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

Long session today. Got a lot of the punchlist items done, including: finish painting all the remaining projectiles, replacing the broken cradle/spanning tray in the center gun compartment, installed the last LEDs under the gun girders, painted the new ring gears and installed them, opened up an enlarged cutaway in the inner shell to match the larger one of the outer, and built the primermna's platforms that will go into the pan deck. Starting with painting and detailing the new ring gears, then installed them.
Again, I overall painted them dark iron and Allclad metal for the gear itself and then highlight the cut off ends with red and put high gloss metal on the exposed rollers on the ends. The ring gears are the "true" diamter that the shells should be, but the shells, after splitting did attempt to staighten out. It's amazing how much spring is in the sytrene sheet. Instead of trying to glue the ring to the entire array of the brackets requiring lots of pressure to hold it all together, I just glued up the four inner brackets with CA and when they were set, just had to haul in the ends and used epoxy. That 1/4" had a lot of tension.

I put the epoxy in the joint area and held it together with Quickie Clamps. One shell came out nice and strong. The other, as you'll see, broke loose and is requirng a stronger intervention.

While the epoxy was curing I did all the rest of the stuff. The primerman's platform required some estimation of its location both X-Y and Z. I estimated that the breach was about 7 feet above the guy's head because they're reaching up pretty high to place the cartridge in the breach lock. I then measured down from this point to detemine the height of the platform. In pictures the platform is on some spindly tubular metal legs, but I chose the easy way out with some Evergreen Styrene angle.
I let them dry for the rest of the session and will paint and install them tomorrow. Because of my lousy spacing of the partitiosn (they are not even), The left gun's platform is interferring with the projectile hoist chase and it will need trimming to fit right. That said, you can't see this platform at all, so it really won't matter. You will see the right gun's platform as it is right in front. The angle's a little out of scale, but it was the smallest I had.

Next up was installing the last two LEDs under the gun girder that will give some more light into the pan deck. As before, I used the copper foil tape method testing the LEDs before installation, after soldering in place and then after wired up. All was good. I combined the black negative leads and just let the red leads be independent.

I painted all the silver tips on the remaining projectiles and then went back and touched up the yellow, O.D. and the spin band brass. I didn't take any pics of this... boring.
I removed the broken cradle/spanning tray from the center gun rear compartment, and attached the new, stronger version. Again, no image.
I enlarged the cutaway in the lower bulkhead shells so it now matched that enlarged one in the barbette shells. The enlargement was a mistake, but I'm living with it. More views into the model are not a bad thing. The mask was to isolate the exterior for the white airbrush touchup. I still have to do the red edge trimming and with the red paint pen is much less stressful.

The last thing was fixing something...again. The tension on the one of the shells was too great and the epoxy let go. I 1/16" drilled through the shell, bracket and into the ring gear and was in the process of epoxying a 1/16" brass bar to reinforce that critical joint. I ran out of time.

Also, the joining of the upper and lower shells is going to be a challenge. The lower shells cone taper is way too shallow. Again, it's partially because splitting the cylinder allowed everything to splay outwards. It was taking way too much force to have all the brackets in good contact all the way around. Instead of forcing the issue and breaking something agian, I'm going to make sure that the brackets on either end match the cone's angles and the one in the middle that are completely obscured, will find their own level. I'm tiring of this challenge and don't want the perfect to be the enemy of the good.
I'm getting really close to starting to stack all this stuff together. If I were to do this again, I would make darn sure that the gun girders were more accurate. The two center platforms are not equal and this is reflected down to the pan deck. The only saving grace is it will be difficult to view the model from directly overhead... I hope.

Where that Tension is..................... pin it!
You're at a blistering pace now!!!!
Woohoo.

I sure am!!! Just like with orthopedic surgery, when it doubt, pin it!

First of all, the 1/16" pins plus J-B 30 minute epoxy did the trick. Those joints are not solid and will not let go. I ended up filling them again after I ground off the protruding pins and did a little bit of plastic damage. I have some touch up painting to do... again, and that will finish this up FINALLY.

I painted the primerman's platforms with Allclad metalllic and then glued them onto the pan deck partitiions. There was much more surface area on the flanks of the styrene angle, than on their little tiny feet. I first tried to use clear silicone caulk as an adhesive since it might have some give and not be too brittle, but the stuff didn't work at all. I removed all of it and then used my standby gel CA. The one on the right side of the image (left gun), is in the way of the projectile chase and I'll hack at it to get the clearance. This one is out of sight behind the bulkhead so not matter what I do to it, no one will ever know, other than the myriad of people that read this stuff on four fourms.



