1:72 Complete Iowa Battleship 16"-50 cal Turret with interior down to the magazine

[BertUS]

To get the round form into the sheet, try to use a doughroller (uhhh, .........searching for google translate, brb......Google said "rolling pin ???) but put a shirt or something on the table, put the sheet on it and rolling the sheet, you will see, the sheet will get curling

 

[Wurger]

 

[Vic Balshaw]

Seing a spray can against all these parts put a prospective on how small and detaied this build is. Just amazed.

 

[Gnomey]

Looks great so far!

 

[Builder 2010]

No one is more amazed than me… Everything about this project was a crap shoot from the get go. It's been 10 months and I'm just now getting to the point where it will start to look like something other than an explosion of gray plastic parts.

Got some suggestions for making that flat styrene round; using a rolling pin or heating in the oven. I was not going to attempt the oven. I've had bad experiences with heating styrene to bend it. It quickly goes from soft to a mess. I did try using a rolling pin over a soft substrate. Did not create any curvature at all. Ended up doing it the hard way.

First I needed to stabilize the various rings so I could get a test fit on the wrapper. I have a pile of 3/8" threaded rod left over from the Sikorsky S-38 restoration. I cut another annular ring and put them together on the threaded rod with some big fender washers. I immediately ran into dificulty with the 0.040" disc thickness. It was flexing all over the place and made wrapping thes sheet very difficult.

Regardless, I was able to test the wrapper fit and it was the right length. I actually figured out the disc diameter by dividing the wrapper length by Pi. That number still works! Using tape and rubber bands I got it to stabilize long enough to take a picture.

I added a splice plate on the squared ends of the wrap and glued it old school... I mean really old school using Testor's tube cement. I find this standby adhesive works well when you're gluing large surface areas. Liquid cements seem to evaporate too fast to get a good adhesion. Clamps insured that the joint stayed together during curing.

Because of the thinner sections where the cutouts are, the cylinder wants to turn into an oblate spheroid (football) shape, but the rings will force it to round out eventually.

While this was curing I got to work on the annual discs opening up the inside to create the actual ring shape. To establish the i.d., I first tried to trace the o.d. of the powder flat's lower edge, but the accuracy of this method was dubious. The ring needs to fit quite tightly.

Next attempt, I used the caliper to measure the diamter, split it in half and used a dividers to scribe an accurate circle. This worked well and after a tiny bit of shaving with a #11 blade, got an almost perfect fit. It was originally too tight and caused the thing ring to fold over.

After taking off the clamps and trying on the drum, I found that the 0.040" styrene ring didn't have the structural integrity to withstand the drum's springiness and it was distorting all over the place. Ergo, I can't use this thin stock for the annular rings. I'm transitioning to 1/8" Masonite which is much, much stiffer. The extra thickness shouldn't detract from the model. It will also provide enough lateral strength to retain the drum's shape when (or if) I decide to split the hemispheres for the clamshells.

I was originally going to use this piece of Masonite scrap, but I found some better pieces floating around the shop. The lowest ring has the cutouts and this piece will work for that one. Waste not want not... The only trouble with Masonite is the porosity of the cut edges. I have acrylic sanding sealer that, when applied in several coats, gives the edges a finished look.

Tomorrow's a physical therapy day again which will cut into work time.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Gnomey]

Excellent work so far!

 

[Builder 2010]

Thank you!

PLAN A: 0.040" thick annular ring. Failed due to too much flexibility

PLAN B: Cut annular rings out of 1/8" Masonite... nice and stiff, but a pain to cut and finish

PLAN C: Idea given by Dioramartin on Kit Forums to make the thin rings strong by using Evergreen structural shapes. Three times a charm. I have made many scratch-built items using Evergreen structural shapes and I should have thought of it. But... who cares. You take good ideas from where they come.

Using 1/4" Evergreen I-beam stock I cut a series of peices to stiffen the annular ring and then glued another ring on top of this making a completely stiff assembly.

I used a piece I was going to scrap for the bottom web leaving the perfectly fitting one as the top visible ring.

This was pretty cool since the 1/4" thickness put the ring's top level almost in perfect line with the floor level of the powder flat interior. Happy coincidence.

But there's a wrinkle! Two parts of the this ring have to be chopped off due to the truncated aspect of the #1 turret's lower end. This cut removes a significant part of the ring's inner structure and destroys some of its structural integrity.

To resolve this dilemma I added some more interal structure. This helped a bit.

