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

[Gnomey]

Looks great so far!

 

[Builder 2010]

Thanks!

Author's note: This was yesterday's post that I forgot to transmit due to being interrupted by some TV shows.

With another long session, things are accelerating. Once all the stuff is painted (almost), it's an assembly job and, unlike a modern plastic kit, these parts contain all the details in a single piece. All that work was done in the drawing phase.

I wanted to simulate some glazing in the portholes and bought some Microscale Kristel Klear, but the stuff apparently kicked. This is what I was greeted with when I opened the brand-new bottle. It was just a pile of thick glop that was not capable of making any windows.

I then resorted to using Bondic. it works, but it has to be applied really thick before it will bridge the space.

I finished the rotating portion of the powder flat with the gluing in of the remainder of inner and outer powder scuttles and hatches, plus the two powder hoist base pieces. After trial fitting this deck with the projectile flat above, and found that the powder hoist bases were too tall by about 1/8". Again, it was a bit stressful to hack that much material off these parts that were already CA'd to the floor.

I used the Dremel with a big abrasive cut-off wheel that had enough radius to cut at least halfway across. I measured the exact amount of offset I needed and scribed this with the calipers. I then put on a dust mask and went at it. Results were good and the two decks now nestle together as they should.

I mounted the quench tanks with 1/32 phos-bronze pins to make sure they were secure.

I couldn't help but to put a projectile flat on top and light it up. I'm happy to see that the layers of paint on the walls are nice and opaque and aren't letting any light leak through.

Of course all those wires will disappear down the central column.

I then did the same thing to both projectile flats by finishing the painting of the gypsy heads with brass. I again used the #11 to trace around the glue masks so they wouldn't pull all the paint off during demasking. Everything dropped in where it was supposed to including the six projectile hoists.

Lastly I put the hatches and scuttles on the outer shell. I ran out of inner scuttle parts and had to print some more. I never, ever delete the slicing files. The ChiTuBox Pro lets you save the set up which loads very quickly and can be worked on immediatel.

Here's where the air bottles will go. They're not glued in...

And here's a passal of scuttles ready for cleanup.

One last thing... I finished up the reprinted rear compartments. They look just as I would like.

Up next is today's work.

 

[Builder 2010]

Now for today's post.

First of all, here's a shot of the base getting its final clear coats at my friend Byrant's home shop in Albuquerque. He's got a craftsman brain where everything he does is a piece of art.

Today was another milestone day, even though I didn't get into the shop until 3:00. The electric deck is now finished with all it's machinery in place. Instead of wildly spraying accelerator on the masked gluing areas, I just brushed a thin layer of the stuff where the glue was going to go. When using the Gel CA, it cures really slowly without accelerator.

Here are two views of the deck: the top view,which no one will see, and the oblique side view, where the viewpoint will be restricted through the cutaway area. My wife suggested that I include a board with some of these overhead shots to show what's not being seen in the model. It's interesting that one of the pointing systems has the motor on the far left, a long drive shaft and the hydraulic pump on the right side to scoot around the powder trunk that rises up right in the middle.

So here's what's built so far; Again... all those cables will disappear. You can clearly see why lighting is so critical.

I then installed the pan deck equipment. I continued to touch up the paint and will probably keep doing this until the plexi-cover is in place. The front upper part finally fractured. It was a very thin cross-section and was way out of roung.

And a more overhead view... Seen in this image are the B-end pointing machines with their rotating screw boxes (which actually work) and the two B-end training machines that tied into the massive worm gear boxes and down to the drive pinions.

To repair the break, I traced the actual curve and am laminating three pieces of 0.040" styrene to form a backbone and hold it into shape. I don't think this reinforcement will foul anything that goes on top.

So the massive pile of parts is dwindling. All that's left are the parts for the gun house itself (the guns are over on the messy work bench waiting for their final painting) and the projectiles which need the trim colors painted. Then I have to finally cut the remaining partitions that separate the three gun rooms, plus two more lateral partitions that line the side compartments.

The end is in sight!

 

[Vic Balshaw]

Just gobsmacked.

 

[Wurger]

 

[syscom3]

Are you going to add a scale figure or two to give an observer an idea on the size of this stuff?

