Trumpeter 1:350 USS Essex Late WW2 Trim

[Dazed]

I will partally agree on the real thing. The Hornet only has you and maybe a handful of people cleaning/spot painting. A active carrier has a boatload of deck apes whos only purpose is chipping paint. Now below the deckline/anywhere they have to hang over the side the ship will get rust streaks. But once they get in port its over the side chipping and painting.

As for the model. Its a presentation/Builders model. Suppose to be spotless

https://pilotonline.com/news/militar...249d34da2.html I thought they were changing paint to ease manpower cost and improve efficiency on many fronts.

[Builder 2010]

Have to agree with Gun on this one. Museum models are rarely weathered. They are almost always pristine. Most captains take great pride in the condition of their vessels and when steaming from one engagement to another there's 3,000 people that need something to do. Idle hands are the devil's playground, so keeping a warship in shipshape condition is the norm, not the exception. My model will have occasional rust, but not "weathered".

Here's what I'm talking about.



Even the anchors get taken care of. Wouldn't like that job though...

[Dazed]

Have to agree with Gun on this one. Museum models are rarely weathered. They are almost always pristine. Most captains take great pride in the condition of their vessels and when steaming from one engagement to another there's 3,000 people that need something to do. Idle hands are the devil's playground, so keeping a warship in shipshape condition is the norm, not the exception. My model will have occasional rust, but not "weathered".

Here's what I'm talking about.



Even the anchors get taken care of. Wouldn't like that job though...

That photo is a profile in Cal OSHA/OSHA work place violation. The harness and flotation device ok but no hard hat goggles or respirator.

[Builder 2010]

That was an interesting article on painting! I wondered about painting where the welding was going and then got to the paragraph about taping the weld areas so they didn't get painted. There's still some touch up that would be needed to paint the weld beads themselves.

The PE was ordered from TotalNavy.com, a comprehenisve website with lots of materials, paints, and PE for ship modeling. I ordered the GMM full Essex set, a fret of Eduard 1:350 WW2 Carrier Naval figures, and some brass display pedestals.

Today's work was a potpouri of various activities. Started out by finish sanding all the filler on the port side that was added on Firday and added some more today.



I'm reasonably happy with how the filling turned out.

I want to light the hangar deck with LEDs so some of today's work was to prepare the hull for this. Much of this has to be done ahead of time or you're out of luck.

AC adaptors make great power supplies for LEDs and we all have a load of them in drawers of old cell phones and computer junk. I found another AC adaptor in a drawer upstairs in the office yesterday when I was getting our 2018 files sorted out. It was a 4 - USB port which no longer has any purpose since everything in the house runs on WiFi. The adaptor was 5.0 VDC and 2 amps so it could drive a pile of LEDs. I'm going to use an LED driver chip which takes any voltage input from 5 to 90 volts and outputs a 20 ma current that's directly able to drive a string of LEDs without the need for currect limiting resistors.

I liked that the adaptor had a mini-power plug and the Belkin USB device had the female socket. I took the unit apart and de-soldered the socket from the circuit board and scraped the board. I then cut a rectagular hole in the bottom of the hull to accept this socket. I traced the socket's perimeter, opened it up with the carbide router, and filed it to final size for a snug fit.

I needed to find out which socket leads were what and powered it up and measured the voltage. The center lead is +, and one side lead -, the other lead was dead so I cut it off. I now won't have the chance to wire it backwards.

I CA'd the socket into the hole and then glued some additional support around it with styrene. The socket had two little plastic alignment pins that I left on siince they acted as stops and positioned the socket nicely in the hole.







With the power input in place I needed to plan on how to get the wiring into the hangar deck. The lights are going on the ceiling so the wiring had to come up in a way to get there nicely. I drilled an 1/8" hole through the large structure that sits under the island and then continued drilling through the hangar deck below. I needed to then install a tube between the two holes so the wiring would be easy to thread. I cut a piece of 1/8" brass tubing and CA'd it into place. So that part is now done also.

[Builder 2010]

Next up was modifying the foward port-side sponson to become the new double 40mm gun emplacement. I was really glad that the sponson was already in the kit since it's a tricky attachment since the hull is not vertical so far forward. I was able to cannibalize a gun tube from my 1985 Tamiya Missouri which has been steadily being stripped of all usuable components before going under the scraper's torch.

