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

Looks great so far!

Glad you're enjoying it as much I am building and writing about it.

I finished all the rails today and got the life rafts attached. There's not much left to do... There's lashing that crosses over the rafts, PE/Styrene assemblies of the two floater net baskets. I should probably make some scale 1:72 floater nets.... hmmm. And lastly, there's some PE grill covers that go on the open gun house vents. I think the assembly of this will be done tomorrow.

The kit has this rear rail as a two-part affair, with a butt joint at the corner. Not going to happen. Instead I made a single piece rail. The first starboard side took quite a while. I did this the same way I did the other strbd rails, and wasn't happy with the progress. I had to redrill some of the holes two times to get the fits right. I filled the errant holes with Bondic.



I did get it done and installed.



t is so fast and concentrated that I could solder the verticals with the metal supported in the hole in the gun house. Instead of filing the angle on the end, I filed a curved notch in the middle of the wire. The notch nestled tightly against the horizontal and soldering was very clean. Furthermore, it was already aligned with the hole in which it was going to end up.
After I took the above, I went back and filed the protrusion from the lap joint. The end result is pleasing.




With that challenging work out of the way, I was back to cementing some plastic parts together. That seems so pedestrian, but it was relaxing.



There are some fine PE strips that attach to a PE ring that criss-cross the rafts. I'm thinking of going to soldered wire or using E-Z Line. If I use the PE parts I'm going to solder that
too. I'm not a big fan of CA'ing PE parts, especially if it's going to sit in a museum for a long time.

Incidentally, I probably broke five 0.022" carbide drills doing the railings. At over a buck a piece, the drills cost more than the bronze wire. One broke when a bottom of dull coat fell of the little shelf on the right side of my work space and hit the table hard. And of course the Murphy's Law corrolary, "Anything dropped will do the maximum amount of damage", was at play and the bottle hit the sanding block from the precision sander and the drill was below and of course was broken. Another broke when the pin vise fell on the floor. And a few broke when actually drilling.

There's one more dilemma I'm facing that's causing me some critical ideating. I have to slip the three lead screws into their respective screw boxes while getting all the rest of the gun house stuff into the pan deck. And you can't look down and see what's going on as the view is blocked by the now-installed guns and the gun compartment rear assemblies. The only view will be through the pan deck cutaway. And to make matters worse, one of the internal partitions completely blocks the view of the farther-most screw box. I may enlarge the cutaway that bulkhead more so I can expose that screw box.

To solve this problem, my idea is to carefully drill the ends of the lead screws and add a longer wire... much longer. And I will drill the screw box hole deeper... much deeper. This will enable me to insert the wire into the hole long before I have to seat the gun house onto the pan deck. I would like the holes to pass all the way through the pan deck out out the other side so I could guide the wire from the outside. But I don't believe I have a long enough small drill to do it. Anyhow, it's the last big challenge facing me.

It looks great and yes those carbide drill bits do break easily, I bind a couple myself yesterday.

It's not too bad if you can get the broken chunk out of the hole. Otherwise, you better drill a new hole somewhere else. You can drill out carbide with carbide.

Today I got the raft strapping completed, the PE vent grills installed, the projectile crane arm installed, some odds and end plastic details and fabbed that final gun house bulkhead. I've decided that I'm definitely going to enlarge the pan deck far bulkhead so you can see more of the port gun's screw box. That will help in getting the lead screws installed.

Before the straps I had to install some connection points. The model just has the PE somehow being fastened to the gun house sides, but I needed more since I was going the EZ-Line route. The only PE part I was going to use was the teeny-tiny central ring. The Takom PE sheet was protected by adhesive clear plastic on both sides. This was a good idea. I peeled the sheet back on the facing side, but left it on the back. When I cut these tiny rings they stayed attached to the backing sheet and really helped control them.

I erred at first using high E guitar string (piano wire) for the attachment points. This wire is really, really tough and can poke you too. I did 7 of the 16 attachments this way.



I got one raft strapped. The EZ-Line is actually Lycra elastic thread made of many strands of very fine gauge, and because of the very large surface area this presents, cures thin CA almost instantly. That's a good thing. You just make a half hitch, pull the elastic tight to stretch it a bit at the knot and apply a small drop of CA. Wham! it's cured forever.

