5" 38 Mark 28 Twin Gun Secondary Battery from Iowa Class Battleships

Builder 2010 said:

Good golly indeed! If wasn't actually the person building this thing, I wouldn't know how it was done.

The reprinted parts including the platform are done and painted. I cleaned up the gun house shield back wall and airbrushed fresh white on it so it's ready for the newly resized part. Painted the white rail portions of the ammo racks waiting for the final touch up, and continued cutting out the styrene wall panels for the cabin work. So in summary, work proceed apace.

Making a new manual sight was the correct thing to do and takes advantage of having the 3D printing capacity right in the shop. The old one was just a mess and didn't belong on the model.

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I tested the new platform and it slips between the comm poles without interference so the gun house can be joined to the inerds whenever I want to do it.

All the white paint is on the ammo racks. I have to do some detail and touchup on these and they're ready to go.

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Woke up thinking about lighting scheme for the magazine and how to best run all the wiring to the electrical compartment under the wood base. There is a railing on the deck in front of the gun and I may add that along with the planked wood decking. I need more information about exactly how those rails were constructed. I will just need a little bit of it, so I could make the stanchions out of brass… much stronger than 3D printed resin.

All depends on how much time I have. I want to deliver the model when we do our visit on May 19. That sets a hard date. It's not easy for us to make the trip back East, so if I don't deliver it then it will have to wait until 3 months or more later. I don't like keeping finished commission models around. Once they're done, I want them out of my hands. I don't want anything to happen to them.

I have to get the final case dimensions and order the plexiglass and the name plate. I also have to create the AV program. I'm collecting images as I go along for it so the work will be in organization and adding all the text items. Shouldn't take too long, but it's another task that's needs to be completed.

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Yumpin' Yimminy! That is mind blowing work.

I'm in the business of blowing minds (without the use of drugs!)

With the 5"38 project showing signs of completion, I'm starting to think about the engine room challenge. To get 33 knots, over 250 feet of the entire center of the Iowas were dedicated to propulsion. Each of the four engine rooms generated 53,000 hp. The engines rooms were over 35' feet long, over 60' wide and 25' high. In 1:48 the model's volume would be 7.8" long, 16.5" wide and 6.5" high. It's not vastly large. I have general understanding of the layout, but that's insufficient. The machinery takes up two platforms vertically, with floor gratings separating the levels. I am not planning on modeling the boilers, but may change my mind.

Here's the four engine rooms withing the envelope of the armored citadel.



I'm aiming at engine room #3 since it was a rectangluar shape with square corners. Rooms #1 & #2 had tapered sides based on the curvature of the hull.

This is the floor plan of #3 from the 1st Platform level. There is the 2nd Platform level where part of this extends downward to. The low pressure turbine is very large and extends downward. The condensors are also very large and are at the lower level.



Elevation views of two rooms show equipment from different points of view. I was wondering how the 53,000 hp thrust is captured and transmitted into the ship's structure. It's not a simple thing. The prop thrust is captured by the all-important thrust bearing, but where does it go from there. I am assuming that the massive vertical beam that's attached to the ship's structure by massive gusset plates is where the thrust enters into the ship proper and propels it forward.


This view gives a good look at the size of the LP turbine.



This project won't be started for a long time, and will be on a separate thread if and when I do, but I just wanted to give a teaser of what could come.

The mind boggles....................................................again!

I'm wondering if my chiropractor can do something for My boggles??????

Is there a vaccine for that? I don't want anyone getting hurt.

I suggest drinking heavily. I was pre-med while I was pretending to go to collegge so I know.

What scale figures are you looking for? Some wargaming figures might work or more easily adapted for the gun crew. If I can help, happy to do so.

Terry

Well then… if you are truly a medical expert… heavy drinking it is. I prefer an older bourbon… let's say 18 year-old.

Yesterday's work and today's are in this post. Bunch of odds and ends. Got all the ammo finish painted and ready to install. Mounted the new captain's platform installed and it works. The gun housing drops right in place. Continue working on the styrene sheet stock cutting the partitions for the magazine. I somehow lost the cut ends of the sighting telescopes which I wanted to glue into the sighting blisters. I took the drawing of same and made a clipped off versions. I'll print them tommorow. Once they're finshed I'll glue them in. Then the housing will be ready to install with the scews.

Speaking of screws; I decided that if it would work to hold the gun house together, why not do the same on the UHR. To that end I added Bondic filler to the bottoms of the four legs of the ring frame. The screws should hold it down nicely, and again, I'll be able to take it apart should the need arise.

I power my LEDs with the CL2N3 LED drivers soldered into a small circuit board. When I was doing this for the 16" project my first attempt had their polarity reversed. I soldered together another one. That "bad" one was sitting on my bench since them. Today I successfuly de-soldered and removed them. They all survived the ordeal when I tested each one. They're not that expensive, but they're not free either. I will use them again.