I cut segments of the tub to glue to the sponson edges. I then used some 0.020" X 0.188" Evergreen stock to form the rest of the sponson edges. I first used solvent cement and CA to better secure the walls. Lastly, I mixed up some J-B Weld 5-minute clear epoxy with a load of Micro-balloons filler to create the blob on the bottom that I'll shape to the curved bulge that mades up the transition from the gun tub edge to the sponson's flank.



The gap between the hull and the hangar deck was too large for my liking and the PE railing was going in that area. So I filled it with some styrene and then added some filler.



While all this was curing I got back to work on the fantail adding some more bulkheads. I scraped off Trumpeter's molded-on doors and added some more open Eduard PE WT doors. I'm noting that the Trumpeter doors are a bit oversized, so there will be a difference between the PE doors and the model's.



I ended the session putting these parts onto the ship. I also finished sanded the filled fantail areas. I have to be careful going forward since there's a ton of PE that goes into the fantail. I don't want to glue in solid plastic only to find out when the PE arrives that it's got to be pulled out.



Since I'm adding two more 40mm emplacements that weren't in the kit, I pulled these off the Missouri too. These are the last non-damage 40s from that ship. I used a bunch of them when building the good Missouri. The screws in the pic are the ones from that USB hub that gave up its socket for the project.

[Gun Grape]

Wow, your beating this thing into submission. I know the quality of work you do. If this thing requires you to use so much filler its got to be a bad kit.

Alliance Model Works makes some really nice 40mm mounts. I used them on my Fletcher. Got mine from Sprue Brothers. Now about the only place I buy on-line. But the don,t carry GMM. Fot that I go to Freetime Hobbies.



Does Total Navy really take up to 3 weeks on PE orders? 3-5 days was the longest I've waited for an order from SB or FTH.

[tbm3fan]

I will partally agree on the real thing. The Hornet only has you and maybe a handful of people cleaning/spot painting. A active carrier has a boatload of deck apes whos only purpose is chipping paint. Now below the deckline/anywhere they have to hang over the side the ship will get rust streaks. But once they get in port its over the side chipping and painting.

As for the model. Its a presentation/Builders model. Suppose to be spotless

Ok, for a presentation you are right.

As for a actual carrier my experience on the Kitty Hawk, Connie and Ranger on various Fleet Weeks showed me reality was different. When last on Connie I spent more time wandering the ship looking at details and noticed simple stuff such as rusted through stuffing tubes on the flight deck perimeter. When I questioned sailors about it I pretty much got a shrug. Actually when it came to clean ships I would have to say the Canadians and Japanese have it over us as their ships, at a Fleet Week, were immaculate. Unlike your average visitor I always look into the nooks and crannies which can drive some people crazy.

After some of the issues coming out of the Seventh Fleet concerning ship maintenance I wonder if anything has changed.

[Builder 2010]

Yessir, I am beating it to a pulp. I never let a model get the best of me. Early Trumpeter products are a challenge. Those are nice 40s. What scale? I know that Tom's likes to do some cute stuff, but at any scale smaller than 1/72, diamond plate really isn't viable. TBM, you better not come and inspect my shot. You won't even have to look in the nooks or crannies.

Again and day of jumping around between areas of effort. It started with filing and sanding the gun tub/sponson mod to give it a reasonable contour. In looking at the print, the rail needs a dip in the center of each curve. I measured the pin on the Missouri's 40mms, set off the distance where the center should be, and then drilled with a #44 drill (after using smaller pilots). After the initial sanding, I slathered on some Tamiya Filler and after drying, sanded it again. When I was satisfied I used solvent cement and medium CA to glue the sponson in position.



You'll also notice that I drilled out all the portholes with an apropriately sized drill. First I tried it with a pin vise and then chucked the drill in the flexishaft and went at it.



While the filler was drying I went back to work on the fantail. Much of the middle deck was so obscued with overhanging decks, etc., that I realized that railings, ladders and painting would have to be done now. I don't have the new GMM PE yet, but had some railing stock from the 1986 when I built a Tamiya USS Enterprise with my first PE addition ever. Those old rails are clearly less delicate (or prototypical) than GMM's current production, but buried way under the flightdeck tail, it will serve the purpose, and, more importantly, it let me keep building while waiting for supplies to arrive.