There is this tiny ring that you have to thread on both the top and bottom strand. I installed the top strand first with the ring and fastened the line on both sides. I gave a modest amount of slack. Not much is needed because you want the line to stretch tight while being somewhat centered. EZ-Line is very forgiving.



It was at this point that I started using this.



This lovely brass wire comes from a braided decoration on a bottle of Montepulciano Di Bruzzo Italian red wine. It's a perfect gauge for fine detailing and is about 0.010", same as the guitar string. I have a 0.012" carbide drill I used for all these tie points. Believe it or not, I didn't break the drill after drilling 16 holes.

With the brass wire, I was able to push it through from the back, and bend the eye on the outside with a tweezers. Can't do that with the piano wire... it's too tough.

I did one eye on this side and then all the eyes on the opposite using brass. Much better.

I bent the wire over on the back side and used CA plus accelerator to control them.



Here's the completed strapping on the piano wire side. This will all be painted so it won't be so glaring.



When working with these tiny parts I use my parts catching cloth that's stapled under the front edge of my work surface. This has saved me a lot of floor crawling and it caught this for me today... twice.



With the rafts done I added a series of plastic bolt strips that surround the entire turret deck seal area. There were six segments and the engineering was terrific since they fit absolutely perfectly. This is a WIP shot. It was fun assembly.



Next up was the PE vent grills. Two go onto the back along with some tiny handwheels for the hatches. Incidentally, the Big J curator doesn't know what that left hand hatch goes to. The one of the right (it's upside down) is the access hatch to the turret.



And the side vents. They're at odd angles so you have to pay attention to the orientation. I use Gel CA to fasten PE. You can control the quantity, it stays put and then you cure it with a light touch of accelerator.



Since I had the turret interior on the bench I figured I better do that last bulkhead or I might forget it. Did it just like the smaller ones. It's not painted. I'll brush paint it tomorrow in place.



The floater net baskets are a flagile contruction of styrene ribs and PE grating. I have no doubt about being able to build it successful... I've built enough in 1:350, but I dread having to handle the gun house exterior when I'm doing final assembly. It has to be painted with the gun house. I may created some scale nets to go inside. I have some tulle that looks about the right hole size for the netting. I have to decide on how to make the floats. With that done, the gun house will be ready for paint and stack building can commence.

I also want to install a line switch in the base to control the lighting. Right now you'll have to pull the plug to shut off the lights. I'm not happy with that. I have a a switch and I'll have to do some surgery to enable the switch to be installed.

Oh my goodness me, this is so enthralling. Going to miss it when your done.

Thanks, but I'm reaching the point where "getting it done" is sounding better and better.

One of those days...

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times... to paraphrase Dickens.

I was able to successfully form and solder the floater net baskets.

To more easily form the shap of the large I made a buck with the correct profile. This idea came to me when I was on my way back from Costco. It made getting the right curvature with the flattened bottom much easier. I then used the same buck to hold the geometry when I soldered on the ends.



Here was the firsrt basket all soldered. CA wouldn't hold this large piece that was under some spring tension. Solder in perfect in this case. BTW: for the soldering novices out there... Solder does not form a mechanical bond between substrates. It forms a metallugical bond. It why it's some much stronger than most adhesives. The solder literally dissolves into the surfaces being soldered. It's why a thin solder joint is stronger than a thick one. The solder itself is not that strong, but the intermetalic alloy created is.

Then the first challenge came. The plastic top frame doesn't fit over the basket and not due to my soldering since the ends are inset into the sides. The sides themselves are slightly too long for the plastic. If I pressed the issue the piece would have broken. So I soldered some brass angle to the top edge. The loops that go on do fit.



This image shows the angle pieces I soldered and how tight the fit of the plastic frame is.



I set this aside for bit and went back to the main assembly. I painted the bracket I built yesterday, and looked at that bulkhead that was hiding the screw box. It was not eligable for further cutting. I bit the bullet and decided to see if I could get the lead screws into their respetive screw boxes without modifying anything. And lo and behold, I was able to get the port gun's screw seat into the screw box and get the whole gun house on top of the pan deck. I was also able to get the center and strbd guns' screws in too. Eureka!.

