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

Looks great so far!

Thanks Guys!

I blog this build on three other forums. On one a reader asked about weathering and showed an image of a highly weathered piece of machinery. I answered his suggestion thusly:

This was a flagship, and I would guarantee that any time they weren't at battle stations, they were cleaning, painting and polishing. You can't use the images of the unrestored areas on an 80 year-old ship as a guide, You have to remember that the Iowas entered WW2 very late and they were effectively new vessels. Furthermore, Iowas were almost untouched regarding battle damage. Even the lone Kamakazi didn't do more than scratch the Missouri's paint. That said, I am going to use some panel accents to highlight some areas. The difficulty is the viewing angle. The decks are low and the eye lines into them are almost horizontal. Much of what I'm painting won't even be seen.

One last point... this is basically a teaching model, not a historical depiction. Most teaching models are pristine with no weathering at all.

I've finalized the display drawing that I will be printing out on a large piece of photo paper along with the key on another sheet. I originally was going to have SketchUp's shadow setting on, but it hid some of the details.



Between exercising (sciatica is still a pain... literally) and voting, I didn't have much time, but made it worthwhile. I stuck all the machinery to the paint board and airbrushed the neutral gray. I let it dry and then popped them all off making an impressive pile.



I then, using fresh masking tape, stuck all the structural doodads on the paint board and painted it all a much lighter shade of gray. The gray is darker than it appears in this picture. I also, using a cool holding fixture printed by my friend Ed Tackett, painted the remaining parts for the projectile hoists and the ladders that attach to them.





While these were drying I finished the shells with the red edging and then more touch up. This part is ready for installation of its attachments.



The only piece of machinery that I could not airbrush was the e-deck center section. This was a brush painting challenge due to the access. I got it almost all done. What's left is some small piping, the edging and retouching the white. Should the webbing around the bulkhead openings be painted a contrasting gray? Never getting into the e-deck or seeing a single picture of it, I don't know what color anything is.

I am also going to pick out the shafting with molotow chrome to make them pop.



The neutral gray was dry enough to pick out some of the brass parts. Again, I'm using Rust-oleum gold pen. There's a pump inside the tube. You pull out the wick, and using a small diameter round rod, activate the pump to push out some gold paint to use with a brush. This included the brass control quadrant on the projile hoists and the handwheels/seats on the Pointer/trainer stations on the e-deck machinery units. There are more details to pick out on the hoists.

I'd like to put some small arrow decals on the hydraulic piping, but YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO SEE IT! I did that in ALL CAPS becasue it is a certainty. I did that viewing test a while back and you see almost nothing.



Lastly, I got the rest of the cutaway edges painted on the e-deck and powder flat. That job was actually easier than I thought. I was contemplating having to find a red marker or paint pen to do this edging. Insteal I used one of those tiny makeup brushes that I buy from Amazon. They're about 8 bucks for 100. When they don't work right you throw them out.



This are moving more quickly now. I can actually see assembly starting in earnest by the end of the week. The New Jersey will be open during Christmas week and we may be back East at the that time which is a perfect time for me to deliver the model. I will definitely be done by that time.

Big job but oh my, what a build.

Thanks guys!

I had about 45 minutes before I had to leave for my PT appointment. I was able to continue picking out the details of all the machinery using the Molotow chrome mix I have. I left for the appt. and was one exit away on the expressway when I got an urgent call from my wife. She was out doing her 3 mile walk and had tripped and fallen at a piece of pavement that was misaligned. She was banged up pretty bad. I turned around, did 95mph on the highway and got to her in less than 10 minutes. We had our orthopedic surgeon son in law look at her right hand and it doesn't appear to be fractured. She hit her face and has a fat lip, bumped her knee and has some sore ribs. Ergo, there was no more model work today.

Here's all the machines with the tubing and shafts picked out.



And the same for the center section.



Hopefully, she'll feel better tomorrow.

I forgot to press Enter on yesterday's post (above), but here's today.

My wife is on the mend. She feels like she's been in a car wreck, but if 3 Advil make it feel better, she's not seriously injured. Nothing's broken (other than her spirit) and she will be back to her full, energetic self.

This is the face of the Ballistic Computer in the Officer's Booth. It's a complicated mess of dials and pointers that when set correctly, let the big guns hit what we want them to hit. There's one of these in each turret and then two more in the fore and aft plotting rooms. Lots of redundancy. I took this image at the Big J visit in July.

I scaled it to fit the face of the model computer that I printed, and printed out a sheet of them.



Here's the output. I don't have CorelDraw anymore, but have InkScape, which is also a vector drawing program. The nice thing about vector drawing is fidelity does not change regardless of how small or big you make the drawing.



It looks like there's nothing there, but the printer actually resolved something. Unfortunately, you can't see it with the naked eye. In other words I've actually created detail that isn't visible to humans without some serious magnification.