I drilled a hole in the back compartment of the e-deck to pass the pan deck's wiring down into the bowels of the structure. It was now time to join these two critical components. I've shown this months ago, but there are reinforcing ribs under the pan deck base to help minimize warping (it worked...sort of), and I then had relief cuts all over the e-deck to nestle into these ribs. The p-deck base did warp some with the midsection bulging downwards and that made for some very repetitive fitting steps to relieve all the high spots on the e-deck so the two would nest properly.

But lately, the two were not fitting correctly. The back section did, but not the part where the pinion gears lie. Today I spent a lot of concentration and using my iPhone's light to see if I could find what was impinging that was keeping them apart. First i found that the hydraulic lines running up to the p-deck were too tall, so I chopped them down, but the fit did not improve.

Finally, I found the culprit. When I rebuilt the bulkheads that surround the pinion gears, I neglected to cut the relief notches into the new parts. It was a small triangle of the new material that was too high. When I trimmed it, it again fit as it did before.
It needed some concetrated and even pressure to hold the two decks in close contact so I could apply the epoxy. Again, I resorted to using a disposable syringe to apply it precisely.

I arranged to big Quickie clamps with some blocking to get the joint tight. I had to be very careful since the clamps could exert enough force to crush the e-deck's side walls. I tightened until I started hearing some ominous creaking sounds and then backed off.



Here's the syringe that applied the epoxy. I purchased a set of syringes of different sizes and interchangeable tips just for this purpose from Amazon.



Here's two views of the final joint. There's just a couple of spots that will need cleanup. I will paint the epoxy next session when it's fully cured.




Here's a normal view of the assembly. This was the singularly most challenging of the joints since it wasn't stabilized by the central column. The other decks don't even have to be glued together to be concentric.



It's mighty dark in there... needs some lights... oh... wait... there are lights. Glad I thought of it ahead of time.

I was now ready to finally finish up the gun house and create the six bulkheads that separate the gun pits. I had drawings of these that were made a long time ago before all this stuff was actually created, but they were pretty close. The did nto reflect the new learning of how people entered and exited the gun pits, especially the center gun alcove and the big opennings in the side guns.

Here's the right side gun's left bulkhead now fitted to the little bit of it that's included in the gun compartment printing. I noted on this picture where I'm going to re-attach the foot rungs and will do it off the model so it won't be so difficult.



And I built the center gun's right bulkhead and attached it to the alcove. Here is it test fit with the rear compartment. The white sytrene is so nice, I may not paint it.



I have four more buikheads to fit and then I'll assemble the pan deck to the gun girder, kit base and kit deck part. I was thinking about using the silicone caulk for that joint too since it has some large gaps, but the test today is giving me pause. I'll probably go with epoxy again. Once that's done, I'll install the gun compartments, powder trunks with the one where the powder car is exposed, the hoist machinery, and the side aisle details. Before I do the above I have to decide whether or not to laminate real wood planking to the main deck. And I have to buid the Takom plastic parts of the kit too. After this 12 month odyssey, that seems like child play.. famous last words.

All in all, it sounds like a lot of work, but in reality, it's not too much since (I think) all the show stoppers are now taken care of. This is pretty much straight model building, not naval architecture. And i still have to build the Takom plastic parts. After this 12 month odyssey, that seems like child play… famous last words. I should still make my deadline.

Still gobsmacked.

Great work so far!

Glad that I continue to impress...

A nice long Saturday session. My wife, realizing that I have a real deadline on this project, has relaxed the, no-model-building-on-weekends rule. And I took advantage of it.

This was a particularly important session that had consumed a lot of my creative juices. I couldn't measure the gun house bulkheads until all the stuff below it was done. I needed the pan deck to be stabilized and by gluing it to the e-deck accomplished that. Each bulkhead had to be hand-fitted because of end compartment variations.

Before doing any of this, I did some airbrush touchup of the now-fully-cured epoxy joint, which is now looking great.

The two outside bulkheads, with the large opening, were actually the easiest to do since they didn't interact with the powder hoist trunks. The hoist trunks also couldn't be finalized until I created the bulkheads... sort of a chicken/egg scenario. As it worked out, the hoist trunks needed some elective surgery. I was never really sure of the interaction of the bulkheads and the trunks and was going to play it by ear once I got to that point.