But the decks weren't meshing sufficiently. After evaluation, I found that the projectile hoist chases were too tall by about 1/8". Took it apart, cut off the excess and tried the fit again. Again I got the port gun's screw in, but broke both center and strbrd screws at their hinge points in the gun slides. That wasn't too bad since the guns don't move and I just glued them into the screw box and positioned pointing in the right direction.\

The gun house DID fit to the right depth. I injected epoxy around the perimeter and let it cure. Then all heck broke loose. I went to elevate the port gun more and heard a "crack"! Uh oh... what broke. This is what broke.



Notice that the center gun's screw is missing also. At first I just got depressed. Then my creative problem solving brain kicked it. I thought of doing what they do when replacing a nuclear reactor in an aircraft carrier... They cut big holes in all the decks above the reactor, take it out and weld everything together. I could cut the back open, fix the gun and glue it all back together. Drastic! I know.

But after dinner and some less panicked thinking, I realized that neither the trunnion caps nor the trunnion shafts are glued in. I should be able to remove the guns entirely, put in brand new screws and put them back one at a time and get the screws in correctly.

I can do this two ways: If possible I can bend the gun house partitions off of the trunnions and remove the caps and guns. If that doesn't work or looks like I'm going to do more damage, I can extract the trunnion pins starting with the outer guns and move the center pins into the side trunnions. That may be the best approch. Meanwhile I need to print some more gun lead screws with the load-position guns' a bit longer since they were just barely entering the screw box. And I will not post-cure them so much to leave them a little more flexible.

Oh... and one more thing... the port side long PE grill that I installed yesterday, popped off with an audible "Click" and disappeared. Yes, you read that right. It simply disappeared. I have swepted, cleaned and moved everything within a 5 foot radius and nada, bubkis, nothing. Gone!! I fully expected it to fall out of my shirt when I changed out of my shop clothes into my decent-for-dinner clothes, but nothing fell out. I'm sure I will find it. If not, I'm not sure what I'm going to do. I could print something or make something out of bridal tulle, or perhaps it will pop out of the dimensional rift that it popped into and show up tomorrow. You never know. I don't have the time to order replacement from Takom and making my own PE is the one special technique I can't do...yet.

Another day, mores problems to solve. I was worried about installing these screws and my worries were realized. But, it will be fixed. Man... I'm glad I didn't glue in those trunnions.

My you are having a bit of setback, hope tomorrow bring better luck and lots of solving problem brain f**t's.

Thanks guys for the moral support. And yes…today was a much better day… Read on.

Another dramatic save in the making. Not gluing the trunion pins saved my cookies. I was able to extracate the port gun by pulling its pin completely out, and the sliding the center gun's over to the port trunnions and freeing it also. This enabled me to remove the broken elevator lead screws to install new ones.



Speaking of new ones, in a few minutes on SketchUp and an hour+ on the printer I made a gaggle of new ones in three lengths. I made a lot and only post-cured them for 8 minutes. They bend but don't break. And I bent a couple like a pretzel in figuring out how to get them in properly.



The center screw broke at the screw box, and I HAD CA'd THE SCREW INTO IT AFTER THE TOP END HAD BROKEN YESTERDAY. So there was no way of getting that chunk out. I was able to drill it will the Dremel Flexi-shaft handpiece with a 0.033" carbide drill. The hand piece just fit between the bulkheads letting me get down the pan deck's floor. The drill broke just as a I was finishing up, but the broken piece was sticking out of the screw box. I was able to remove it leaving the hole intact.

This bird's eye view shows both the port and center screw boxes. The port side (B) is intact with its original opening. The center one (A) has the small 0.032" hole for the pinned screw. While I now can individually insert each gun's screw without worying about getting all three in at the same time while holding the heavy and delicate entire gun house assembly. That brass strip sticking up vertically is going to be the fish to pull the gun house shell wiring into the guts of the build.



I almost had another catastrophe (averted) when trial fitting the center gun when I had put it in ON TOP of the open spanning tray when it's supposed to enter the breach. I was meeting some resistance, and thankfully, didn't force anything. I was pressing down on this very delicate structure. I caught myself and did not break it. You get lucky sometimes... and frankly I was due. When they say, "hey it's not brain surgery!" I say, "It's really beginning to feel like brain surgery!"

I was also able to pull the upper pins holding the stubs of the broken screws and release the stubs.