I had a little Life Color Navy Blue and Deck Blue left from the Missouri build. I'm concerned that the Navy blue is not blue enough and, in fact, looks suspiciously like the deck blue. I used it, but don't know if I'm going to have to repaint when I get the ModelFlex Navy Blue.

My first decision was what color to paint the undersides of exposed decking. I've read that white is used in some of the camoflage schemes, but I'm not sure what is used on Measure 21 (all Navy Blue on vertical surfaces). I had to brush paint this part which is the 3rd deck and nestles deeply under the flight deck.



I also had some Eduard inclined ladders left over so I was able to bend them up and install them on the two deck ladderway. Unfortunately, the distance to from the middle deck to the upper is longer than the distance from the lower to the middle and my Eduard ladders were a couple of rungs too short. I also had some very old GMM ladder stock (at least I think it was ladder stock) which I folded and use in the starboard side upper ladder. It looks different and much less elegant than Eduard's, but it's in a difficult to see space and will work okay. If I post the pic in the FSM Reader's Gallery, I'll be sure to photograph it away from this errant ladder.



These close up always show up places that need touching up. I'll do that tomorrow. There are many more parts that can be assembled prior to getting all that PE. I've looked at GMM's PE instructions to see what interactions there are and what I can and can't do yet if I don't want to paint myself into a corner, so to speak. One more word. Brush painting sucks! I thought about air brushing this tail end, but had so little Navy Bluie that it wouldn't work. All the defects I see are a result of not air brushing. I will rectify this going forward.

[Gun Grape]

Yessir, I am beating it to a pulp. I never let a model get the best of me. Early Trumpeter products are a challenge. Those are nice 40s. What scale? I know that Tom's likes to do some cute stuff, but at any scale smaller than 1/72, diamond plate really isn't viable.

1/350
http://store.spruebrothers.com/product_p/amwnw35029.htm

http://store.spruebrothers.com/product_p/amwnw35030.htm

Their 5/38 are nice also when you get to that portion and decide you don,t like the kit guns. I used them to replace the guns on my Dragon Gearing


White countershading was authorized with MS21. Your good there. Deck Blue 20-A and Navy Blue 5-N are very close. But deck blue fades faster.

I admire your perseverance. I would have put her on the "Shelf of Doom" by now.

I use to prefer brush painting. It just took to much time to get the paint mixed right, then clean-up. That was in the enamel, and early acrylic paint days. And a Badger 200. Now days, once I found a paint brand that I like and is easy to work with, change colors and clean up about the only thing I use a brush for is decal work

[Gun Grape]

The underside of the port elevator isn,t countershaded. Its Navy Blue. To reinforce the similar shade of 5-N and 20-A take a look at some destroyers in MS 21. The tops of the gun mounts are 20-A, sides 5-N

[Builder 2010]

Gun, I looked at Aliance's offerings on the 40mm, 5" single and double emplacement kits. There are only four doubles and four single 5" guns and 8 - 40mms so it wouldn't break the bank to do it, but the Trumpeter guns aren't bad and the GMM PE set includes a lot of goodies to enhance them. Missing are the commanders' hoods for the top of the twin 5s, but I have them left over from the Eduard Missouri set. So I'm going to see how they build up and then decide if it would be worth the $$$ to upgrade. Also, looking at the kits, there's some very small finicky parts to deal with, which I not really looking forward to.

I started putting on the remaining gun tubs on the sponsons, but before doing do, scraped off more molded-on WTDs and continued installing my own. It's a four-step process and goes something like this. I use a dividers to figure out a hole spacing for the extremes of the future door opening and mark this location. I drill the two holes with a 0.032" carbide drill in a pin vice. I then mark an intermediate hole and drill that leaving three small holes.



I found that a #44 drill is the next size that opens the hole, but not too big so it gives me some stock to carefully remove to bring it to size. Sometimes the drill skitters off the center hole, but that's not a big problem.



With a sharp #11 I carefully trim out the interior of the hole to conform to the shape of the door frame. I occassionally hold up the PE to the hole just to get a final size.



If you're careful you can also remove some small amounts when the door is glued in.



I took the above picture with a piece of black paper behind to make in dark inside. Most of these doors are in blind spaces so nothing will be seen inside. In the real ship, whenever a door opened into the hanger deck itself which was well lit, there is a light labyrinth to trap light from getting outside when running dark. I'll build those for the model also.