This is a close up of the decal. The details really aren't all that discernable, but there's something there.



Since you can't see any of this, I'm not upset by the distortion. It will be placed on this lovely little detail which I finished painting today. The decal is printed out on clear decal film so for any of the white details to show I needed a white background. Since it needed to be gloss anyway for good adhesion, I painted it with gloss white. I'll apply the decal tomorrow.



I completely finished the first batch of added details, the machinery ones. Lots of going back and forth with various colors to get the color breaks as good as I could. My hands aren't so steady... it's not age related. They never were particularly steady. Thankfully, my son's, the eye surgeon, and son in law's, the orthopedic surgeon, hands are steady as a rock.

The tops of the oil resevoirs that have that topknot are now brass. The cable reel that hoists the powder carts are black. I will use some E-Z Line to simulate the cable during final assembly. The center section is fully done and ready for installation into the electric deck.



I started painting the rear gun compartments. These are nice challenging model painting tasks. I printed the spanning trays way to thin... almost a scale thickness. And they kept fracturing at the junction to the thick part. I've reprined them, but didn't change the geometry, and I'm paying for it. I had to CA another break today and am a little squeamish about handling them for fear of breaking them again. If it breaks again, I may have to bite the bullet and redesign the cradle assembly to make that part more robust.

I'm starting with the neutral gray cradle body. The walls stay white which is why I painted them that first. It is really neat that all that piping is actually separate from the walls. Makes painting it more possible.



Last thing today was modifying the electric deck's bottom adding a spacer ring so the projectile hoist on the projectile flat one deck below would properly fit the space. If you remember back a few weeks, I had spent time making the p-flats the same height only to find that the top was being spaced differently due to the large boss on the electric deck's base. Rather than reprint that projectile flat or individually change the projectile hoists, I just took some scrap styrene centers left over from making the annular decks, and cut an i.d. to correspond to the middle p-flat's rotating deck. I needed about 0.080" so I laminated two 0.040" rings. I had to relieve the rings where the LEDs were and cut out the projectile trunk's openings. I used the 3M transfer adhesive tape to cleanly and permanently attach the ring. The ceiling is white so I'm may not even paint this. I tested the projectile hoist's fit and the spacer works well. All the cutting was done with the 1/16" solid carbide router.



All this detail painting should be done in a couple more work sessions.

This is such amazing detail and makes me realize just how much work you are putting into this model. On a second more important note, I trust your wife is okay, fals like that can be quite confidence shattering.

Just phenomenal work and craftsmanship going on here good luck out on the east coast .

My wife is recovering. She fully understands just how much more happens when you fall when you're 77. The most painful part is the rib cage which probably got stressed when she extended her arms to break the fall.

Happy Veterens Day to my USA readers. ! What an appropriate project to be working on...

I had one of the longest work sessions today in the entire project, over four hours. I was able to do this because I did my back therapy stretching when I first got up at 7:30 leaving a whole lot more day to work in the shop.

I was fix'n to start laying in the apparatus in the electric deck and this meant pulling off the tape protecting the nascent gluing surface. And again, I had some paint delamination. This isn't a big deal here because it's just some floor color that I'll touch up after installation.



I decided to detour. I need to solve the how-to-run-all-the-wires problem and it directly involves the e-deck. I don't want to install anything until the wiring runs are finalized.
I did a raft of detail painting and got a stiff neck as a result. I think I'm ready to paint Fabergé eggs. I had done a little bit of trial painting on one of the rejected rear bulkheads so I knew what to expect. I will say that you can get slightly sharper edges in injection molded parts than 3D printed, but it's no show stopper.

First pass wasn't bad and some minor backpainting with the white cleaned up most of the edges. I had lunch in meantime and that steadied my hands a bit. i find that if I really want steady hands a good shot of bourbon and a big pasta dinner makes me steady as a rock.



Not shown: I airbrushed the armor piercing projectiles and the powder flat air bottles semi-gloss black. When i finish detail painting of these I will take some photos. I still have to airbrush the O.D. projectiles, and the tiny ladder rung assemblies need to be painted. I have another big pile of light gray parts that need detailing, but this is all going to be done in one session.

I then finished up all three of the rear compartment pieces. Again, paint, backpaint, paint, backpaint and it's done.
Here's an overview of today's production. That strange part in the middle is the officer's booth communications panel.



Looking closer at the rear compartments;

Here is the left most compartment.



Looking at the reverse view you can see the projectile in the ready position ready to be rammed when the breach is opened.



This is the center compartment with the steel ladder up to the officer's booth.



And here's the right compartment. Also shown is one of the two auxiliary sighting systems that I also finished painting. I went with a two-toned scheme just to help show the contours. There's no rear door in the left and right compartments as the entrance is from the side corridor leading to the sighting stations.



