The Ship Model Forum

really pushing it hard Ryan!

Good golly Miss Molly!!!! She's looking beautiful man! Glad to see my photos are helping. Keep it up

Ryan,
Can you post some pictures of the LED lighting and how you routed it? Looking beautiful bud!

-Blake

Thanks guys, and Cliffy, yep, your pictures have helped a ton!

Warty, I was away form my computer, I hope you got the e mail I sent.

Anyways, as for the routing of the LED's here are some shots. Since I only did the one section of hangar, I removed a bunch of the lights from the string. I have one left that will be used to illuminate the fiber optics later on. spliced on a longer length of wire to connect the lights to the battery pack, run the wire out the bottom of the hull, then eventuall through the keel block and rout a channel in the underside of the wooden base. I connect it to the battery pack which I keep on the outside of the case, so the top of the case never has to be removed to change batteries or something, lessening the chance of damaging the model.

I scratchbuilt the 3 Sea Sparrow launchers, I think these are really close to accurate, not quite 100%, but pretty damn close. Each Launcher has 27 individual parts!

The aft radar mast was a project in itself. It is a combo of WEM, GMM, and Scratch. Each of the brass sets has good points and bad points, so I took the best from each, then added some bits of styrene to make it more accurate.

just a great build.

nice, im sure that it gonna turn up great:)

As a request of the commission, I have lightly weathered the flight deck. He wants the deck to look as it did when she came out of the yard for refit and had undergone "CQ's" with the airwing. I have a little more touch up and smaller weathereing areas to do, but it is nearly done. I am going to add just a little more wear and tear to the area between the 4 wires, but that should be the last of it. I have not overcoated it with flat yet, so the finished product will be a little less weathered than you see in the pictures, since the pressure form the airbrush will blow away some of the pastel powder. I used a combination of artist's oil paints thinned way down to coat the whole deck to take a little of the "brightness" away, then the pastel powder to more heavily weather specific areas.


I was going to paint all of the deck markings this time just to do something different, but because of all the issues I have been having with paint and primer pulling up on this kit, I decided to use the kit's decals where ever I could. I still had to paint all the "foul lines" and did encounter some of the pull up issues even with my new low tack tape.

The 49 radar tower is complete, as I stated earlier, it is a combo of what I deemed to be the best and most detailed parts from both the WEM and GMM sets, along with some styrene scratch bits. This tower is a kit in itself.

I finally got ahold of the cruise book from this specific deployment, so I was able to place teh correct awards on the island. Using the photos in the book for a scale comparison, it seems that my 2 options for the awards were both a little off as to their size. It looks like the smallest awards are about 20-25% too small, and the next size up looked to be 20-25% too large. I decided on the larger awards after trying the smaller ones, and they looked way too tiny and had me squinting to distinguish one from another. I think these larger ones look much closer to accurate.

I can't believe I forgot to post pics of the completed hangar bay!

Well here they are, I finished this portion a couple weeks ago. This is by far the most accurate interior I have done to date, and I am pretty happy with this one. It is in my opinion very close to being accurate, I did not take any artistic liscense here, I matched everything as best I could to pictures of the actual hangar bay.


Also, I have just about finished detailing the hull and will be weathering soon. I added fiber optic lights in the unrep bays, I hope the effort was worth it when I actually light her up. I also added scratch built details to some of the unrep bays so simulate teh refuling stations, adn I painted them purple for the "Grapes" to ID them! I'll have to take some close ups later of these areas.

Really, really nice work.

You're doing an awesome job, love seeing your updates!

That is way Cool!!!

Thanks guys, and Kelly, given your recent build of this ship, I really appreciate that, I used your in-build pictures for a lot of trouble shooting.

Here are shots of the hull with light weathering, again per a request of the commission. I usually prefer to weather my builds a little more, but actually looking at close up shots of the HST in this timeframe, she had recently left the yard, and she was one of the cleaner looking carriers I have seen, so I suppose this level of weathering is accurate for the time frame.

I also took a few shots of the UNREP bays, the details are just random bits from my spares box that add a little visual interest.

Pending any additional request for weathering on the flight deck from the owner of this build, the flight deck weathering job is done and I flat coated over it.

Stealing Kelly Quirk's awesome idea of lighting the island lights, I attempted it and I like the results! On the port side "5" I probably should have used a few less lights, but it still looks good. The Starboard side fiber optics have not been installed yet, but I drilled fewer holes on that "5".

One thing I found that makes working with the fiber optics a lot easier, is that if you hold the end of the cable near a flame, it expands the tip into a larger round "bulb". This emits more light, AND makes it simple to install: Simply feed the un heated end through the hole you drilled, and once the "bulb" reaches the hole, it is too large to fit through, so you have a prefect stop every time and just add a dab of glue to fix it in place.

I am going to make lighting the hangar and island #'s a standard on all of my future builds, can't wait to try it on the Wasp!

Small update:

I tinted the bridge windows with a thinned down mix of tamiya clear blue, as this is how they are on the actual carrier. The pics show how it will look IF my attempt at lighting the island's interior works. I just held an LED flashlight under the bridge to see how it looked for the pics. I will be adding a crew to the inside of the bridge, hopefully you will be able to see the Air Boss sitting up top in his yellow shirt keeping a watchful eye on the flight deck!

All the weapons have been painted, just need to add a little weathering.

Man how the Macro Lens picks up tiny errors that are invisible to the naked eye and makes them stick out like a sore thumb!

A very great work you've done here.

Looks very good from the carrier.

All I can say is "Wow".

Cheers,

CB

Thanks Gentlemen! I must say, I will be really sorry to see this on go, just as I was with the Nimitz. It seems all of my best builds are for others, and I always seem to have flaws on the ones for my collection. Hopefully I will change that trend with my completed 1/200 yamato.

I finished the lighting of the #'s on the island, I like the outcome of the starboard side better than the port, this is gonna be a really cool feature.

I also added some crew to the island interior, I kept it to a minimum for now to be sure I don't over-do the effect. I think it adds a little interest to the island, especially the air boss and the Lil boss up in Pri-Fly.

Finally I have completed some of the weapons sponsons and started detailing all of the catwalks. There are lots of little goodies that can be added to liven up the look of the catwalk; things like fire extinguishers, all the different colored hose reels, the ships' bell, saluting guns, and the list goes on. I think I have left the catwalks on all my other carriers pretty bare since I did not have good resources at the time. Well now I have plenty of good color pics, so I plan to cram everythign I can onto this one.