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

I'm looking forward to painting!

I started to add the lighting circuit on the underside of the e-deck before I could paint it. I got the foil tape and tinning done, but then couldn't find my LEDs. I did a pretty extensive search and the only thing that makes sense is I somehow threw them out when doing the cleanup prior to the trip. That'll teach me not to clean the shop!
I ordered 50 new ones and they'll be here early next week, and I only had a few of them left from the previous batch, so that's the silver lining.

Part of the circuit runs over Evergreen styrene. Styrene doesn't do so well when you're soldering over it. I tested this when doing the tinning and it was okay. I'll just have to get on and off with the heat quickly. That's not a bad thing since the surface mount LEDs are very heat sensitive too. The UV resin has a much higher temp profile and doesn't really melt. It's a thermoset not thermoplastic material.

With that work stopped, I got back to the projectile flats. I found that nice new one I printed last month was almost a 1/4" shorter than its mate. I think this error came from taking my height measure from a different reference point on the drawing. The structural steel framing on the two projectile decks is confusing. I decided to reprint this critical part. Here's the new versus the old one.


The last one was redrawn with 96 sides on the circles, not 48 and this produces a much smoother curve... so smooth that I decided to reprint both projectile flats.

I used this as an opportunity to fix some other issues that I had with this part. I also decided to draw the double powder trunk as a cutaway objects with nicely formed walls. Since I'm reprinting stuff, might as well do it all correctly. I really wasn't all that happy with the results of my chopping and grinding activity on the other trunks.

And on that theme, I'm also reprinting the deck rotation machinery that goes inside this structure. My original had the control link coming off way too low. The control is actually around head height on the outside of the inner shell. I also made it a better part all the way around. I'll reprint this today and it will all be ready for assembly on Monday. The upper level control needed some serious bracing if it was going to hold together as a little 3D printed part. Here's the new view showing the revised parts.


I'll just keep doing stuff over and over until I get it right. The only expense is resin.

Looks great so far!

Thanks Guys!

Happy Monday. All my reprinted parts are now done and almost all cleaned up. This week should be an excellent week to do the solvent painting outdoors. October is my favorite month!

The session was foreshortened today. I had an appointment in the a.m. with my urologist to decide to do anything with my PSA numbers that floating around in the 4s. We're going to take another measure in 3 months. At my age, 77, PSA numbers don't matter as much as do with the younger guy. And then this afternoon started some physical therapy to help relieve my annoying sciatica. Otherwise, I'm doing just fine.

All of the insides as well as the exterior shells of the two projectile flats are now renewed and correctly sized. Starting with the cutaway powder trunks. The difference between my feeble attempt to thin the walls of the previous, full-size trunks and my newly drawn and printed (as cutaways) trunks is painfully obvious. I still had sanding to do on the new printed parts.



Here is the reprinted inner ring turning machinery. In this print I set it up with the control rod facing the build plate and the gear head on the hanging end, therefore having no supports on this detailed portion. And it shows. The gear came out beautifully and meshes with the ring gear running around the deck circumference. It's interesting... even in this close coupled mechanism, the designers chose to have a motor attached to a hydraulic pump, piped to a hydraulic motor driving the gear box. It probably provides good control and protection against overloads.



Here's a top view of the newly printed projectile flat.



Here's the full stack showing both projectile flats. Their heights are now identical. Almost had a catastrophe, but it was averted. I thought I had cut through the majority of supports and went to rip the part off the remaining few. I miscounted. There were more supports on the thin circular wall than I realized and it fractured the wall like a spiral leg fracture, from the top edge one third the way around until it stopped at a thickened parts where one of the electrical boxes was attached. Again, with the help of Bondic, I reattached it, sanded off the excess after it cured and alls well again.

The cutaway powder trunk gives ample view into the space. The motor is hidden... I guess I could cutaway part of the central column...

Great work so far!

Thanks!

Yesterday (Friday) was somewhat frustrating! The weather was good for painting and I really wanted to get everthing I could primed. I had to do some mods first. The projectile hoists didn't match the wall height of the projectile flat core. I had originally drawn these to match the shorter height, but I changed that last week when I found that the two decks were different heights. So I reprinted both of them to the higher wall height making the projectile hoists now too short.