To cut the square corners in styrene (or wood) I use the right-angle chisel I got from MicroMark years ago. For scratch-building sytrene it's really great.



I use it in the drill press. I stack up wood packing under the table since the pressure is so high when punching the table lock can slip. The packing provides a solid, immovable base so the chisel works as designed. I pre-scribe the cut lines giving the chisel a positive engaugement position. It's easier for me to leave the chisel in this positiion and rotate the work around to pick up the other corners than to spin the chuck around by hand.

A particularly challenging bulkhead was the one that's going to have the open powder door. This image shows the opening before I made it a little wider so the door frame fully occluded the opening's edges. BTW: that cradle also broke while doing all this manhandling. I had another good one printed, so I painted it and fixed this one. Once the compartments are glued into the gun girder, those delicate spanning trays will be out of harm's way and won't constantly get broken. The critical fit was the butt joint between the styrene bulkhead and 3D resin printed compartment. I made the compartement walls 0.040" to match the styrene's width when assembled.



Here are all six bulkheads taped in place for a beauty shot. Obviously they're all out of alignment, but won't be when installed permanently.



I have some left over Archer Fine Decal rivet decals that I used when building the girder bridges on my model railroad 8 years ago. There are rivets on panels in these buikheads and I decided to add them only on the viewer-facing ones. First I scribed the panels at a scale 3' width. I then added decals that looked apropiate. In one of my images I notice that there is a break in the bulkhead right in the area of of the trunnion caps to permit access to them for maintenance. Not sure if I'm going to add this since I have no really good information on what it actually looks like. It under the gun house roof area so won't be to obvious if I don't add them.

This is all the bulkheads... Note the little relief cuts in area over the trunnions. That's to clear the trunnion bolts. They weren't sitting down correctly without them.



And here are the three that will have rivets. Notice that I cut two strategic cutaways that will expose the gun slide's flanks and the hoist machinery. With this riveting, I will have to paint the panels.



While "adjusting" the double hoist trunk, the thin separation panels that stick up, broke apart (the second time, I might add). I removed all of it down to good material and rebuilt this part with styrene. The reason for the adjustment was the width. I neglected to add relief for the bulkheads. I probably thought at one time that the flank of the trunk would serve as the bulkhead, but decided against it. You can see the surgical scar on the trunk's flank. It's completey covered by the bulkhead.



Getting these bulkheads cut and fit is huge! It, like joining the shells and the e-p deck joint, were very hard to predict the outcome. I did many iterations in my head about how this could go, but until I started cutting and fitting, I was never sure it would work out. It has and the rest of the work is going to go pretty well. I only have a very few parts that need to be installed. I'm predicting that the turret itself will be done by next weekend, leaving a few days to build the remaining kit parts, the crew members, the display case and finally any accompanying graphics. It should all be ready on time. If I had any doubts that this would come out as I envisioned and drew it, those doubts are now dispelled.

Thanks all! Firing...heh, heh. I'll be lucky if I can move it from Lousiville to the Battleship without popping glue joints I'll be very happy.

I epoxied the upper barbette to the lower shells to the upper side of the brackets. Next session I'm going to tie the lower ends of the brackets to the shell. I will again, use some metal pins to secure the joints.

I then airbrushed the now-cut gun house bulkheads and made those missing ladder rungs. It was so much easier to install them in a piece of styrene than on the angles in the gun girders.



And then I started loading the stuff in to the gun house. I started with the left gun. First I tested whether I could install the rear compartment piece before the guns went in. I found that I could, but I decided that I couldn't get the guns in AFTER the bulkheads are in since the bulkheads sit on top of the trunnion caps. It's there position over the caps that enabled me to NOT glue the caps down, but just let the bulkheads hold them, thereby preventing any CA geting in to the Trunnions and freezing the guns. I need those guns to be movable so I can adjust them when the bloomers go on.

I used the 3M transfer adhesive tape to hold the compartments and some of the bulkheads in place. It works... sort of. At least it's not brittle. Notice I also installed the side aisle hatch to the L sighting stations. Needs some touch up painting.



Next was installing the double powder trunk and the center gun and bulkheads. Because of the trunks and the elevation screws going down one deck below the gun house, I originally thought that I would have to install all this stuff with the pan deck connected below, making an awkward assembly upon which to work. I solved the dilemma by attaching the gun house to a box with sufficient depth to protect these down-hanging things. I just used some rubber bands to hold it all.

