Egilman

Yep but I do believe that ocean waves count as well..... Thank you brother it's really appreciated....

Yes, normally the aircraft were polished and kept clean in 1/1 scale, in smaller scales light glinting off the surface would be completely disproportionate to the scale of the aircraft when your trying to depict an object.... Flat paint cuts the shine so when observed by the human eye it appears as realistic as possible... In real life some of them were actually painted in flats especially at the start of the war where a glint off a canopy or the spine of a fuselage could mean life or death.... So it depends on what your trying to depict..... in general, in smaller scales, flat paint gives a more natural finish to the eye..... But this is for aircraft.... tanks and ships were generally painted in flats even in real life cause a reflection or flash of sunlight could easily mean getting shot at.....

Gorgeous US Navy tricolor..... Beautiful.....

I think I'm done carving..... So let's see how close I came to the subject..... I think once I add the splashing action along the hull it going to be close..... Onward.... EG

Same interior color you used on everything else Brother....

Almost done carving... lets see what she looks like.... I think she needs to go a bit deeper especially at the stern.... Yep definitely, the stern need to sit down in the water more.... Onward....

No NO badges The pin reference was to "POP"as in balloon.... Agreed wholeheartedly... {chuckle} Correct brother, it protects the rudder pedals from interference from the bombardier as he leans in to operate the bombsights.....

Uh oh, where's my pin.....

Yeah, it is, but I see you got to it before I did brother... I'm slowing down in my old age.... {chuckle}

Well time for another update.... Getting all foamy here... (next time I'll do this first rather than assemble the hull first) Cutting the foam base... Checking size and presentation position At this point we go back out to the shop to fire up the torch, But the admiral asked a question about flammability of the foam and yes it is flammable if you get too close... So, she suggested that I try the heat gun which gets hot enough to melt paint off the wall and see if that would work better.... Anything is worth a shot for safety's sake..... {chuckle} Works like a charm in fact, easier to control than the torch as well.... (she does come up with a good one every once in a while, it's why I married her) The black marks on the foam are the ridge points I want to keep parallel and fore and aft marks for the hull so while I'm shaping the surface I can keep to the pattern I described earlier... go slow and steady and if it starts to deform to fast take the heat away, you want a gentle shrinking of the surface, too much and it becomes a globby unuseable mess.... The results.... Deeper in the middle slightly down at the bow and stern... looking good here... Now we have to insert the hull into the foam... Marking out the hull.... Carving, you will want a tight fit at first to get the shape right, eventually opening it up for a slightly loose fit for positioning later..... About half way there.... You can begin to see the effect the heat has on the smooth surface of the foam, it creates a rippled surface that looks like wave action. (but in scale) Once the hull is in the foam in the correct position, you can start to finish the foam surface off as a seaway..... Next step finishing the mount and detailing the seaway.... Onward..... EG

It's the rear bulkhead for the nose bombardiers section.... Circled in red....

Prayin for ya brother.... Hope you remain well....

I loved these kits when I was a kid, so much fun.... the only real problem was finding them....

Take a piece of the rubbery sprue and test it with some cooking oil see if it breaks down, if it doesn't use a few small drops to lubricate the bogies so the turn real easy....

That's the gear teeth to prevent track slippage, the taper is as you guessed to prevent track wander....

Originally an Otaki designed kit dating from '71, this is a reissue/reboxing from the '90's.... it's a very hard brittle styrene... feels very slick and stiff doesn't it? Neat kit, you gonna make her mobile Dennis?