So I used the surface gauge and laid out a cutting line to make the walls the same as the hoists. All good? Well... maybe not as good as it should be. Here's the new wall height.



And here's the stack showing the nice tight fit.



Then I found out why the two walls were different heights in the first place. Due to the large boss hanging down from the electric deck, the upper projectile flat wall height was shorter than the lower projectile's deck. In other words, I had forgotten that I had alredy accounted for this difference when printing them originally. The two walls were intentionally different. So now the lower deck's hoists fit perfectly as shown above, but the upper hoists are anout 1/8" too short. I really don't want to print another deck, nor do I want to mess with the drawing and print another set of three hoists. They were tough enough to get right the first time. I think I'm just going to scratch build some spacers to close the gap.

The next frustration kept occurring as I was adding pieces to the painting board. Some of the components, which I thought were fully done, were "almost fully done" and required some additional cleanup. One of the rear compartment prints had the spanning tray break off...AGAIN! This piece had a very thin weak spot as the tray joins into the cradle at the faux hinge. I've had to reinforce them with Bondic. It's that point that broke. I had to sand off the old Bondic and re-attach the piece. So this all took longer than I wanted. I was short on time. I had a physically therapy appointment at 4:00 to work on my sciatica.

I did finally get all the masking done of the projectile decks including the three spots on each where the hoists will be glued.



With that, all the big parts (except the rear bulkhead and the gun girder) are ready for primer. Masking the electric deck took a bit of time also.



Here are all the rest of the parts ready for paint. I masked the gun recoil slide area which remains as natural metal. I'm using the gun barrels as a convenient handle to paint the slide/yoke assm.



And the rest,



Besides the aforementioned gun slide, rear bulkhead, there are still a ton of even smaller parts that I'm not going to prime. Many will be painted when they're glued into their final locations.

The last frustration that kept me from painting was finding out that one of my LEDs illuminating the powder flat was sitting where the double powder trunk was going.



This is why!



And here's the fix. Re-rounting the copper foil tape to the rear. And as I'm looking at this image, I see that the other LED is also where the single trunk's going, so I have to move that too. Ugh! I don't know why soldering the LEDs over the styrene patch didn't clue me into the fact that the powder trunks went there. It just seemed like a good place to put the lights. Ran out of time before installing the LED. When I repair the tape, I no longer rely just on the tape's adhesive. I add solder to ensure a good electrical connection.



I have to keep reminding myself, "Scratchbuilding is fun! Scratch-building is fun!" Whenever I complain to my wife, she reminds me, "It's your hobby, no one is telling you to do it!" She is very unsympathetic.

Weather permitting, on Monday I'll have the LEDs re-routed, the spacers fitted on Projectile Flat #1 and get some primer put on. I'll also have the gun girder and back bulkhead ready for paint also.

This sure is a cracker.
Net worth about 2.5 Mil I would judge!

This is really unbelievable.

Your dedication is second to none and the whole thing is just mindblowing.

Amazing work.

Looks great so far!

You guys are way too nice!

Happy Monday. The weather was PERFECT for outdoor painting. I took all the major and medium parts outside and used what was left of a can of Tamiya gray primer for the gun barrels, a full can of Tamiya white primer and then some Rust-oleum flat white for what was left after I ran out of the Tamiya white. I just plop all the parts on the boards to which they were stuck using rolled blue masking tape onto another big piece of cardboard and that onto the top of our two trash totes. There was just a slight breeze and I wore my full 3M chemical vapor mask since there was lots of spray around. I even took off my Apple Watch and put it in my pocket so it didn't get hit.



The big parts had their bottoms painted too. When the upper paint was dry enough to turn over, I sprayed all their bottoms. The LEDs were masked with the Molotow Liquid Mask.