In this image you can also see the installed powder hoist winches and the small bulkhead separating them. That strategic cutaway helps viewers see these machines.



In the above, I tested the fit of the gun house shell just to make sure it still fit. Whew! It still does.!

At this point I realized I hadn't glazed the view ports from the hoist operator's booth to the gun pit and the portholes in the rear bulkhead. I used a new bottle of MicroScale Kristel Klear that had not kicked. And it works. This image shows the stuff completely webbing over the porthole openings.



Onto the right gun.

I needed to do some surgery on the powder cart that I want to sit behind the open powder door. It was too wide and too deep. Some agressive sanding on the disk sander beat it into submission.



I didn't trim the powder trunk sufficiently and it was sitting proud of the girder and forced the side bulkhead out of alignment a bit. I may remove the bulkhead tomorrow and trim that trunk and reinstall. Here's two shots of the final state from today's session.

The guns fit in the compartments with same very tight clearances they do on the real thing. There's a lot of little touch up jobs to do before this is finished.



Here's another shot from the side. One more bulkhead to go on and then onto the officer's booth. There's going to be one powder bag sitting in it. The powder do will be installed before the outer bulkhead goes in. There will be another cutaway in that bulkhead to show more of the hidden gun slide flanks.



Like George Peppard of the "A-Team" used to say, "It's great to see a plan come together!" Sure is! Gun house interior will be done tomorrow.

Oh... and one more thing. The plastics supply house called and my Plexiglass display case parts are in. I will pick them up tomorrow.

I'm in awe.

Piicked up the Plexiglass today and the name plaque so everything is in the house to finish this project. I tested the sizes of the pieces and they are perfect. And I dropped two of them on the concrete floor, but did not break anything... I think. I also found out more tips and techniques to do a flawless case build. One tip is to pre-wet all the joining surfaces with solvent cement. This helps wicking and prevents air entrainment. Also to scrape a very slight chamfer to the interior edges to help guide the needle applicator tip and also to improve solvent wicking. I will construct the case sometime next week.



Even with just over an hour in the shop, I got the partitions finished, all the powder doors in place, glued in the back bulkhead and officer's booth assembly. All that's left is a bit more touchup work and shoehorning the sighting stations and too more lateral bulkheads into postion AFTER the gun house is buttoned up. In this image it's just sitting there.



And a side view. This view clearly shows why I had to make the optical range finder ends as separate parts. They will be inserted from the outside.

In pushing the officer's booth assembly to the proper spot, I broke the seat back off the right side rangefinder operator's seat. I have others that I can replace this one with. I also broke the open powder door during handling and again, found one more in my "extra-parts" box. If I couldn't find one I would just reprint it. Again... great to have such a tool at your disposal.



Any problems I'm having with this assembly stems from these parts being drawn very early on and not fully understaning just how the model was going to build.

I am not happy with the fits and even though to the uneducated eye, it probably looks very complex and interesting, all I see is a bunch of lousy fits and compromises.

If I were to make another one, I would base the part sizing on this model as well as the drawings of the real ship. Some of this trouble comes from never really knowing the actual width of the hatches in the rear bulkhead and having them too wide so they don't fit within the confines of the hoist compartments. This pushes the bulkhead away from the pieces to which they're supppsed to nest.

Another problem, which I really can't fix is using 0.040" thick stock for fabricated and printed walls. The 1:1 bulkheads are barely a scale inch thick which is 0.014" in 1/72. That's too thin to work with and it would have been a mess. If you try and print to that thickness, it would form, but break as soon as you handle it.

But at 3 inches per partitiion, you end up with almost a 2 foot stacking error. In the real ship, everything is fit with no slack. Those are just the compromises us modelers work with every time we attempt to make something scale thickness.

Another challenge was the decision of printing the gun compartment parts with the detailed back as part of it and not detailed directly on the rear bulkhead. I had to make thaat choice because I didn't want all the supports attached to those details. It's hard to print parts that are highly detailed on both sides. You always want the supports to be on the plain side. When I printed the compartments I was able to have 90% of the supports on the gluing surfaces and away from all the goodies. But this decision created more thickness an complicated gluing.

That said, I'm really happy seeing it come together and when sitting behind the plexiglass and all lit up, it will be impressive and one-of-a-kind. I wonder if the other Iowas would want one...?