Ok some history, when I decide to represent a specific scene I usually pick an image that represents what the subject is doing at that point in time.... This is the image I'm attempting to model..... We know the ships name and the date so we can do all the research and model the ship as to her condition and fit on that date, but what else does this image tell us.... The ship is traveling eastward, she is rolling with the westerly swell and the records tell us it's the North Pacific Ocean... You look at the line of waves behind the ship which are driven by the wind so the wind is coming in over the portside from the north... The beaufort scale tells us that the wind is probably 10-15 kts, sea state is force 5.....(choppy waves some whitecaps) The flag on the ship is standing out full in the breeze so she is doing at least 20 kts.... It's early morning given the sun angle and is shining full on her bow, that is what tells us she is on an easterly course as is the USS Sabine AO-25 in the background.... we know that is the Sabine cause she is in Ms. 11 overall Navy Blue paint.... That means this picture was probably taken from the USS Cimarron AO-22... The other destroyer you see in the pic coming about is a Sims class but too distant and indistinct to tell which individual ship..... This is Task Force 16.3 formed on the afternoon of April 17th when the Tankers topped off the Carriers and Cruisers and started their dash into the launch point. These ships are part of the Doolittle Raid group..... So what are they doing..... they have done their jobs and are returning to Pearl at approximately 15 knts.... Right now, the rest of the ships from TF 16, the two carriers Hornet and Enterprise, three heavy cruisers the Salt Lake City, Northampton & Vincennes and one light cruiser Nashville, are returning at 20 kts after launching the bombers from the deck of the Hornet and are approximately 700 miles to the east.... The rest of TF 16, the eight Destroyers; Balch, Fanning, Benham, Ellet, Gwin, Meredith, Grayson & Monssen, and the two fleet oilers Cimarron and Sabine are returning home awaiting the striking force to catch up to them. Now the scene, the ship is 350 ft long and is fully captured in the image... the frame length is 431 feet which means 42 feet of ocean on the bow and stern of the ship is also seen, this is our seaway.... The ship is riding the crests of two swells one the bow has just cut thru and the other just under the #3 5" mount the low spot between the two crests is right under the forward stack.... The depth of the swell is approximately 10-12 feet.. The crest at the #3 mount is about 2-3 ft below the main deck level and drops at the forward stack to below the boot topping probably showing a bit of hull red... In scale that is about a 5/16ths inch rise to the swell, it will be a bit higher at the bow when the stem throws the water aside as she cuts thru... Along the ship there is some foam and spray but not much airborne as this is the lee side of the ship. the swell is slightly angled to the bow off the ship probably 5-10 degrees to port...... The ship hull is just under 12" long measuring up 431 feet at scale gives me roughly 15" leaving me an inch and a half at bow and stern, I'll bump that up to 16" for a bit more surface..... The hull is a inch and a quarter wide so giving a scale I would need 5" of seaway beamwise for an angled presentation which is more attractive than square to the board so I'll set the width at 6" I'll cut a piece of foam at 16x6 inches to make the seaway.... Next up, firing up the foam cutter and then, lighting the torch.... EG

There hasn't been a current study that I'm aware of and if you look at the NHHC's site they are still running the same story they fed to the newspapers way back in '44.... as they say the victors get to write the history... (and spin up their less than stellar moments/little white lies/dirty little secrets) can't have the public knowing the truth can they.... (at least not until all the people who were participating are gone) All war planning today does the same thing, but it's much much easier to do today with the tracking and guidance equipment we have now.... Especially weapons delivery...... All the naysayer were claiming that we would be overwhelmed by hoards of soviet tanks coming thru the Fulda Gap, and from the early '50's thru the mid '60's that was for the most part true.... But since then not a snowballs chance in hell of that happening... (although the naysayers are still thinking up reasons that we will get our butts handed to us by the enemy)

Ours just drops them over the fence into the yard, sometimes we are lucky if they put them in a plastic bag...... Is it any wonder that amazon set up it's own delivery service? {chuckle} And, that is a good idea brother, I think I'm going to do that as well, getting tired of all this crap.... Thanks...

Very Very true brother, it was plain that the age of the "Battle Line" tactics taught before the war were dead.... The airplane was the death of the battleship... exactly as Billy Mitchell predicted in 1919