 

[Builder 2010]

I would love to add some crew. I've searched the unsuccessfully to find 1/72 scale US Naval figures in interior work uniforms, not the flak-jacketed, crash-helemeted folks that are available commercially. I fear if I want them, I will have to create my own. My sculpting skills basically suck, so I will probably create scaled featureless humans in correct poses that will show the scale of all this massive equipement. Any other suggestions would be welcome.

i got all the extra stuff attached to the shells. I'm constantly having problems with the joints noted in the picture breaking loose. When I handle it and put any stress on the hinge area, these annular decks are cracking away from the wall. CA is just too brittle and fractures under stress. It happened again today... twice! I use medium CA to repair it the first time, and I haven't attempted to fix it for the second. I may resort to epoxy.

I finished painting the ring gear and installed it. I first tried some new clear Gorilla Glue construction adhesive, but it lacked the tack that was needed to hold the pieces in place and there was no effective way (that I could find) to clamp them. I then resorted to gel CA pretreating the contact area with accelerator. This held... for a whie.

Then I put the pan deck into place on top of the upper roller bearing race and found to my total annoyance that my initial cutaway area was too low by almost a full deck and didn't align with the pan deck's cutaway. Why? I think it stems back to my getting into my head that the ring gear was connected to the wrong part of the bulkhead. So... what to do?
I drew the enlarged opening on the bulkhead and went at it with the Dremel Flex-shaft and the 1/16" carbide router. This was bad enough, but was complicated that the ring gear was now sitting right behind the cut area. The cut was successful, although the ring gear CA broke away and it fell off. The ring gear was not damaged.

I have to reattach it and probably going with epoxy assisted by CA to hold everything while the epoxy sets. I also have to better finish the now-exposed back side of the ring gear assembly, which I forgot was exposed in the cutaway area.

With more of the barbette armor area now exposed I'm going to fill the inner space with Milliputt so it looks like solid 14" armor. And then paint the edges red.

Meanwhile, the fix I did to repair the pan deck bulkhead in the front was successful. It's now nice and round and is much better all around. That distorted edge was annoying me, but not enough to fix it. When it broke I had no choice. It was this cutaway area of the pan deck that shows the training gear that necessitated opening the cutaway larger.

So that fills out the week. It was a good week that saw a lot of forward motion and a few steps back like today. Again... if I was going to make more of these things, I would take all these lessons learned and build it into the next attempt. Unfortunately, I suspect this will be the only one of its kind, (unless the other museum ships want one of their own) and all the lessons will die with me (or live on in the thousands of words I've written in this missive.

Everyone have a safe, secure weekend. And if you live in on the west side of a Great Lake state, you have my sympathies since you're going to be buried in Lake Effect snow. Silver lining... good time to stay in and build something cool.

 

[Vic Balshaw]

This is really coming together now.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Gnomey]

Looks great so far!

 

[Builder 2010]

Thank you!

We're in the punchlist phase of the project; picking up the odds and ends that need addressing. One of these was filling in the armor barbette area with Milliputt so it looks as solid as it should. Milliputt says it's cured in 2 – 3 hours, but I find it really takes longer. I'm giving it 24 hours before I'm able to sand it. When applying, you wet the tool you're using and it goes down much smoother without grabbing. When set, I will sand and apply the red edging showing it's a cutaway. I bought a Testor's red paint pen to streamline the edging process.

I also bit the bullet and brought out the big guns... well in this case a little syringe. I bought a selection of syringes from Amazon to use in instances just like this one. I mixed some J-B epoxy and injected it into the errant joints. I then used rubber bands to pull the hemi-cylinder into position for it to cure. Before applying the adhesive I removed the excess CA from the area. The joint is not strong and shouldn't give me any more trouble. Once the shells are a) glued to the stack and b) screwed to the base, there won't be any stress on these joints. The only stresses have been when I'm handling it to do all the other stuff.

That syringe was tossed out, since it's no longer viable.

I then painted the yellow tips on all the non-training projectiles by filling a container with flat yellow to the depth that corresponded to the length of the yellow portion. I then dipped them to apply the paint. There was some surface tension problems where the painted didn't want to seek a level on the parts, but it worked out in the end.