Oh... and one more thing. This image was included in a comment on the thread I'm posting on Kitmaker (same as this since I write this first and copy/paste it to three other forums) and it shows the "uniform" sailors actually wore in the gun pits in the 1940s. It was hot as hades in that turret in the South Pacific with no airconditioning. They're bare chested. Also, look at the color of the powder bags... BROWN! I may have to change mine. If I make the figures so are going to have no shirts. Notice how skinny they are. They'd have to be to get through some of those hatches.

Do you think if you had a jewlers lathe and maybe some photo-etched parts, it would have helped with some of it?

I have a jewelers lathe, but don't do any photoetching. Thought about it. Don't like the chemicals you have to use. That said, I can understand why the high scale HO and O locomotives are built out of brass sheet and soldered with lots of lost-wax castings. But to do that I would need a much more well-equipped metal shop. Brass would permit thinner wall structures and much stronger junctions. I am good at soldering, so that would not have been an issue. That said, I'm okay with pushing the envelope in 3D printing and scratch-building a complex structure.

Today is a milestone day. I'm declaring the gun house interior COMPLETE! Before I get to that I had to take care of some more barbette challenges. I got the upper attachment point on the spacing brackets epoxied last week. Now I had to bring the bottom edges to gether. This is a huge gap and is under tremendous tension. This required another approach. I noodled a bunch of different ways to hold it together and came up with some 1/32 phos-bronze held between two backing plates and resistance soldered so it won't be going anywhere. It's not prototypical, but it will be not that observable.
This the gap.

And here's the outside fitting. The inside looks the same.

I did both outside corners this way, but found too much tension to pull the inside corners tight without breaking something. I can't afford to break anything at this late time, so I'm leaving the inside corners with the gaps. They in the back and no one will notice (I hope). The difficulty layed with the conical bulkhead being too vertical. When it was a full-cylinder, it was correct, but when split the extremities flared out.
While I spent some time last post rationalizing why I had to put the manual sighting stations in AFTER the gun house shell was installed because the tiny telescopes had to poke into the blisters, I realized that while I could wriggle them into position, I couldn't effectively glue them in nor work on the other bulkheads. The solutionro? Cut off the telescopes. You won't see them! Really! And now I could do a careful install without working through the gun house roof.
I fabbed the missing bulkheads. There are supposed to be two; with one in the middle of the sight unit, but on the starboard side, the cutaway removes the gluing place. I realize now that I could make the one for the port side and will do that as a "recall item" tomorrow.

Here's the same on the opposite side,

I made up some tiny decals for the warning labels on the yoke face that are so prominent in pictures of the guns. The top one says, "Caution! Release yoke locking device before firing!" The yoke lock is the red knob on the top that prevents the gun from recoling when the ship is underway. There's also an elevation locking pin (which I did not attempt model) that is almost impossible to reach on the real ship.

The last thing I did was install the powder hoist cables, guides and pulley assembly. This was a simple crafting exercise that completes the gun house interior. The cable is E-Z Line Lycra fiber so it maintains tension.

I took some better pictures of the entire deal using the iPhone on a tripod, triggered with my Apple watch on a 3 second delay enabling me to hold up some auxiliiary lighting.



I cleaned up the workbench and started working on the turret shell by installing the interior portion of the two periscopes.

So here's all the parts left. There are six that go into the pan deck and the remainder are the turret clips and buffers that can't go on until the stack is placed in the barbette shells so I know exactly where they lay. The clips tuck under the ring gear and the buffers are on the same lie. And, oh yeah.. the ladder rung units that go on the central column. I haven't finalized the column. Again the stack needs to be assembled and on the wood base so I know how long it is. There's work on that column creating the entry points for all the LED wiring.


I sent yesterday's images to the curator and he kiddingly commented, "That's just a colorized photo of the ship from WW2…" That's about the nicest thing you can say to a miniaturist.

Painted the repairs on the shells and they're done ready for installation. I put the remaining details into the pan deck. The work officially commenced on the Takom Gun House shell.

I put two out of three projectile hoist trunks in the pan deck; the two that can be seen. The third, hiding behind the port bulkhead and a powder trunk is completely hidden. And it didn't fit past that primerman's platform anyway (which also is out of sight I might add) so I simply didn't spend any more time fitting it in. I made huge oversized holes in the electric deck base so I had a lot of slack for the projectile trunks, and it still wasn't enough. I had to do some minor surgery on them so they would align reasonably well. I filled these holes with epoxy putty, and sanded/painted when it cured.