I had to filled the edges where the gun tubs fit their respective sponsons. Again, early Trumpeter's require a lot of craft if you want to make a respectable model (by my standards anyway).

[Builder 2010]

I added the single 40mm gun tub and its associated director on the fantail. This part actually fit very nicely. I hand painted this also. In comparing deck blue and navy blue, the colors are almost identical with deck blue being just a tad darker than navy blue. I've read that the Modelflex colors aren't very authentic, I don't like Vallejo for airbrushing, and I can't seem to find Life Color in individual bottles (only in sets) and since I only need two of the colors and set doesn't work well for me. So I'm going to try and mix my own shade with Tamiya paints. I really like Tamiya best for airbrushing. I'm not color blind at all and do okay when mixing colors. I'll try with a very small amount to get the proportions and then enlarge the batch to the quantity I need. Navy Blue 5N is basically a very dark blue-gray. I start with medium gray, add the blue and darken it with black and see what happens.



In looking at the above C.U. I will have to do a better job on the deck blue painting.

Last thing I did was add the two 40 mm tubs on the startboard aft deck. The tubs were a no-brainer. I got one of the directors assembled and installed without drama. They're just a silly little two-part assembly. Then while removing the sprue nubs on the other director, it hit the floor, but I actually was able to see it land and try to get away.

I actually voiced "Aha! I've got you." (I often talk to myself when working). Then I was handling this director and it's little tub trying to get it perfectly centered and the darn thing hit the floor again, but this time it entered the quantum rift. GONE! Thought I saw it's trajectory, swept the area with a dust brush, crawled around on my knees in an ever-expanding search grid, but it was gone.

So I went back to my trusty old Missouri and popped one of the two similar director tubs that were on its fantail. An boy! Did it pop! It was very difficult to pry loose unlike other old glued parts. When it finally let go, I heard it hit the light fixture over my work bench then heard it ricochet onto my mobile work bench where I do a lot of the work. And sure enough, there it was right in the middle with a bunch of stuff around it. Whew! So I have one Trumpeter director and one Tamiya on that back deck. That Missouri is really starting to look like a ship that could be used for target practice.



The director's molding is difference, but no one, and I mean no one (except those reading this treatise) will have any idea, especially when the model is sealed off in a plexiglass case.

Just in case you're wondering or have forgotten how it is that I have all this excess Eduard PE after building a full-workup Missouri, it's becasue I had so much trouble with the Eduard parts breaking that they sent me another full set of four frets to use. As it was I did use quite a bit from that second set, but not all.

Eduard, like some other PE makers, etches the places where you're supposed to bend. The normal stock is 0.010", but it's half that at the bends. Being half-hard material, if it's bent more than once it can fracture. Some of these even broke before I got them off the frets. In some cases, more complicated bends fell apart in three or more pieces. There was some tricky railings on the Mo's superstructure that almost drove me crazy. Instead of being a single, nicely-bent piece, I was fumbling with sticking all these pieces on the model and trying to align the ends with stanchions with the three skinny pieces of brass sticking out where stanchions used to be. As a result, I like those companies that don't do this etching, but leave it up to me to measure and bend appropriately. It may take a little bit longer, but it doesn't break and therefore, takes much shorter.

You can anneal the brass to prevent the breakage (heat with a torch till it glows red and letting it air cool), BUT, and it's a big but, you now have a material that's so soft that it can't sustain its shape and this opens another hornet's nest of annoyance. (talking from experience here).

[Builder 2010]

I knew I had one more fret of Eduard Missouri PE that had some long railings on it, and finally found it. I was able to hack it up to get some very convincing longer rails to wrap around the fantial. The gun/director tubs break the rail in two. Eduard has opened the rails when they're opposed to deck chocks so I found chunks that did this for the Trumpeter kit. I had primed these rails a long time ago after dipping them in a vinegar bath to provide some "tooth" for good paint adhesion. I brush painted the Navy Blue after they were fixed to the deck. I also added a little chunk of rail on that stair well projection that sticks out of the starboard side. That may be a docking platform since this is the dock-side of the ship.