And here are all the outer projectile drying. Next I have to put the bright metal tip on them. Technically speaking, the black armor-piercing projectiles are longer than the O.D. high-explosive ones, but I didn't fuss and did them all the same. I only had one dimensioned drawing of the projectiles and that was the HE type. The Blue training projectiles do not have the yellow or silver bands.

And now for something totally different:

After noodling the power circuitry to power the nine LED circuits I came up with this. This was one of those ideate-stuff-when-waking-in-the-moring things. Being retired and waking when my body wants to gives me the splendid opportunity think about creative stuff. In the 40 odd working years and waking much earlier with an alarm, my creative thinking was usually done staring at my face in the mirror while shaving.

I bought a pack of blank circuit boards this summer when working with my grandson on his Tesla Coil. I was able to press one into service on this project. I need a separate parallel circuit for each set of three LEDs based on the 12VDC power supply. And the CL2N3 driver chips can't feed a parallel circuits. So each parallel circuit needed its own CL2N3 driver chip. They, in turn, can all be driven from the same power bus. So using the copper foil tape I created a circuit board bus bar and soldered each driver into it. The center lug on the driver is a dummy and is just used to hold them into circuit board. Now that I'm writing this, I realized that I probably soldered all the chips on backwards. Facing the flat surface, the hot side is to the left, and I have it backwards! Yup, just checked the MicroChip pin diagram and I have them all reveresed. One step forward and two back.

The flat side should be facing the camera!

Unsoldering is a whole lot harder than soldering in the first place. I have another circuit board and it may be easier to just start over.

For what it's worth, here's the underside showing the foil buses for + and — power inputs. If I didn't write this blog, I would have soldered all the wires into the board and wondered why nothing was working. I just checked and I have more than enough drivers to redo the entire deal. That's how I'm going to proceed. My dad always said, "when the mind doesn't work, the feet suffer!" True, true!

Some of the sides of the gun girders needed to be white, especially those areas that border the auxiliary sighting compartments and the area under the alcove in the center gun. I masked the dark iron upper surface and sprayed the white. One the edge facing foward in the side area, I have to install two ladder rungs. Also two rungs go into the side of the girder in the center compartment. I'm still not sure of either using transparent plastic for some of the gun house longitudinal buikheads or simply strategically cutting them away to show the flanks of the gun slides. Notice that when I cut the web on the girder between the left and center gun, the right hand component dropped down quite a bit due to internal stresses. When the powder trunk is installed, this will be realigned and should work out okay.

The last thing I did today was stare closely at the guns to decide just how I'm going to proceed with the painting. I think I'm going with Haze Gray as the gun color. The rear face is bare metal only where the actual gun barrel penetrates the yoke. Also the counter-recoil cylinders are natural metal as well. But there are protruding details that make applying masking tape difficult. In one of my rejects I experimented with using liquid mask and may still go that way. I'm thinking of airbrushing a good metallic paint and using gloss black as a base coat. I've left this as the last thing to paint as I wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing.

 

[Vic Balshaw]

All good stuff.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Gnomey]

Great work so far!

 

[Builder 2010]

More potpourri...

I built a new power board. This time I got all the polarities correctly placed and then tested every chip to make sure they were all good before putting all the soldering tools awat. They were!

The individual ciruit + leads will enter through the top of the board and then tie to the long output lead underneath. Same goes for all the – leads on the left side.

Next I finished up the cutaway extension since the Milliputt was now cured solid. I also epoxied the ring gear assembly to the support brackets for added strength. Some of it got a little frisky and I will touch up those shiny areas with more dark iron. Paint can hide a lot of sins.

I put the first coat of gloss black onto the gun breach and counter-recoil cylinders in preparation for the metallic finish.

When this was dry, I then airbrushed Allclad aluminum as the metallic coat. The circled area shows the rear of the gun barrel proper that needs to be masked and you can see the protrusions that make simple masking more challenging. I'm thinking of using liquid masking. The protrusions are a mixed bag color-wise with some brass and others painted. The breach plug carrier seems to be colored. In some images it's gray, others it's a bright blue. I also airbrushed the elevating screws. They'll be accented with panel accent black.

I then spent an inordinate amount of time making those foot rungs that protrude from the gun girders in three places: on each auxiliary sighting compartment, and the entry into the gun compartments. And again, as I write this I realized that I still have to add them in the side compartments coming down from the side aisle.