And install the new screws. The center gun's is truncated and has the 0.032" phos-bronze wire that will be joined into the screw box. Before painting the screws I did test fits to see if I could now steer the srews into their respective openings. I was able to successfully do this. (except for that almost-breaking-the-cradle caveat). I then painted the screws the Alclad aluminum, Tamiya black panel accent color and finally some AK Interactive Real Metal wax-based buffing color. I also had to reglue the gun captain's platform which had broken some time ago and was pinned and CA'd. it broke again when I was trying to fit the scew into the socket. This time I epoxied it and it's fully curing for tomorrow's reassembly session.

I finished the floater net baskets. I used three out of four plastic end frames. The fourth fractured and was not savable. How you are expected to put these parts on a large PE structure that just CA'd is beyond me. Soldering was a much more effective way to construct this.

I used some 0.010" X .040" styrene strip to make the fourth end. It's slightly different...



The instructions showing there mounting rings added to the basket and then gluing to the turret. That might work if the rings were being glued to the kit's upper styrene frame. Since I was not using that, I had no way to correctly space them. Examining that drawing, do you see how hard it would be to CA that end PE to the body PE with now flanges?



Instead, I glued the supports to the turret first and then dropped the basket into the loops and CA'd it from the insides. This worked quite well. The molded-in ribs gave perfect alignment guides.



Here's the first basket in place.



And the second one.



I did some reseach on how to construct 1/72nd floater nets to populate the baskets, but came up pretty empty. While I can understand the floats themselves, I was unable to get any details on how they're strung together. It's not a show stopper and I'm really running out of time. If I have find some time, I'll see what I can do. However, making some crew members is more important.

The gun house is now ready for paint! I have to prepare the masking for both the shell and turret base and then reinstall the guns. I was unable to find that piece of PE even searching a wider area. Nothing. I'm going to fab and new one out of a perfect bridal tulle. In fact, it might be better than the PE it's replacing.

So sports fans, I'm dodging another bullet. I don't have a lot of time left and can't keep fixing crap that I shouldn't be breaking. Being able to remove the guns without further damage was very lucky! Hopefully I won't have to press my luck any more.

Soldier on my fried and I hope you make your deadline.

Man, what a Day, just keep one thing in mind.......... The end result

Finally, a day where all arrows pointed in the forward direction. I got all three elevation screws corrected, installed and broke nothing new. I replaced all the side PE vents with tulle. I masked and painted a coat of haze gray on the upper works, and I did some final touch up on the projectile flats and added ammunition to all the projectile decks for the final assembly.

After finally fixing the port and center gun's elevating screws, i pulled the trunnion pin on the strbd gun and replaced its broken screw also. I thought that just having the stub pointing in sort-of the right direction would work, but had second thoughts and fixed it right. I drilled out the old piece of screw in the screw box and was able to actually slide the new screw into the screw box.

So now all three are correct and I could put the turret shell on for painting. While it was difficult to work within the confines of the pan deck, it wasn't impossible and, using a long tweezers was able to maneuver the screws into position WITHOUT damaging the delicate cradle assemblies.



In handling the whole deal, I broke out the remaining side PE grills and again lost the long one. I used the bridal tulle to replace the side vents on both sides. I may go back and add some framing to these to finish them better.



I masked the insides from the outsides from inside covering most of the area with paper on which I first traced the opening.



Oh... and I used that brass strip to fish the turret shell's LED wiring down below with the wiring from underneath the gun girder. So all the wiring is staged to go down lower.

I completely masked the pan and electric decks. I also carefully removed any excess epoxy scraping with a single-edge razor blade. I will touch up the white...again... since it has gotten a bit distressed.

I added the metal guns passing them through the bloomers. Neither are glued yet especially since the bloomers need to be painted a weathered rubber color. But I needed to put the guns somewhere to paint them.

I used Badger Model Tech acrylic Haze Gray because I'm basically lazy. It's a decent paint, and the bottles screw directly onto my Badger XF-150 air brush. The labeling said, Haze Gray (early WW2), and I think it's too dark. I have Life Color Haze Gray that I used for my WW2 Missouri build which is a lighter shade and I think I will shoot it again with that color.



It looks so much better with paint.

Here's the tulle grills with paint on them. The turret shell is not fully down into its final position. When it is it covers the sort of ragged top edge of the tulle.



Here's a staged shot of the turret with my iPhone on a tripod and triggered with my iWatch and me holding up some additional lighting. I painted the range finder end caps seperately and will glue them in when the range finder optics are installed. I still have to paint the optical windows on these parts. The slide areas of the barels is masked and will reveal actual poslished metal.



