wglasford

I ran up against the first parts of the model that don't fit correctly, the anchors.  I had to open up the holes in the deck a bit with a drill and carve out the hole from below to get the the shaft to fit.  The anchors were modified a bit to get more angle to them.  Note that the one in front was the extent of the angle with the one in back has been modified.

Got some blue paints today and mixed up a few possibilities.  I ended up with XF-50:2 XF-8:2 XF-2:1 which gives a dark grey blue, but not so dark the black line is lost.  I now need to paint the upper part of the bow a light grey and start some weathering.  

I have started painting the hull.  The band above the waterline is supposed to be a dark navy blue for the WWII era version of this ship.  The blue is so blue it gets lost with the black band.  I have found 3 builds on-line that all came to the same conclusion.  One guy painted this part a light grey, good for the modern version, but not the 1940s era ship.  Another was medium grey and another was a darker blue, but much lighter than navy blue.  Now waiting for 3 more blue paint jars to arrive... I was able to paint below the water line and added some subtle panel lines. 

Just finished making the 16 bitts, not bollards, my mistake.

There are always those decisions as to what order you add parts to the model.  I base my decisions on how delicate the part is and how accessible the area will be later on.  In the case of the stern ladder it is a no brainer given the size of those little rungs and how accessible the stern will be later on.  I will add this detail much later in the build.  

As I am waiting for paint to arrive I have been looking forward, planning the next steps.  I see where Pontos and Trumpeter disagree on the placement of the forward bollards.  Sure enough, I need to remove plastic from the deck to get them to fit.  

 I found this idea on another site, you don't have to glue the main guns to the deck.  You can get them to swivel by gluing a magnet to the bottom of the gun and glue a fender washer under the deck.  I did this before the decks were glued on.  BTW, the decks fit perfectly.  No trimming or Bondo needed.  

I added the hull plates using leftover styrene strips.  You can see I used .010" x .188" strips cut down to about 2mm wide.  The longer ones are 7mm long and the shorter ones are half that.  First I drew pencil lines every 35mm along the hull, using those lines to position the long ones.  I then made a jig to place on the long ones and the top deck edge to draw an angle positioning mark for the smaller ones.  Each side took about an hour to complete.  

After gluing together the hull I oil canned the sides.  With a model this large you want some realism and not large smooth sides.  I included pictures of the original oil canning bow and stern.  To accomplish this I drew grid lines on the model with a pencil and then used a large curved Exacto blade just like a cabinet scrapper, adding a burr to the blade.  I like the effect with the lines sanded off.  Once I start layering up the paint it will be a subtle detail.   

I chose this model because I built the USS Constitution, what I consider to be one of the first US battleships and this is the last US battleship.  I strive for museum quality construction so I needed a model with plenty of add-on kits and large enough to show the fine detail of the ship.   In addition to purchasing the kit itself I purchased the following:

1) Pontos 23002F1 - which includes the wooden deck.

2) Pontos 21002F1 - which includes the bofor detail.

3) Eduards Part 7 - which I got specifically for the air intake grills.