After making the cut, you can see there's not much left of the old lateral I-beam.

An added web of 0.040" styrene restored some of the strength. I still had shape the web a bit to get it conform to the rings circumference.

The true test of all this work was putting the skin on it and seeing if it held shape. It did what it's supposed to do. When the other rings are in place the oblate shape will round out nicely.

Here's a side view of this assembly.

And here was a test with the truncated wall. Clearly, it will take a bit of finessing these flat walls to get them tight, but I have no doubt that it will look okay.

Getting this drum formed and solving the annular ring problem was huge for me. I really was concerned about this aspect of the build. I have to make two more ring sets for each projectile flat, but having a viable method takes all the angst away. I've left the settings on my two Starrett machinists dividers from the final ring i.d and o.d sizing so I'm certain that the additional rings will be exactly the same size, therefore guaranteeing that the drum will be perfectly cylindrical from top to bottom.

I also realized today that I did NOT make templates for the barbette portion of the outer drums. That and the extra material being consumed in making the additional annular rings created a stock shortage. I put an order for two more 12" X 24" sheets of 0.040" Evergreen Styrene. I ordered it from my wonderful local hobby shop, Scale Reproductions, Inc., even though he doesn't stock these larger sheets. I have a goal in flife to keep them in business. The model building community in Louisville, KY is alive and well.

Due to the strength and stability of the constructed rings, I feel more confident that I could go with the clamshell scheme.

 

[Vic Balshaw]

I'm glad you know what your doing, to much technical work for me with angles and shapes. I like my plastic joined to a strip of sprue ready moulded to shape.

 

[Wurger]

 

[N4521U]

Cracking work!

 

[Builder 2010]

Thanks Guys! I like building kits too. I also now like super-detailing, but it took my a long time to get up my nerve. And I now find scratch-building very rewarding, but I didn't start doing any of that until my mid-60s. I'm just hitting my stride at 77. For most of my modeling life (since my 9th birthday), I thought I didn't have the chops for scratch-building. Live and learn.

Worked on the second set of annular rings today, with a break to go to the hobby shop to pick up more 0.040" large sheet styrene. When he special ordered the large sheets for me months ago, he ordered more than I needed. He still had it and I bought more.

I measured the rings for the projectile flat, cut it all out and found that my i.d. was about 1/32" too big and wouldn't work. That's part of the reason why I was running out of my original stock. I remeasured and re-scribed. For the first of the two rings, I scribed the circumferences and then made radial scribes to faciliate snapping off the scrap.

While this works okay, it's a bit tedious and also leaves some inconsistencies that need to be sanded out. On the second ring, I realized that if I scribed the circles just a bit deeper, I coud snap the scrap out directly, leaving a much smoother and rounder edge. It also took 1/3 the time.

I also was being really anal and actually laid out the 1/6 spacing for the internal bracing. An absolutely meaningless exercise that will never, ever be seen by anyone. But it was fun.

To glue on the top piece I used some angle blocks to hold the edge in line. Liquid cement all the way.

I test fit the stack to see how it all aligned.

And then I fit the upper and lower annular rings into the drum and was rewarded with a nice rounded drum. I was almost tempted to glue it at this point, but it was very near quitting time and I didn't want to do anything rash. I've said it before, "I am not patient! I am persistent!" It's that persistence that has me doing stuff two or three times until I perfect the method, but I will screw up when I don't allow time for glue or paint to dry.

I've created the development drawings of the barbette pieces. I don't have a working CorelDraw any longer, and am not in a position at the moment to buy a piece of $400 software. I have Inkscape and MyDraw. Both are decent, but neither works for me to make full size templates on US Standard Letter Pages.

Coreldraw is simply the best vector drawing program I've tried. It does several things that really help. First, it enables you to move the ruler origin anywhere on the drawing page. It makes it so much easier to establish accurate guidelines when you can set zero at the edge of the object. It also enables you to tile prints that exceed the size of your printer's page. I can't figure how to do this in MyDraw at all, and in Inkscape you have to export pieces of the drawing as separate PDF files, which is a total pain in the butt!

I ended up printing a page scale image of the three templates with their 1:1 dimensions. Two of them are fully rectangular and will be easy to layout on the styrene. The other has a simple curve on top and bottom edges and I will work that out somehow. Corel also enables scaling very easily. I also have skill with Adobe Illustrator and found it too to be clunky and difficult to use.