I broke three carbide drills in the process, one of which, I broke just by putting down a tool that touched it. These things are really, really fragile. I made the rungs out of 0.022" phos-bronze. If their 1:1 size is 1" in diameter, the trus size would be .016" rod, which I don't have. As it is, working with this stuff on a dropped rung ladder is challenging enough. Anyone who super-details HO trains works with this stuff all the time. If you look closely at the pin vise there actually is a drill point on the end of that bit. I also have 0.012" drills. They're so small as being ludicrous. I would love see how they grind flutes and points into solid carbide this small. I don't know how they can do it.

The entry holes are on a slight angle due to access with the pin vise. In the center compartment, my first attempt was too far rearward and fouled the compartment piece. As it was I had to do some surgery on this piece since it was the reprinted one and I forgot that I did some trimming on its original. I ended up re-drilling new holes and filling the errant ones. Of course all of these rungs require viewers being able to view the model directly from above which they aren't. So I'm doing this just for the fidelity of the model and I'm a little nuts. This exercise took over and hour.

I did the same of the side aisles leading down to the auxiliary sighting compartments. In this case I found that the sights sat too far off the floor. I needed to add .100" fillers to bring them flush. The error was caused by the elevation of gun girder floor at that point being driven by the kit base plate, which I had not drawn accurately. You can see the rungs in the center compartment that lead up to the alcove where the gun captain goes to get out of the way of recoil, but if you look past the center to the vertical face of the outside compartment... that face also should have ladder rungs coming down from the aisle into the compartment. That's how you enter the side guns. If you remember, not having any detailed drawing of this aisle's details, I drew steps and printed them. I had to reprint the compartments killing the steps. Now I have to go back and add the rungs. I may cheat...put the rungs into the styrene partitions instead of drilling on an angle into the gun girder itself. I still have to bend the rungs, but installation will be easier.

I took a few minutes that wrote a list of what's left so I don't leave anything out. I think I could be done in two to three weeks. Remember, I still have to build the plastic parts of the kit. Luckily, that should be the easiest part and only a few days work. If I don't do any work tomorrow, everyone have a happy Thanksgiving. Our son and family are coming in from State College, PA tomorrow, but won't get here until late. He's an eye surgeon and has to do post-op visits before leaving. They usually arrive after 9:00 p.m. The weather's going to be good. If I do more work tomorrow, I wish y'all a happyy Thanksgiving again.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Vic Balshaw]

Those foot rungs are identical to the bristles that fall out of my well used wire file cleaning brush.

Great work today as well, hope you have a great Thanksgiving.

 

[Builder 2010]

As you'll read, I've given up on adding any more of them for a while. They're not going to be seen and were taking an inordinate amount of time.

Even with getting the house ready for guests I had time in the shop. I fussed with adding more ladder rungs, but gave up finally coming to grips that they will be unseen and were taking way too much time.

I then got to painting the guns in earnest. I saw a picture of a gun captain standing next to the breach of one of these beasties, and the color was a blueish gray. i mixed some to do my guns that way. Not sure it works... and I can't find that image. I kept running into it and now I can't find it.

Masking with Tamiya tape worked predictably well. The rest of the liquid mask with the Molotow product wasn't so hot. It wasn't wetting the metallic coat well and then was a real pain in the butt to peel off. It kept coming off in little bits and pieces and even now there are places where it's still on the model.

That said, the view distance and viewing through plexiglas will hide a lot of the things that i'm seeing with a 3X magnifying headset.

Here are three images of the first (left-closed breach) gun painted. I didn't do any accenting with I will do next session.

And here are the breach ends of the open breach guns. i notice on this picture that the breach operating lever on one of them is missing, and the salvo lock is missing on the other one. The open breach puts the operating lever down below the breach and will not be noticeable. The salvo latch is also very tiny and very difficult to replace with scratch-building. Maybe I'll fuss with it, maybe I won't. Meanwhile, my base was delivered. That's the beginning of the end game, since I needed it to build the stack.

So now I can officially wish everyone a wonderful Thanksgiving. Next post will probably be next Monday.

 

[Wurger]

 

[Vic Balshaw]

Really looks good.