USS Missouri by Amphibious0311 - Very Fire - 1/350 - PLASTIC

[Amphibious0311]

Hello everybody. I’ve been building models off and on for 10 years or so and after a 4 year break I’m back with my first ship in 1/350 scale. I’ll be doing the typical new guy thing and going way above my knowledge and skill level incorporating resin, wood and photo etch parts in this build. 
 

 

starting first off with a nice bath to clean all the parts of injection molding left over and my finger prints.

 

 

i started off with the hull. Filling and sanding the seems and a small l spot where the sprue broke the hull, which appears to be common on this kit. 
 

 

the hull was inspected by the supervisor, Moose and given the meow of approval. 

 

I attempted to add the armor plates along the hull. At the time I thought .10 would be about right, but after the fact I realized they were too thick and not to scale. Live and learn. note: I made a booboo and got some stitches here. 
 

next I primed the hull and started working on the hull red using white ensign models Norfolk 65 hull red. 
 

I thought 14 hours would be enough time to dry or maybe it was just a bad primer spot, but I had some paint pull while doing the boot stripe. 
 

 

all fixed. 
 

while waiting for the paint to dry, I started working dry fitting the deck and working on some sub assemblies. My cat enthusiastically watched.

 

 

i took a moment to look things over and wasn’t super happy that there was paint lines from the hull red under the boot stripe so i used an #11 blade to scrape it down. I’ll touch this back up after the camo pattern is on. I also added some nuts for brass display stands. 

 

I got the deck mounted, primed, and started gluing down the wood deck.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[ccoyle]

Off to a great start! Except for the boo-boo, of course. 😬

[Dan Poirier]

The model is looking good, but ouch!

[Amphibious0311]

Taking my first stab at photo etching. I tackled some easy parts first to get a general idea on how to remove it from the sprue, sand it, bending and attaching it. It seemed to come out pretty well..
 

with my confidence at an all time high I decided to tackle something that 1: looked pretty intricate, and 2: could be easily replaced with resin if I royally screwed it up. I want to say these three parts took me roughly 8 hours to put together. I did accidentally put one of the catwalks on the catapult backwards though. I won’t tell if you won’t tell. 
 

 

next I decided to tackle something pretty easy just to feel like I was making progress while waiting for some stuff to come in the mail. I decided to go after the turrets. They’re not completely done, most of the turrets are just dry fit as I’ll be adding PE ladders after scratching off the molded ones and didn’t want to risk breaking off the gun tube or director shields. 

 

painting has never been my strong suit, and I’ve decided to paint this, probably the most difficult pattern she ever wore. I used pre-cut deck stencils to scale the original naval paint drawings to proper size so that I could create my own masks. After one pissed off girlfriend, 1 trip to target to get more ink, and 33 test prints. I got what I believe is the drawings to a 1:1 scale. 
 

I then at this point printed all of the drawings from the naval archive, trimmed them down and tape them together.

 

Once again asked the quality control man for his approval. 

 

I decided to start with the deck, in my head, it seemed like the logical place to start as I’ll be able to double check the pattern on the side to its corresponding location with the pattern on the deck to make sure that I’m roughly in the right area. I started by laying down the wood deck using MiG ultra glue. 
 

 

 

After what felt like an eternity masking…

 

 

While waiting for the wood to dry, I went ahead and started tackling, making the masks so that I can begin painting the pattern on the side.

 

 

This is where it currently sits. It’s been about 26 hours since the deck was finished being painted. 

 

 

Edited Friday at 08:52 PM by Amphibious0311

[g8rfan]

Awesome job so far, can't wait to see the rest of it. I have a special fondness for this ship, as my grandfather raised the commisioning penant when she first went into service. Glad to see someone giving her the attention she deserves. 

[king derelict]

Looks very good so far. The PE looks quite daunting but you are doing a great job with it.

alan

[Canute]

Like your work masking the deck. 👍  And your PE catapult and crane are "the cat's meow". 

[Amphibious0311]

There’s definitely a learning curve here for my next ship. I think next time I’ll tackle the camo before mounting the deck.
 

i sprayed the 5L last night, got the masks in place and just finished spraying the 5O. I really want to get the black sprayed tonight, but I’ll most likely wait till tomorrow afternoon to mask over the 5O and get the black down. 

[Amphibious0311]

Wanted to make SOME progress, so I tackled the PE ladders on the 16” guns. They really didn’t like sticking and it resulted in a lot of excess ultra glue. Thinking regular CA would have been better here as I’ll now have to somehow try to clean up the excess glue. 

[Winnie]

It's easier to clean up ultra glue than CA if you do it while it's setting. Dip a tamiya micro cotton bud in water and wipe away. but it may be easier to use medium CA glue. That is the part I find most annoying on model ships.... Gluing the parts without making it messy.

 

Your work on the paint is just perfection, but be careful of taping the wooden decks!

Edited 8 hours ago by Winnie
Added comment on paint

[Amphibious0311]

3 hours ago, Winnie said:

It's easier to clean up ultra glue than CA if you do it while it's setting. Dip a tamiya micro cotton bud in water and wipe away. but it may be easier to use medium CA glue. That is the part I find most annoying on model ships.... Gluing the parts without making it messy.

 

Your work on the paint is just perfection, but be careful of taping the wooden decks!

I shall give that a go. It was great while doing the semi larger parts but these ladders man….

 

and thank you! I’m definitely a little nervous about the tape on the wood decks. I’ve started assembling some of the super structure to get in place so I can mark out the power levels and get them painted so I can remove the tape to avoid damage. It’s a little annoying that the lower levels are molded into the deck on this kit and having little experience with ships it’s left me thinking about the order I put things together. 
 

 

with that said….. I just finished painting the camo on the hull. Some smalls spots I’ll need to touch up from not burnishing the mask as well as I should have left some smalls spots with a smidge of over spray. I know the boot stripe area looks pretty bad, but I was planning to back and redo that anyways to correct the previous paint line issue. 
 

for the most part almost everything lined up where it was supposed to and I think I’m pretty happy about the way it came out.