Thank you. If I remember to not be out of town on the contest date, I'm going to submit it this year. Maybe I'll have an Essex to go along with it. Not hearing any, "Don't waste our time on boats, I'll give you some more info. By all means, get started on that ship model.
I'm thinking that to bring everyone up to date, I could give the URL to the PostImage web site. I found this photo sharing site to be the most bulletproof of the free sites. No ads, fast up and downloading speeds, and reliable links to forums that require pictures from sharing services.
Here's the link. I think this site is open to the public.
USS Essex — Postimage.org.
If it doesn't work, please let me know. If it does work, it will at least get everyone up to speed on what's been done so far. I tested the link and it works. The images are listed chronologically with the first being the earliest.
Let me summarize. This is a rather old Trumpeter issue (2002) so it suffers from their traditional complaints; poor fits, lots of flash and ejection pin marks, and needing lots of filler to make a "ship shape" job of it. With lots of labor, it can be a very nice model. I believe late issue Trumpeter kits are much better as the Asian competition has certainly heated up making all the makers strive harder to make better kits.
I'm going to use as much PE as makes sense. For example: I bought Alliance Model Works (AMW) 40mm quad gun mounts with shields only to find out that they're almost impossible to successfully build in 1:350. I'm a decent model builder. If I'm not having much luck with something, it's probably because the parts in question are not very good. They etch 0.005" brass which is very thin to start with (Eduard use 0.010") and then they further etch the bend lines reducing the material thickness to less than a piece of paper. The end result is parts break on the bend lines without doing anything. I'm hoping the Gold Medal Models PE is a bit more robust. The AMW gun barrels were resin and they too are so fragile as to be almost unusable. They're sending me another set of them to replace those that broke during construction.
Like the Missouri I'm also going to produce all the masts and yards using brass. This is more secure, lasts longer and doesn't deform under rigging tension. Besides it's challenging and fun to make your own. What I'm not going to do is super-detail the hanger deck like I've see some builders do. It's almost impossible to view the interior. This kit does have some of the primary interior shapes so when painted white, it will look like a hangar deck. I'm going to light the interior with some LEDs so what is in there will show up.
I don't like heavy weathering, and want the model to be like an engineering model, not the player in a diorama. The Missouri has no weathering. Besides, just after a vessel is shopped, it's going to be pretty clean. On the trip back to Pearl, I'm sure that Captain had everyone spitting and polishing the whole ship above the water line.
Yesterday, I built the 5"38 Mark 38 twin gun mounts using scratch-built brass barrels. The Trumpeter barrels were too thick and I broke a couple necessitating making my own. Today I went on to build the island and finish up the bow area. Since it's all hidden by structure, it all needed painting now rather than waiting till the rest of the ship is painted. There is extra PE on these that was left over from the Missouri project 6 years ago.
In addition to the bow work, I mixed my own Navy Blue 5N. I used Life Color naval colors for the Missouri and liked the shading, but thought I only had a drop left so I played around with Tamiya paints to get a close match. It turns out that it's a dark blue-gray color, but needed a touch of red to get it right.
The center patch is the Life Color sample, and #7 was my last trial. Then I found a bottle of pre-mixed 5N left from the Missouri project. It needed some thinning, but still worked. I airbrushed the bulkheads this color and brush-painted the deck with Deck Blue. Deck Blue and Navy Blue are very, very close to each other with the deck blue being a bit darker. In the Missouri's measure 22, the Navy Blue didn't butt up against any Deck Blue so you couldn't see the similarity. In this case it looks like the same color being used in both places.
I built as much of the island as I can now before the GMM PE arrives (which I just found out will be early next week). I didn't want to paint myself into a corner by putting plastic in place that would block applying the PE. The stack and some small joints did require a little Tamiya putty, which BTW: is one of the best on the market being very fine grained and quick drying.
The last thing I did was install the bow flight deck supports. Since this is an aircraft carrier and will have aircraft on it, and since those said aircraft are WW2 Naval aircraft, that further justifies posting this thread on a WW2 Aircraft website (of so it seems to me). If you stare at this pic you'll see I put real chain for the anchors which will be effectively invisible when the flight deck and all of the detailed catwalks are installed.