I couldn't help myself and stuck the three into their slots in the gun girders. There will be partitions between the gun pits. I was originally going to use transparent styrene to make them so you could see across, but the cutaway work has been so successful that I might use the white styrene and cutaway strategic parts to show the gun flanks which would be hidden from view (as they are in real life).



Everyone have a nice weekend. See y'all on Monday.

Great stuff.

I will say it again. Its like watching Michelangelo creating a masterpiece.

Did Michelangelo screw up as much as I do? I think not! Maybe more like Rodin???

I was mistaken... had a rare Saturday session.

I found the wiring route from the gun house down to the electric deck. I'm installing a wiring tube so it will be easy to direct the wires southbound. The tube exits the pan deck OUTSIDE of the electric deck and I will then route them inside and down the central column. This will be at the back, fully enclosed part of the model and will be out of view. The wiring in the gun house is also down the back wall, unseen by the viewer.



The pipe is JUST big enough for four of the tiny wires to pass through. With the route figured, I'm now green-lighted to install all the apparatus. I'm still having trouble getting the e-deck to nestle snuggly under the pan deck. It seems to be rocking on something in the middle that's a little high, but I can't identify what it is. I really want it to sit flush all the way around.

I bit the bullet and reprinted the right rear compartment. I was unhappy with the repairs on the spanning tray and didn't like that it was sitting further rearward than the other two cradles. It was printing while I was working and it just finished. I'll clean it up on Monday.

I printed it with the cradle and the rest as two separate assemblies, thereby reducing the difficulty of removing supports and painting things that are unreachable. I'm thinking of doing the same thing for the middle compartment. It only take 3 hours to grow a new part and it would make them perfect. There were a lot of dubious aspects to those parts that can readily be fixed. I've said it before (many times), the ability to reprint corrected, broken or lost parts is one of the most valuable aspects of having the printer sitting in the shop.

I spent the rest of the day hand painting more parts. I finished the air bottles. I attempted to use Bare Metal Foil to make an actual metal band around the tanks, but something about the semi-gloss black made the foil's adhesive not work, so I went old school and hand painted the bands.

I used some Tamiya black panel accent to dirty up the turret clips and hydraulic dampers. While I'm not weathering this beast much, these parts would be buried in the bowels of the turret, wedged between the barbette ahd the electric deck outer bulkheads so a little dirty wouldn't hurt. Unlike the aspects of the ship that are accessible by humans and therefore; constantly being maintained, these parts would only be seen during major overhauls. I picked out the rotary switched on the panels using some Molotow chrome. It's very subtle since these raised details are very tiny. I'm out of all my Molotow stuff and will have to get more.



Those air tanks are these (below) that line the annular space between the magazines and powder flat. Actually, now looking again at them, the straps are painted metal, not bright. I'll leave them alone.



Almost everything is painted except the O.D. shells, practice rounds, and the metalic parts of the powder scuttles. I have a rescheduled PT appointment on Monday mid-afternoon that will interrupt my work, so it should be done by Tuesday. Meanwhile, the base is getting its 3rd and 4th coats of clear finish and I'll be getting that in my hands in probably a week.

What a lot of work, but it clears a lot out, now the parts are painted and positioned. It looks marvelous, man

And give your wife a lot of attention, it's a hard time, falling down at her age

Great work so far!

What function did those air cylinders do?

Thank you for the kind thoughts. My wife is definitely on the mend, albeit slowly.

The air cylinders are the reservoirs for the purge air that's blasted out of the guns immediately after firing. This is the puff of white smoke you see eminating from the muzzle after the blast. It's designed to remove any burning embers that could cause pre-ignition of the next charge. It takes a lot of air since the three guns are often fired in salvo.

The reprints worked as planned and I have to paint these two assemblies. Having the cradle/spanning tray as a separate part will make painting much easier. The cradle is just sitting there for the picture. I redrew the tray so I eliminated that weak area that kept fracturing.



I finished the painting of the powder flat accessories including the quench tanks, and inside and outside powder scuttles. I painted the powder bags hanging on the output side of the scuttles. With this painting done, all that's left are the extra projectiles, the ring gear, the entire exterior of the gun house, and (and I almost forgot) the guns themselves.

With these parts I can now add the accessories to the powder flats and the annual rings to finish up that deck. Notice the red "ignition patch" on one end of the powder bags. These are filled with black powder that ignited by the primer charge and, in turn, ignites the mass of smokeless powder in each bag. The patches insure that the flame travels through the entire charge. I still have to highlight with black the locking handles on the scuttle sliding door.



I added the decal to the ballistic computer and you can actually see some of the graphics. It looks like gobblety goop, but it's something. This image is a ridiculous enlargement.