With paint going on it really feels like this thing is finally coming together.

I added projectiles to the inner and outer rings on the projectile decks and I changed the color of the gypsy heads so they are polished steel with a tiny bit of brass showing at the bottom.



I have just the clips and buffers to add and that gets done when the stack is built and I can get an accurate location for them. The sit just below the ring gear. The buffer and clips go on the electric deck shell, and the stops go on the outer shell wall 180 degrees around from the buffers.

Final assembly will start in a day or so.

Looks like your forging ahead with all guns blazing. I do like the look of that turret, so real looking.

Thank you! Forging ahead continues...

With the full court press to get this thing down by December 25, I had another short, but productive, Saturday work session.

Here's a comparison of the Badger Model Tech Early WW2 Haze Grey and the Life Color Late War Haze Gray. This Life Color is the correct version in my estimation and is the one I used on my Missouri.



So I shot the whole model and here's what it looks like.



It's better. The Life Color airbrushes beautifully. After it was dry to the touch, I pulled the turret carefully off the base plate, easing as little slack in the LED leads that I fished yesterday and removed the masking. I was rewarded with no leakage.

It was time to fasten down the shell permanently. And Boy! Am I glad that I chose to screw it on instead of gluing. Gluing would have been almost impossible. There's so much stuff inside and little things here and there pushing in the opposite direction, that unless I clamped and epoxied the whole deal, it would not have stayed together. As it was, I did have to apply significant pressure in the rear to get the pre-drilled and hardened (with thin CA) screw holes to line up. The fronts also needed some coaxing to settle in, but I prevailed. I also knocked off one of the rangefinder armored ears, the port side front ladder and the shell derrick. All were fixed.



There's a lot of stuff going on it there.

Before I could button up the rangefinder armor I had to put in the RF optics. And before I did that I had to do the optics themselves. I used Molotow Chrome, folloed by a lens of Bondic, and finally Tamiya Clear Green.



Then it was time to fit them in. And of course they were about 1/4" too short. Again, a screw up that is a product of designing them without the actual model dimensions. At first I was going to extend them using Plastruct butyrate pipe, but then I remembered that I had extra optics. Glad I didn't throw them out. I needed the ends since one has a male stub with a half-moon slice and the other the female version of the same shape.

If you can't see the optical head in the open RF shield there's no point in having it there are all.

I measured the shortfall with the caliper and transferred this measurement to the spare. I then needed to make a square cut of the spare to create the extension. I could have chucked it my Taig Lathe, but it's all stored away and too much of a hassle to resurrect it just of this one thing. Instead, I gently chucked it in my drill press with the cut line just sticking out. I used a razor saw to inscribe the cut. I didn't go all the way through since it was unnecessary and could go flying off somewhere. The cut was deep enough all the way around that i could hand saw the rest. I then lightly sanded the newly cut face for a good joint.



The oddball shape of the extended part is not visible at all. I put the corrected optics into the shield and was rewarded with a good view of the lens.



I closed off the ends of the RF shields and took another picture.



The only thing left to do on the entire turret shell is highlight the cutaway edges with the bright red and install the bloomers.

The kit has some nice gun plugs which are great since the barrel's bore only goes in about 1/4" and has no rifling. The plugs are red and on Monday I highlight the center nub with some yellow.



Last thing I did was demask the gun barrels. No leakage. The polished slides on the real guns are never this color since they're lubricated and have a much browner cast to them. I may dull them down with some Tamiya Clear Yellow mixed with a little Clear Smoke.



On Monday I will also be painting the bloomers and permanenly installing the guns. I've been handling the wiring a lot and sincerely hope that all the circuits are still intact. I used Bondic as a strain relief so tension was not directly on the copper foil. I did notice one of my my Bondic "cable clamps" came loose under the turret shell roof and is no longer fixable. I hope this was an isolated incident. In most places I can reach the circuitry.

I'm predicting the turret stack will be assembled on Monday leaving the rest of the week to install a off-on switch in the wood base and build the enclosure. And maybe make some crew. If the weather is poor we may postpone the trip. If that happens and I can't deliver the model until Spring, it will give me time to purchase those perfect 1/72 scale USN crew for the insides. That would be the silver lining.