The Ship Model Forum

Very nice work and information, Tracy.

Looking forward to this build as I passed on the late war, but have been on the fence with this release.

TOMLABEL

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Tracy,

Very nice work, good friend!

When I hear back from the guy who I'd like to get to build my kit, I'd like to have you show him how to do that framing on that starboard bulkhead. I think it looks good and gives the model more dimension.

Tim

Tim - it's just .020" strip cut a little bit long and then laid down and glued. I did the top, curved piece first, gluing maybe a third to half at a time so that I could manage pushing it into the curve, but it's thin and pliable enough that as soon as the first segment was down I moved on to the next segment. All in all that top piece took maybe 10-15 seconds to work and get down. I had about 5-10mm of excess poking out at the rear and I just gave it a rough cut and then cleaned all of the excess up at once at the end. Second strip was the straight horizontal one and it was similar, albeit I think I was able to drop all of the Tamiya liquid cement down at once.

Vertical pieces were again, just eyeballed. I dropped a long strip about where I wanted it and pressed my knife blade a little bit long so that I left a groove that weakened it. It broke clean when I bent the strip (in other words I didn't cut through with the blade) and I then just sanded one end until it was short enough to fit perfectly.

The bigger sheet is actually supposed to be somewhat flush, but as I didn't have any drawings or good photos I decided to make it out of .010" sheet instead of .020 as the borders should still be visible and I wanted it to look it. I could have also used some .020" sheet and beveled the edges at an angle, but I had some scrap .010" and the decision was made....

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Tracy White -Researcher@Large

"Let the evidence guide the research. Do not have a preconceived agenda which will only distort the result."
-Barbara Tuchman

OK, more progress. The major deck pieces are down:



Not much to say at this point. Everything fit fairly well. The one exception was the forward gun tub. In order to make sure good fit to both the charthouse and main deck, I did not glue it to the charthouse and then the assembly to the deck as the instructions have you do, but rather held the charthouse to the deck, placed the tub down, and tacked it to the chart house. This left it sitting on the deck perfectly, but with a small gap on the sides that widened as it got closer to the deck. It was fairly easy to fill it with Mr Surfacer at that point since I had access to both the front and back of the gaps (meaning I could fill it in such a way so as to have less chance of bubbles) and simply clean up the excess with Mr Color Thinner and a Q-tip. Didn't think to get photos of that, but I'll try to this weekend.

I'm going to wait until I have all of the hatches glued down before I glue the deck to the hull so that if I drop one through I don't have to turn the air blue getting it back out.

As you can see, I started the torpedo tube mounts and I have two comments about this. First, the kit would have you build "posable" mounts that can be positioned either stowed or ready to launch (swung outboard) but the trees come with alternate parts to have them fixed inboard. These later parts are much simpler and one again I'll try and get a photo of them this weekend and provide a "conversion chart" for those wanting to use these parts.

Second is that both the forward plate that the tubes slid outboard on rendered incorrectly. They should taper as the move inboard so that they're more or less parallel to the water. Instead, the Merit kit has them as a fixed thickness, so the top is parallel to the deck with its camber, the same as the aft plate that was the pivot point, which was a fixed thickness. I didn't feel like sanding all of them down to match this on what I'm hoping to be a somewhat quick build, so I just popped them on deck and will live with it.

Also "incorrect" about the forward plates is the omission of the gear that was used to actually move the tubes in and out - you can see it in this photo of PT-149:

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Tracy White -Researcher@Large

"Let the evidence guide the research. Do not have a preconceived agenda which will only distort the result."
-Barbara Tuchman

Looking good.

One trick I learned for avoiding the "dropped the hatch, need to curse it out of the hull" trick is to back the opening on the inside with styrene. If you're closing the hatch, you won't see it anyway.

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We like our history sanitized and theme-parked and self-congratulatory, not bloody and angry and unflattering. - Jonathan Yardley

That's a good tip. In this case, there's no reason to get the deck on earlier other than my desire to have it together, so I'll skip the extra work that would cause and just focus on gluing them down. I have two modifications to make to the hatches as well I'll cover in my next post.

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Tracy White -Researcher@Large

"Let the evidence guide the research. Do not have a preconceived agenda which will only distort the result."
-Barbara Tuchman

A busy work schedule has killed my progress this week - I'm posting this in-between client calls.

Stock kit has the day cabin hatch opening from inboard hinges whereas PT-157's hinged aft. It's a square hatch, so all it took was a quick shave of the old hinges, rotating the hatch 90 degrees, and then using some Evergreen .040" half-round cut into 1mm segments and glued around the hatch after it was in place. Look good, last long time!



In progress, but not well enough along to post, is the replacement fold-out bench in the cockpit.