The two ladders are CA'd to these trunks that go from the gun compartment floor to the pan deck enabling the primerman access.



With these pieces, the pan deck is complete.

The turret kit itself only has three sprues, so it's really a rather simple model. Boy, did I find a way to compicate the heck out of a simple model!. The turret face has four ladders and three bucklers that fit into the gun slots. The ladders were terribly distorted at each place there was a sprue connection. I straghtened them as much as possible, but they aren't great.

Because of the delicacy of the turret's plastic details, I entertained the thought of waiting until the turret was mounted onto the stack, but I had to turn it all over the place and that would have been impossible if it was attached to the stack. Ergo, I'm building it off the rest of the model as far as I can.



The bloomer bucklers went on next. It has a one-direction slot that aligns it within the gun slot. Took some careful trimming to remove to remove the sprue nubs that were directly in the way of properly mounting these parts. The arrow shows the alignment lug.



Here are all three mounted in their openings. I believe this piece of hardware is bright metal on the ships.



I test fit one of the bloomers into the slot. It's a very tight fit, but it's engineered well. The bloomers are a part that's going in AFTER the gun house is mounted on the stack.



The next details were the small rails that surround the turret roof in it's WW2 configuration. I remember how crazy it was installing the Eduard PE on the my 1:350 Missouri build in 2012. Now I'm doing it in 1/72. The kit rails are plastic that gauges out at 0.026". There are/were very fragile.

I glued in the first one on the forward starboard side successfully. The second one broke right in the middle. The third tiny one has a huge chunk out of the top of it where the sprue was attached.

At this point I decided to go high-craft and solder one together out of 0.022" phos-bronze. It was so successful, I'm going to craft all of them. I ripped out the plastic ones and started soldering them together.

This is the setup. I use a fireproof soldering pad that I got from MicroMark. It softish and you can insert wire and it will hold. I stepped of the spacing with a divider so the parts went approximately where they should end up. These are butt joints and aren't strong, but they're a heck of a lot stronger than those brittle styrene ones.



To do miniature soldering jobs, I use my American Beauty Resistence Soldering Unit (RSU) and eutectic 63/37 .5mm rosin-core solder. The RSU is expensive... one of the most expensive tools I have in the shop, but it does the impossible. With it I can solder almost anything including solid brass intricate mast system for naval vessels. It heats only the joint area and does so very quickly, thereby reducing the heat soaking of the rest of the part causing previously-soldered parts to fall off. The eutectic solder has a hugher tin content and has no transition slushy phase. It goes from liquid to solid instantly. This is especially useful in electronics work since you avoid a cold (crystalized) solder joint.

This is the tweezer handpiece I have. Not only is the heating very focused, the tweezers enable you to hold the parts in contact with one hand and apply solder with the other. You energize the handpiece with a foot switch and the current is adjustable. For this tiny job I had it around 20%. The needle points are copper clad stainless steel. I occassionally file them when materials buid up that affect conductivity.



And here's the progress so far. This was about an hour's worth. They're not perfect, but they're tough. As I progress I get better at it and finally have it perfected when I reach the last one. In this image you can also see the external periscope housings that I also put on.



Last thing I did was prepare and mount the range finder hoods. I opened the shutters so you can see the RF optics inside, and opened up the entire back which was solid plastic so the optics can pass into the hood. I did not install the outer cover since I have to insert the optics first from the outside.

My first attempt was to drill holes in the corners and then use an Xacto saw to cut between the holes. That worked, but it was slow. All the rest of the cuts were done by drilling corner holes and then using the 1/16" carbide router. After cleaning up the holes, I glued them on the shell.



I suspect that I'll have the gun house exterior finished tomorrow or maybe on Saturday and ready for paint. Being the WW2 version it will be haze gray on the flanks and deck blue on the top. As previously, I wil paint the cut edges of the roof with the red paint.

In setting up the projectile trunks, I actually was attempting to install the gun house assembly into the pan deck. The hardest part of this is guiding the lead screws into the screw boxes while juggling all the rest of it. It's actually heavyish and I can't grab it carelessly because it's delicate and stuff will break. I should have a couple of shots of soe good bourbon (Elijah Craig 18 year old... maybe) to calm me down keep me centered.

This just keeps getting better end better.