I finished painting the magazine circuit panels.



Here's the new platform glued into the rear of the gun house shield.



I drew and printed the correctly sized magazine entry doors. On the magazine's outboard side is a narrow passage. On the port side (towards mid-ships) is "Broadway", the 300 foot long wide corridor that goes from turret #2 to #3 and has entry to all the magazines, four boiler and four engine rooms. The view of my model will be from outboard looking in.

I didnt even attempt to 3D print the door dog handles knowing now that most would break off. I did made a tiny hole in the drawing whcih the print did pick up as a guide for the drill. I used phos-bronze wire (0.015") for these handles. I did not put them on the non-viisible side.



I've started cutting all the walls beginning with the magazine. I'm using a fairly heavy stock for these walls thinking (probably wrong) that the magazine's walls would be thicker than you're average partitiion. Still don't know about the ceiling detail, but have an idea of how to do the roof girders.



Lastly, I got more serious about how to run the wiring and did those Bondic thickening areas to prepare to accept the screws at the bottoms. The Bondic is transparent and will be very unobtrusive.



I suspect things will be going quickly from now on. Building styrene structures goes pretty quickly, and there's not much more drawing/printing to do except for building the railing and what I do with the ceilings.

Those finished ammo racks look great.

3D modeling is an amazing thing.
I'm still boggeling!

Great work so far!

I'm going to try and make cable railings like the real ship has. In 1:48 scale, theoretically, I should be able to. So I designed and printed the stanchions. I think they'll be strong enough. They should really be brass, but that's whole other deal and I'd probably go with solid rails not wire. I also printed very tiny turnbuckles. They printed perfectly, but do not have the structural integrity to handle even applying the wire to it, as seen here.



The eye broke off almost instantly.

I did thread some magnet wire through the eye on the stanchion and it's quite strong.



I made two that also have angle braces to withstand the tension of the wire. In fact, I made a whole lot of them.



I also printed the telescpe ends for the sighting scopes and painted them semi-gloss black. I purposely did not paint the lens face. I'm going to apply All Clad silver to it overcoated with transparent green to simulate a coated optical surface. I drilled them so I could hold them with a toothpick during the painting process.



Then I went back to cutting wall pieces. I'm using some 3/32 aircraft ply for the main deck. I'm going to plank it and wood glues to wood better than to styrene. There will be a little lip glue to the front edge so you won't be able to tell it's wood. Started cutting out the openings for the access hatches.

Excellent work so far!

Not much time in the shop since I was spending hours fixing up all the nonesense with my software. Besides the SU extensions challenge (all fixed now), I ran into a problem with CorelDraw and Mac Sonoma. While I could print directly out of CD with tiled pages so I could print full-size plans even thought my printer could only hand letter-sized paper. Mac changed Sonoma so CD no longer prints at all, let alone tiled prints. I would have to buy CD 2024 to have a fix, but I don't want to incur that cost if only to get it to occasionally print over-large images.

So I did some more research and found a web app that takes over-large PNG files and coverts them to multi-page PDF files that can be printed out of Adobe Acrobat Reader. Adobe also can print "poster" objects, except…. that feature is grayed out unless you subsribe to the Pro edition. Seems lilke I was getting caught at every turn.

The app is PosteRazor. You upload the PNG, define how you want it tiled and it downloads the formatted PDF. No charge!

Like I said, I produce oversized plans a couple of times a year. I don't want to have to spend hundreds of dollars to just do that. I'm a hobbyist, not business and I'm on a fixed income and, while I don't mind paying for the software, I don't like getting hit becasue it no longer does a basic funtion like printing.

So I was able to create full-size, Scotch-taped-together, prints of the decks and elevations I'm going to need to finish the superstructure and lower deck compartments. I bought more styrene sheet to finish the job, I also came up with another way to do a scale railing.

Instead of trying to coax magnet wire to behave better, I'm going to use E-Z Line Lycra thread to make the "Cable" hand rails. I also re-printed the stanchions so the turnbuckles are not integral with the end posts. All the stress will be direct pulling and they will do just fine.



I added a flange at the bottom to control how deep they sit into the decking. I also changed the angle on the brace, so it too would sit nicely.

I reprinted the magazine access doors to enlarge the bosses for the locking dogs. They were really tiny and not giving good enough purchase to the phos-bronze handles.

With all the plans done, and enough stock on hand, all that's left is to turn all of them into walls.

I got the final base size from my friend and drew the correctly size plexiglass case. i will order those pieces this week. I also created the nameplate that will go onto the base.



I created a QR code label to direct folks to one of the build threads I'm doing, so if they so desire, can see all the gory details of creating such a thing.



And I have to do the AV program. If I don't get it done by the delivery date of May 19, it's something that I can sent later through regular shipping channels. The model can't. I have to hand-deliver that.

Has anyone considered a short video of the model's construction as part of its display?