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Tracy White -Researcher@Large

"Let the evidence guide the research. Do not have a preconceived agenda which will only distort the result."
-Barbara Tuchman

Managed to surface from work a bit last night and this morning. Working on an aspect that will be a separate post, but I have some useful information at least for today.

As I alluded to earlier, the kit comes with two sets of deck mounts for the torpedo tubes. Only one set is shown on the instructions, and this is the set that allows the builder to display the tubes either stowed in or swung out for launching. The "D" trees with the torpedoes have parts that replace the swivel and skid plates (two parts each) with a single piece. If you want to go the single-piece route, substitute parts as follow:

Port side
Swivel plate: M7/M19 - D8
Skid plate: M9/M4 - D4

Starboard side
Swivel plate: M17/M20 - D23
Skid plate: M10/M3 - D9

Below is the different port side pieces next to each other for comparison:

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Tracy White -Researcher@Large

"Let the evidence guide the research. Do not have a preconceived agenda which will only distort the result."
-Barbara Tuchman

OK, so I had noticed when I put a set of the torpedo halves together that they were smaller than the inner diameter of the tubes. TO a certain extent it's understandable as you couldn't have perfectly scaled torpedoes fitted inside the torpedo tubes unless they were overscale. But, the slop seemed excessive so I decided to measure things out to see how they scale out.

There is a possibility my math is off here, so I wouldn't mind a double check and corrections if I did make an error.

The early PT boats used 21" diameter tubes, which scales out to .4375" in 1/48. The actual diameter measured with a digital micrometer was .333" which is about 76% of what the diameter should be.

How about length? According to PT-103.com and
A Brief History of U.S. Navy Torpedo Development we're looking at lengths of 246", 256.3", or 288" depending on the Mk or torpedo loaded into the launcher. Length as measured with the props on was 4.335", which is 86%, 81%, and 72% the size it should scale out to, depending on which Mark of torpedo they are trying to represent (I haven't tried to determine this yet).

So, in summary, the torpedoes are undersized. This will not be a factor if you close up the torpedo tubes. It might be worth noting for aftermarket companies that want to release a torpedo loading crew type of set - a replacement torpedo might be beneficial.

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Tracy White -Researcher@Large

"Let the evidence guide the research. Do not have a preconceived agenda which will only distort the result."
-Barbara Tuchman

..

Work did not cooperate with my desire to get back on the PT this week and I merely did little things here and there. However, I did make enough progress on one aspect to at least show photos of it. the Boats of PT Squadron NINE (Ron 9 from here on out) had the aft cockpit wall removed. I had noticed in the original PT-157 photo that I posted that one of the sailors in the cockpit was significantly taller than the others, and then that Cdr. Kelley was towering over PT-156/8/9's captiain here and here.

I reached out to Bridgeman Carney of PT-157 who has literally written not just "the" book on PT-157, but two of them! What he said was that there was a fold-up step/platform in the cockpit, and I figured that this would be a fun little feature to help add some more life to the build.

First up was filling the alignment holes and slots for the aft cockpit wall that I wasn't using; I used some strip styrene to make this a little quicker and to avoid shrinking filler:



Next were the two pieces I chose to do. There are a couple of supports underneath that aren't very visible and I chose to forgo them. The most complex of the two is the vertical support, which has a wasp waist shape and hole in the center. The top horizontal piece was a fixed portion about 4" wide before the hinge, and then the step. I did this as one piece with the joint between the two scribed in. Dimensions in 48th scale are:

Step length - 9.789mm
step fixed platform - 3.571mm
Step folding platform - 5.953mm
Step supportt Height - 10.583mm
Step support length - 8.202mm
Step lightening Hole - 2.645mm
Step Angle support - 3.968mm (this is one of the pieces I didn't do, but I include it in case others desire to)

Here we have the pieces cut out and the lightning hole drilled with a #36 or 37 drill bit (I think the former but don't have it with me):



What's not really clear in the above photo is that I had split the vertical piece n the right when drilling it and trying to clean the leftover parts. I glued it back together, clamped between these two metal rulers to keep it straight, and then cleaned up the hole wit ha file instead and filled the little seam that remained. Finished product:



Dark paint is just to adequately "shadow" the areas I can't get paint on when doing the true color. Yet uninstalled in this photo is a narrow step that ran to the front of the cockpit on the bulkhead. Getting closer!

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Tracy White -Researcher@Large

"Let the evidence guide the research. Do not have a preconceived agenda which will only distort the result."
-Barbara Tuchman

Did this project ever get finished?

..

No, but it did get restarted last week! Work's been really busy so I'm not sure when I'll have enough progress to warrant another post and photos, but I'll try and err on the early side.

_________________
Tracy White -Researcher@Large

"Let the evidence guide the research. Do not have a preconceived agenda which will only distort the result."
-Barbara Tuchman