 

[N4521U]

I've created the development drawings of the barbette pieces. I don't have a working CorelDraw any longer, and am not in a position at the moment to buy a piece of $400 software. I have Inkscape and MyDraw. Both are decent, but neither works for me to make full size templates on US Standard Letter Pages.

Coreldraw is simply the best vector drawing program I've tried. It does several things that really help. First, it enables you to move the ruler origin anywhere on the drawing page. It makes it so much easier to establish accurate guidelines when you can set zero at the edge of the object. It also enables you to tile prints that exceed the size of your printer's page. I can't figure how to do this in MyDraw at all, and in Inkscape you have to export pieces of the drawing as separate PDF files, which is a total pain in the butt!

I ended up printing a page scale image of the three templates with their 1:1 dimensions. Two of them are fully rectangular and will be easy to layout on the styrene. The other has a simple curve on top and bottom edges and I will work that out somehow. Corel also enables scaling very easily. I also have skill with Adobe Illustrator and found it too to be clunky and difficult to use.

What do you need? I have the old Corel 12 and do all my own decal art for a printer. I can't seem to do OB builds.
I have military fonts as well as Navy 45degree.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Builder 2010]

Thanks for the offer, but I do have CorelDraw 2017 installed on my MacBook Pro in a Windows partition powered by VM Fusion. it worked pretty well for four years. All of a sudden CD stopped being able to boot up. It would try and start and then nothing… I contacted both VM and Corel and neither could figure it out. Meanwhile, Corel finally created a Windows version of their CorelDraw Suite 2022. I will eventually buy it. After our Maui trip the cash flow has been negatively impacted. I'll have to be patient. I can also use Adobe Illustrator, but didn't want to have to pay their monthly rental. For the hobbyist, these rental programs are killers. I don't have a business to defray the costs. The software costs more than the models I'm making with it. I can understand their profit motivation, but for the user, it sucks.

 

[Gnomey]

Great work so far!

 

[Builder 2010]

In order to ensure that I can butt glue the tapered portion of the lower shell to the previously-built straight portion. I needed to have an adapter that combined the straight and angled portion which could provide more gluing surface. Enter the 3D printer. I drew a curved adapter on SketchUp matching the included angle. It printed in 1 hour and 15 minutes and was just what was needed.

I cut out the tapered portion from the newly acquired styrene sheet using the glued-on-pattern method I used before. I glued the joint plate on one side, but did not glue the cone together. I waited to do this until the cone was almost entirely attached to the straight section, thereby taking up the slack as I went along and adjusting as I went.

I used Gel CA to hold the adapters around the perimeter. The annular rings ARE NOT glued in, but later some thin CA did get down then causing a minor panic, since there's a lot of stuff to do before I permanently glue them in. I got it loose quickly.

I could really use some longer clamps to get down the wall's height a little better, but I made due.

Gluing started out at the back center and worked around both ways towards the joint section. I glued the piece to the adapters using thin and med CA while trying to keep the long junction as close in contact as possible. I glued that line with solvent cement. There will be filling and filing to do, but that's to be expected with pieces of this size and nature.

As with the other pattern-taken-from-SU-Unwrp and Flatten parts that I cut, there was a length discrepency here as well. In this case the flat part was short. To close this gap I'm filling it with some thing strips to better conform to a curve that would be difficult with such a narrow single piece. I can do wonders with filler and it will be fine. Besides, this is at the back of the model and will be covered by the upper barbette shell so it will be out of sight.

Just for fun, I decided to see how the roller track fit. This was a critical test and it passed with flying colors. The 3D printed part just dropped right where it was supposed to go. Amazing! The one dimension that I haven't tested yet will be the pan deck sitting on the roller track and how much room will be below it. In other words, will the interior stack line up as it's supposed to. I have absolutely no idea. It fit in the drawing... Hopefully it will fit or the shell would be too tall. I can fix too tall with some surgery. Too short would be a pain the butt...

Next session I'll do the exterior filling and sanding.

I also cut both layers of the top barbette. Again, I'm not so sure about their lengths either, but I'll figure it out. This thick barbette armored piece with be fabricated with an outer layer, 1/8" styrene spacers and then an inner sheet which, when all glued together and finished, will look like solid 14.75" inches of solid armor in 1:1 scale.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Vic Balshaw]

This construction is getting exciting, I've butterfly's of anxiety for you as I see it come alive.

 

[BertUS]

It looks great till so far, nice work. Waiting for the next posting