1/350 CVL-23 USS Princeton

[Jon]

Excellent, thanks for sharing your progress. I have this kit too and following with interest.

[StevenVD]

You're welcome, Jon.

Next are the quad 40 ammo racks.







On the insides of the barbettes were multiple perforated rings, still some overscale by L'Arsenal. I needed 27 rings over 9 barbettes who aren't closed. You only get 6 times 3 rings, but whole ones, just enough if you cut them.





The Bug avoids damage while bending the spacing lips.



The incomplete particles are used in pairs on the lowest level, out of sight and where the smallest diameter is.





It's not for the feeble-minded to glue the particles to the concave wall. Often the lower ring breaks off or goes aslant. Only two are finished yet.

[Tracy White]

For october '44 overall Sea Blue would probably be mandatory.

The Hellcats were a mixture based on photos I have of her during her loss - I'll try and look them up and see if I can give you a general idea, but it's not going to be exact as some aircraft were in the hangar bay. Avengers were reported as all (nine) TBF-1Cs, which would have been in tricolor still.

[StevenVD]

All 40mm-barbettes are finished with PE, it had to be split up in 4 rounds to avoid insanity.













Now the quad Bofors barbettes remain. Independence clearly had them provided with racks for the curved and some of the straight walls.





@Tracy: that's funny, but maybe I prefer the tricolor scheme over the Sea Blue, which I see often applied too glossy. Not that it shouldn't be semi-gloss, I think reflection should follow the same rules as there are for scale color fading. I read in the airwing section of the forum that Avengers on Independence would count 9, isn't there a chance more were taken in stead of the Dauntless not used on Princeton? I currently have 11.

[Tracy White]

I read in the airwing section of the forum that Avengers on Independence would count 9, isn't there a chance more were taken in stead of the Dauntless not used on Princeton? I currently have 11.

I can only go by the official documents I have access to. Her action / loss report states:

The Navy had a more-or-less weekly report listing the locations of aircraft and their numbers and coincidentally there was one listed on the date of Princeton's loss. I don't know the methods used to gather the data and tabulate the results, so while I'm fairly sure the results aren't entirely accurate for 10/24, I don't know when the ship reported the numbers ans when it's accurate for. It should be "close enough" for discussion though:

The Yorktown and Essex class would frequently carry spare aircraft and parts, but the CVLs were small and didn't have the hangar space to hang spares in the overheads the way the larger fleet carriers could. It's your model so do what you want (I'm a firm believer in this), but I have no evidence that there would be more than 9 Avengers on board.

Generally speaking, F6F-3s and TBF-1s are in tri-color and F6F-5s are in Glossy Sea Blue. Even when the Navy issued directives changing camouflage paint on aircraft, the ships would not repaint the overall camouflage and the aircraft would retain the camouflage they were "issued" in.

One fighter is listed as lost during a CAP earlier in the day, but it's not mentioned if it's a -3 or -5. Six of her TBFs had been reported as being moved to the Hangar bay and the sequence of photos of her loss has three Avengers parked at the very front. One has a dot on the rudder similar to CV-12 Hornet's airgroup and may have been transferred, but I don't know if this was the only one or not. For sure, the plane with the dot is # 9.

Note the outboard Hellcat is tricolor but the one inboard of it is Glossy Sea Blue (dark underwings visible when folded). This plane's tail is hidden in all of the photos I have and the number is unknown. It is known that #1 was a F6F-5 in GSB at least and than numbers 3, 12, and 17 were tricolor.

[StevenVD]

Thanks a lot for all this info, Tracy. I recounted the Avengers and I have only 10, so I can always leave 1 off. In reality they wouldn't all figure on places were they would be visible, aniway. If I want to show what I've built, there are going to have to be placed more of them on deck than would be plausible during combat operations. The Avengers are partly finished with bomb doors open, so I can put some torpedo carts near them. On one I removed the torpedo from the bomb bay.

According to the report, there would also be 7 Hellcats F6F-5, I suppose these can not be F6F-5N's with the radomes on the wings? I still left them all off because it didn't appear in the instructions.

[Tracy White]

Note that Monterey reports a couple of F6F-5P variants - these reports did list sub types and I see -5Ns quite a bit. So, Princeton didn't report any and likely didn't have any assigned. However, you could always include one and a Dauntless for a "representative" air group to show the types of aircraft she did and could have operated. CVL-22 Independence was a dedicated night operations carrier for a time, with radar-equipped Avengers and Hellcats. The CVLs otherwise didn't really see the radome-fitted aircraft - they were distributed to the larger carriers in groups of 4-6.

[marijn van gils]

Nice PE work Steven!
But not ready yet for Putte I guess...

[StevenVD]

You will see, Marijn. Something will show up tomorrow...

[StevenVD]

The airwing won a silver medal at the BSMC 2018 contest in category "naked kit" in masterclass.





In total I won 4 medals today, thrice silver and the bronze for the 8-Rad you see near the Princeton.

[Dan K]

Congrads! Beautiful work.