The Rust-oleum needed 20 minutes to dry to the touch. I used the time to do the lighting scheme for the turret gun house. This time, instead of soldering over styrene, I made a laminate using some 1/64 aircraft ply. The wood will withstand the soldering temp much better than the styrene will. I use Eutectic Solder which has the lowest melting point of tin/lead solders. It has the same freezing and melting point with no transition zone. It is 63% tin and 37% lead and melts at 183°C (361°F). Having instant-solid transition eliminates the opportunity for a "cold" solder joint. Cold joints occur with other solder blends when the joint is moved during the time when it is slushy (neither liquid or solid). The crystaline structure that forms is non-conductive and ruins electrical conductivity. It's slightly more expensive, but it's worth it.



Again, I used Bondic to make instant wire clamps. I again used the 3M transfer tape to hold the front and back light assemblies into the plastic shell. This will all be painted white like the other walls.



I'm thinking about scratch-building the last bit of wall detail that goes on the back wall of the gun house. These are basically a bunch of wiring and junction boxes.

So here are all the pieces back in the drying solid before the detail painting begins.





As an aside, the exercise program I'm working on along with the TENS 7000 that I bought from Amazon appears to be working. It's making the sciatica much better. The TENS unit stands for Trans Epidermal Neural Stimulation and uses high frequency electrical waves to quiet the nerves down that are generating most of the pain signals.

Tomorrow, I will begin some detail painting. I also have to bite the bullet and start working on the final pieces of the puzzle: the outer barbette and outer shells of the lower decks.

Now I got the Rustoleum commercial theme stuck in my head.

So, laying painted on the table, it looks like an very expensive kit. great to see all the parts in one light coler. the "clamps"you use are very likeable to the whole construction

Just thinking.................. sorry
I wonder if upside down sticky back shelf paper would work insted of all that time spent on rolling tape!
Specially for All That fiddly stuff?

Looks good man!

Shelf paper could be a nice way to go. The rolled tape isn't difficult, just repetitive. Always looking for a better way to do stuff.

Very short session today, and I woke up thinking about how to make the outer cylinders and the barbette. I decided to hold off in detail painting until I get further along with these outer barrels. Reason? There are some critical fits to the inner structures and the round outer decking that must bridge the gaps between the inner and our barrels. I don't want fancy paint and detail parts in the way as I massage all this stuff to fit. And massage i definitely will have to do if past experience is a prolog to future experience.

I already printed out the patterns for these cylindrical shapes. This one is the biggest. It is the outer shell for both the powder flat and the lowest projectile flat. It is also cut on a bias at the bottom where the entire stucture is welded into the ship's framing. Only on turret #1 is this angle cut made as the ship is already narrowing at this point. There are no powder magazines flanking #1 turret because of this narrowness. The other two turrets have some room between the turret cylinders and the ship's armor belts.

Here's Jim Slade's rendition of this barrel (straight and tapered portions) that he created from the actual ship's drawings. The fingered extensions at the cut off portion are the weld points to tie the turret into the ship's structure. Notice that this is where the roller bearing and gear rack gets mounted. I hope to be able to do mine this way also. Ttuhat hatchway is the only opening into the turret other than the entrance under the rear of the gun house.





As before, I stick the pattern onto the 0.040" styrene with the MicroMark Pressure Sensitive Adhesive, just lightly applied to the edges. I then scribe with a #11 blade and then snap it aprart.

Here's all the parts for this barrel. The circle will serve two functions. It will be the former to mold the sheet into a drum, and it will provide the stock for the annular decking that is around all three lower decks: powder flat and the two projectile flats.

The odd shaped pieces will be the angled flats that get glued in after the cylinder is formed.



My challenge is three fold. I have to get that stiff 0.040" styrene into a cylinder with the ends matched and glued so it won't pull apart. I aslo have to glue in the annular decks which will reinforce the cylinders, and lastly, I have cut the entire cylinder assemblies in half since I'm planning on doing it as a clamshell.

That splitting into clamshells is a huge question mark for me. It has some unique value in showing what's going on in that annular ring, e.g., the air bottles and the powder scuttles. But it will be very challenging to get the cuts done AND STILL have the halves maintain their cylindrical profile. I'm rethinking this idea and will maybe revert to cutting away some of the cylinders in strategic locations while still preserving their structural integrity.

First things first. I've got to form the cylinders and glue them in such a way to keep them together before any cutting.

Any ideas of how to best roll and glue this large, cumbersome cylinder would be appreciated!