There is no doubt of that brother, the circumstances of the situation forced that.... I really wish this was so brother, unfortunately is isn't, Surigao Strait has a maximum width shore to shore of only 25 miles, on average it is ten miles wide.... The navigable channel is only 5 miles wide at it's widest. both side of the channel are too shallow for heavy ships to maneuver in but deep enough for destroyers to have a field day... 48 hours before the attack which we knew was coming, Oldendorf had the navigable channel mined and stationed his PT's as early warning (and they actually put a torpedo into the Abukuma) and destroyers into the unmined shallows creating a shooting gallery.... All that was left was to move his battleships into a cap over the end of a very narrow tube..... The only people who call this an example of tactical brilliance, the rarely accomplished tactical maneuver of "crossing the "T"" only understand the firepower enhancement establishing such a position brings. This wasn't Lord Nelson splitting the larger french battle line on the open ocean at Trafalgar.... This, (really sorry for this description) was more akin to the St Valentines Day Massacre or the battle of Wounded Knee..... Half his ships were lost to mines, and the Fuso, although claimed by the destroyers, the official US Navy history isn't so sure she wasn't lost to a mine as well..... No real way to tell the destroyers were firing their torpedos by radar plot cause it was a moonless black night and they never caught sight of the Japanese ships.... The same for three of Oldendorf's battleships, the Pennsylvania and Mississippi never fired a shot cause they couldn't locate a target with their optical gunnery system and the Maryland fired one salvo at the burning blowtorch that was the already destroyed Yamashiro... Oldendorf didn't cross the "T", he set up a killing field... Don't get me wrong, I would have done the exact same thing in that situation.... But the truth actually is, there was nothing heroic or brilliant in the battle at all and that is what the whole "Crossing the "T"" description tries to impart on it..... Look at it this way, aside for the exaggerated "T" argument used to describe the battle, what is the other glowing description used? Five of the battleships from Pearl Harbor were there...... the idea communicated is "Final Revenge for Pearl Harbor".... I point out another thing that doesn't make it into the common history, Oldendorf was sending out desperate pleas for help to Halsey who rightly estimated that he had sufficient power to handle Nishimura's small fleet without problem, so Halsey ignored him... UNTIL he received a message from Oldendorf that his OBB's were low on ammo!!!! (through extensive searching through records I don't believe an actual original written copy of this message has been found in the archives) Three of his OBB's were low on ammo the Tennessee, the California and the Wee Vee were low on ammo, he still had the Maryland, Pennsylvania and Mississippi that were fully armed combined having fired only nine shells in the entirety of the battle.... It's another one of those situations where the written public history doesn't fit the actual happenings.....the Battle of Surigao Strait was the hang a target at the end of the shooting gallery and see who can shred it first type things.... The official historians are trying to spin over the truth, Oldendorf doesn't get the credit for the doing what he was supposed to do and gets exaggerated credit for what he didn't do, and the message creates an aura of impending disaster that prompted and woke up halsey to the danger so he courageously sends all his fast battleships south to meet the enemy... (and cover up the biggest blunder of the war) Problem is even though the truth is now out there and is kinda well known, the public releases spinning the truth are what the newspapers got and spread far and wide burning that story into the public memory..... Sometimes I don't like being a historian, I'm always reminded that sometimes the hype becomes the history....

The company that makes it, (and ships it to me) has assured me it will be fine as long as it is kept cool. The real issue is can UPS keep it cool and they have assured me that they can, there are specific procedures they have to use when shipping meds and they've been doing it for decades... Unfortunately, their recent record of service forces one to question that claim... It's frustrating from the standpoint that the dispensing pharmacy called days earlier to make sure someone would be here to receive it and I was..... I was waiting on it all day... They didn't make much of an attempt to notify me that they were here. (none that my wife nor I am aware of) I'll be fine, I still have a two week supply of it (as of today) so if it gets delivered warm I'll have a chance to contact the issuing pharmacy and get it replaced.... But yeah, it sucks for sure....

I'm fine, it's just that is has to be refridgerated at all times before use, and I don't know if UPS can handle it... Guess I will find out....

Thank you very much Ed it is really appreciated....

Thank you Lou, it is very much appreciated... I'm taking my time on this one as I not only want it to turn out nice but I want to make sure I learn the stuff needed for the new tech these kits represent.... So you know what a torch does to styrofoam, I'm going to use it to create the base form of the seascape in the styro before I mount the ship, and will show the steps of the technique, it a really neat and simple way to do a non flat waterway... Working up the history right now will be posting it later.... Again I appreciate the compliment, it means a lot...