[StevenVD]

Thanks, Dan! In this update, I decided to finish the spraypainting of the airwing completely. If I did that, I would be able to close down part of the ship and continue work on the exterior. I had to prepare for some excruciating masking jobs, so the right paints had to be provided.





For the white on the bottom of the tricolor scheme I used Tamiya. Intermediate blue was done in Vallejo, as the GSI Creos counterpart seems to have fallen off the catalogue, with about 20 adjacent colors. Mr.Hobby Midnight Blue will go on top. Vallejo Interior Green was used for the tiny cockpits.

The planes in Sea Blue, pointed out by Tracy earlier, are done in Tamiya. The fragile L'Arsenal planes and most of the Trumpeter Hellcats will be comprised in this easier to paint group.







The resin yellow soon gives way to a smooth blue coat.





Then, the other ones are sprayed white.





Now the mainstay of the work is undertaken. To do the masking, kneadable gum is preferred because it's less destructive for the undercarriages and the paint layer than tape. Notwithstanding some legs or doors came off, mainly because of the weird Trumpeter black unweldable plastic. Eventually, after some corrective spraywork, most planes seemed identical.









I left the cabins open so as not to disturb the carefully administered sticks and seats inside. It wasn't hard to mask the surroundings.











Here you see the results from different angles. Two Avengers and one Hellcat went on hold without paint on them, to get to a more realistic number of planes.

















After these pictures I took out the fine paintbrushes. Soon, the decals can be tested too.

[StevenVD]

Work on the planes wasn't over yet. I found a nice picture from a Princeton Hellcat to illustrate the next steps.



http://www.flugzeuginfo.net/acdata_php/ ... f6f_en.php

You can see the beak, the prop with its yellow tips and the white wing interior areas. Some of these details, like the wheels and grey engines could be pencilled on.





I should have realised that a cavity like on the bottom of this container leads to overspray. That needed some respraying.





Now the props were teaching me a lesson.



They had to be cleaned by polishing away the attachments. Only, the turning direction of the polishing stone had to be respected for every edge of the prop. Only after some had been knocked out of their triangularity, I got that right.





Above, WEM and L'Arsenal F6Fs, next WEM TBFs.



The right pitch I got from looking at some pictures.



The tips were first prepared with white primer and then sprayed yellow. The props are stored on a wire.



Resin canopies were painted blue. Now let's have some real fun and go for all those pretty decals.





With 17 Hellcats en 9 Avengers, there are a lot of roundels to be applied. Trumpeter is not useful in this option because it has an undersize design of star roundels and didn't take the precaution to join the three parts to one roundel. If I also used some of the early red bar examples, I could rely totally on the Dragon decal set. I assume that by the time the all Sea Blue livery appeared, all red components were removed from the three color planes' roundels because of the risk of being engaged by confused AA crews looking for Hinomaru dots. Therefore I used as much decal 25 without red bars, but I still needed them for 6 planes. Though the combo with overall Sea Blue doesn't exist, I decided to rather put the red decals on the less visible L'Arsenal planes in the hangar. I also removed as much of the red bar as possible with a pair of scissors, as a blue bar on an overall blue plane melts in the backgrond. The two Dragon Hellcats have them on the underside, also hardly visible facing the deck. I had no cat face decals for the 5 resin planes, but these have a useless cowling front opening aniway, competely cilyndrical without the oil cooler.

















On these pictures, some problems with the tail roundels appear. I will retry to apply them using some restraint. For the airplane numbers, I still have to double-check on what was mentioned by Tracy earlier.

[gtbred]

Outstanding work on the air wing.

[marijn van gils]

Great work on the airwing Steven!

Did you use decal softener, like Microscale Sol (the 'Set' is not really necessary)? That should make those decals sit down more snuggly, and will help a lot to prevent silvering too. Normally, you should still be able to use it on the already applied and dried decals at this point. They should get soft and start wrinkling, but pull straight again when drying. But test on a less important piece first to make sure...

[StevenVD]

@Gtbred: thanks!

@Marijn: thanks for the tip, but to no avail do I often use sol. I was looking for a more aggressive product, but even at ESM I couldn't find the Daco Strong I had in my hands a few years earlier and didn't take. But no worries, I found a better solution. I rolled some gum around the decals in question while they set. All of them are now level. I penciled a lot of detail too, like the props and the panellines on those planes that didn't have them. The plane numbers were added at random, but for the few Hellcats and the one Hornet Avenger that could be identified. I repeated the numbers on the Avenger cowlings. Now I can finish off the 5 Hellcats in resin and continue the ship's build.

























I know the red roundels are wrong, maybe I'll try to cover that a bit with pencil and Sea Blue.

[Dan K]

Impressive airwing and production. It looks like you received a gov't wartime contract.

[Surfsup63]

I love the work you have done on the Aircraft. The P/E looks great also.....Cheers mark

[StevenVD]

Thanks for commenting! I was ordered below decks now to paint the hangar walls white.



Masking was not easy but by spraying from three sides I got everything.





The ceiling is painted too, if it's not easy to see.



After unmasking it was clear that I could move on with the elevators now.

[Tracy White]

Yay progress!