a lot of work to make it look closer to the real thing. After the deck is secured to the hull, I cut off all the details on the sides of the deck ( catwalks, safety nets) and made these vertical sides all one flat surface for later re-attaching the new catwalk and nets and other details to.

Tie-downs: on top of the deck I puttied the joints, and using a whole bunch more of the grey paste, I filled in ALL those awful tie-down points and those ridiculous, deep “canyons” marking the decal locations. Who marks the location of the decals in such primitive ways in the 21st century? And what for? Actually, regardless of the outstanding quality, MRC did the exact same thing on their USS Wasp, and that is just sad….. The tie-downs are way too big and way too few on the kit, plus they are non-existent where the decals would be located. Instead, after sending the entire deck smooth, I penciled on an 8x8 mm grid –pattern to mark the locations of the new tie-down points. I used a 2mm drill bit and drilled out every single one of these by hand. Of course there are areas you have to leave them off, such as the electrical power supply covers, weapon elevators, around the catapults and the landing area. As always, consult photos when making changes, so that your model will end up not just better looking, but more accurate as well. One of the biggest changes is required by the angle of the deck on the starboard, before elevator No. 1. A lot of work also went into the areas beneath the deck, hanging over the outlines of the hull.
There should be great care taken when choosing an era to model the ship in, because a lot of changes happened to these vessels every few years. One major change that pertains to the flightdeck, and started in the ’80-s, was the gradual removal of the catapult bridal catches , or catapult extensions.

PAINTING: After all the deck surfaces were joined, puttied and sanded smooth, it was time for some grays. I had seen some modelers add the anti-skid texture to their model’s deck, but I personally believe that in this scale that should be omitted. The final colour of my deck consists of at least 5 different shades of gray so far. Plus I painted on most of the deck-markings, instead of using those out of scale decals of Trumpeter.

WEATHERING: The actual flightdeck on a real carrier experiences rough landings, occasional re-surfacing (that sometimes happens in sections only, creating different shades of anti-skid ) , different fluids leaking onto the deck such as fuel , hydraulic fluid, etc., extreme heat and salty water and the list goes on. All these things have an effect on the life of the painted-on markings and the deck surface itself, and I feel that these conditions are often overlooked by others. One shouldn’t be scared about mixing colours a bit. I mixed my final colour from black and some grey, and long since then I ran out of this mix. It will be impossible to match that previous base colour I made and that is just perfect: adds more reality to the finish. My photos don’t show the final stage of painting: a lot more subtle detail is yet to be added.

DECALS: The Gold Medal Models (GMM) ‘s supercarrier decal set is a good buy, but this sheet contains a lot of mistakes too. At least they can be all corrected by paying attention to reference photos. Things like: the style of golden wings on the front of the island either don’t match the year stated beneath it or is just plain wrong. The red-white safety lines provided for the front catapults is also wrong in style (and width) : the length of the two colours is way off, I –personally- discarded them. They are better –and straighter –reproduced by masking and painting. Not surprisingly, I found the actual elevator markings (yellow-red) to be very different from what Trumpeter suggests. Their decals for the elevator are nothing short of garbage (sling-shot it). They are wrong in both colour AND shape, and there are really not too many other ways to screw up decals. Luckily GMM comes to the rescue. But pay attention when marking the elevator edges: number 3 and 4 have a slightly different design from the other two. I also ended up changing the location of the arrester cables. I mean, everything is out of scale on this model, so you really have to pick your battles. There is no way one can-or should- correct everything, because then might as well start from scratch …

I really hate to be negative when it comes to describing Trumpeter’s work, but I just want to remain realistic. This is a very inaccurate model with a lot of very obvious mistakes. But at least it never stops to challenge!

happy modeling

some close ups of the bow:

After looking at the Trumpeter mobile deck crane, I very quickly decided to scratch-build this piece of machinery . I had to, since the one included in the kit is: garbage. It is marked #1 on the picture below. One shouldn’t even waste time considering keeping it. There has never been even a remotely similar design of crane EVER used by the US, or any other Navy in the world to date. After placing this fictional design into my slingshot and getting rid of it, I had a lot of work ahead of me, considering the scale. It is great help, if we happened to have the mobile crane from Tamiya’s Enterprise, (marked #2) at least they were closer to the truth. I planned to do way better than even those guys, so I only used the wheels from Tamiya. (After widening them). After 2 weeks of designing and building , I am pretty happy with the results.

WOW
enough said
gary r

_________________
a bad day sailing is better than a good day at the office

The stern is nearing completion, so here is a bunch more new info.
I rebuilt the crane on the stern, and among many things I made changes to CIWS sponson and the angled corner of the flightdeck, above the rear of the ship. Since the catwalks are absolutely fictional on the Trumpeter kit, I didn’t use a single piece of Chinese plastic from here on. (Except the big crane on the starboard side.) The catwalk bases are photo etch, thanks to White Ensign. The sides of the catwalks is a mix of railing and bulwarks made from styrene. Because there is something very important to consider about these catwalks: contrary to Trumpeter, the catwalk is mostly outlined with railing –and this is what the life raft canisters attach to, not steel bulwarks. Just about every carrierbuilder overlooks this, and spends countless hours on shaping the plastic sides to the photoetch catwalk bases, when in-fact, except for the bow and a few places on the stern, one should discard the plastic pieces, and just simply attach the reinforced railing provided by White ensign to the perforated catwalk pieces. The result: You save time plus your model is more accurate. When you follow reference photos it’s a win-win.
The LSO area went thru a complete overhaul. I made the LSO safety net from an old computer monitor screen. The one seen on the photos here is just a test piece for dryfitting, I will have to make one that fits perfectly.
I did something really simple, but neat to the PE safety nets going around the carrier’s deck: I bent the net part with the rounded end of a paintbrush handle, to give it a more realistic, sagging look.

Some more port shots. This side of the stern is almost complete.....

Holy Snarkies! Amazing work. I'm taking notes.

_________________
God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right even though I think it is hopeless.
~ Chester W. Nimitz ~
My Builds ~ http://ussnorthcaroilna.shutterfly.com/

Just wow!

Your attention to detail is incredible. The results are definitely worth 4 years!

_________________
-Jason Channell

Current Project: 1/200 Bismarck

Now that's some super detailing!!!! NICE! Definitely motivating. Thanks.

_________________
Doug

Currently building:
Tamiya 1/350 CVN-65 USS Enterprise 2001
http://www.shipmodels.info/mws_forum/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=120496

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