Notice how fine the Eduard etching is. It's one of their strengths. Here's the fantail basically completed except for the guns themselves. They will go on near the end. Because I have use more 40mms than included in the kit, I think I'm going to spring for the Alliance 40 mm kits. There are 6 per set and the model, I believe has 10 quad 40s including the two that I added on the sponson. This is a picture of the mount from Alliance. It's a terrific and very small model.



Added a few other details (a port side aft 40mm tub and the platform that holds the ships boat) and then started paying attention to the bow. Since I filled the hull/deck gap in the stern, I was now compelled to do the same for the bow. The framing structure under the bow seems to be unaffected by the GMM PE, so I'll be able to glue all that in and air brush it, once I mix my own version of Navy Blue.

Lots of scraping and sanding to get the filler so it was decent. I wanted to add real anchor chain since this model does not have any molded on chain detail. I found two sizes in my ship modeling parts box. They scale out to 35" links and 25" links. 25" is more close to the real size (I think) so I went with it.



I chemically blackened the chain a bit and then drill a couple of holes where the chain disappears into the chain lockers at the base of the foc'stle. The trunks that feed the chain down are rather complicated based on drawings in my Intrepid book.



Now all of this is rather silly since you will be able to see practically nothing of what's going on on the foredeck since there's major structure around it, and then it's covered by the flight deck.

Having both a Iowa-class battleship and and Essex-class carrier at hand led me to compare their architecture. The carrier is basically an empty box, almost like a big Winnebego, whereas the battle ship is crammed with very heavy stuff. As result, the two ships are almost exactly the same length: Essex=880', Iowa=887', but their displacements are very different: Essex=25,000t, Iowa=45,000t. Their drafts are very different too reflecting this displacement difference:Essex=22ft, Iowa=33ft. And their speeds and this one is really interesting: Essex-30knots, Iowa=33knots, but the power to get them there also varies: Essex=150,000 hp with four turbines driving four, 4-bladed props, Iowa=212,000hp with four turbines driving four props (5-bladed inboard, 4-bladed outboard). The Iowa's had the highest horsepower powerplant of any ship in WW2.

I drew a plan for the base plate and have asked some friends with a wood shop if they'll cobble it together for me. I can do my own plexiglass work, but if I can find a shop in town that cut the plexi for me, I'd really appreciate that, since scoring and cracking plexi, for me, is hit and miss. Overall dimensions are 34" X 8" with the plexiglass box inner dimensions 31-3/4" X 5-3/4". When I built the case for the Missouri, I bought a nice plank and added some faux-rope trim to the outside below the surface enough to make a lip for the case to sit over. The case has worked well with the model still perfectly pristine almost 6 years now.



Drew this up SketchUp and rendered with Podium.

[bbvet]

B2010,

Looks like your ESSEX is coming right along. Not to beat a dead horse here, but there is a whole sub-forum on the WWII era ESSEX class CVs over on The Ship Model Forum (http://www.shipmodels.info/mws_forum...hp?f=46&t=4802) in case you're interested. It's pretty extensive on various aspects of modeling the ESSEX in various scales.

I noticed your anchor chains and was wondering if you were aware of the stud-link chains that one of the 3D parts designers had available (at least, they had been available thru The Floating Drydock). Here are the chains installed on my NEW JERSEY model (yea, hard to actually see the stud between each link):
.
Here is a photo of the various scaled chains that are still available thru TFD:

I'm not sure which size works best for the 1:350 scale, but one of them probably would work. I used the largest since my model is 1:200 scale. I found that Tru-Tint black works well with the 3D plastic used in these chains - enamel and even acrylic paint doesn't work nearly as good. I use it full strength.

Hope this helps,

Hank

[Builder 2010]

Thanks Hank! That's nice chain! And the NJ looks pretty good to. Let's see more of it.

Since this chain is going to be buried in all the bow superstructure and fundamentally invisible, I won't be adding any more cost for this one. However, if I build a bigger Iowa ship I would definitely use it.

The 3D printed stuff they're now coming out with is quite something. Small scale stuff can't be produced well on the plastic filament adding machines, but there are different schemes (resin bath laser cured) that produce exceptional surface texture. They're making these things to produce models for the jewelry industry, but they're not cheap... not cheap at all.

I just went on that Essex thread. I believe I'd been on it before since many of my reference pictures were drawn from some of those posts. I've added my own comments on my Essex. I'm sure it's redundant since there's 117 pages. There weren't that many when I was reading it in 2012.