rcweir

Thanks.  Yes, it is big - about 39".    It'll be kind of a puzzle what to do with the next one I make that's that large.

The kit was from a company named Tehnoart, based in Riga, Latvia.  They're now out of business but for a few years produced some amazing kits.   The kit I used for the Peary was actually "#13" out of a limited run of 12.  As best I can tell they produced 7 or 8 commercial kits of which two were relatively high volume:  1:192 kits for Sumner and Gearing class destroyers  (I built a Sumner one before the Peary).    

Are you building a Houston?

Bob

Thanks for the compliments.  Peary is important to me:  I served on the 3rd Navy ship named after Robert E. Peary and intend to make models of all three.   I did FF-1073 25 years ago.  DD-226 here was finished recently.  Sometime in the future I'll do DE-132.

The Technoart kit I started with was a fiberglass/resin/brass kit they advertised as USS Ward and the kit as supplied would build what a typical Clemson looked like in the early '30s (in my opinion).    By 1941 there was a wide divergence in how they all looked.   So the challenge I ended up with was to choose a date and build the model so that it matched the way that Peary looked on that date.   I chose October 1941 because that month she collided with USS Pillsbury on maneuvers and had to go into the shipyard for repairs.   The war started before those repairs were complete and she was sunk in Feb. 1942 with no chance to ever have more than bandaids for the accumulating damage.

Information that I could find on her appearance in those months was more than nothing but I still ended up making some guesses that aren't going to all be correct.  Like the paint scheme or the absence of the fantail 3" AA gun.