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

Best wishes to your wife for a good recovery.

Wishing your good lady well, my daughter went through the same thing a couple years back and is fully recovered. Also, love to see your "candy" as you call it and the 3D prints that come out of it. Amazing.

Great work so far!

Thank you all for the kind thoughts. A short round of chemotherapy will commence in a couple of weeks, but we're expecting it to go as well as the rest of this process has gone.

The wall print was very good. I broke some of the door dog levers, but that's expected. They're very delicate and I will replace with wire. The walls fit together as designed. The overlapping zones should not detract from the overall appearance. There's a lot of stuff on the walls of this structure which will obscure the joinery.



I put together a punch list for the upper works and it has 19 items on it. So there's still a lot of work to be done here before turning my attention to the lower decks and main magazine. I almost have all the reference photos I need to finish this. I have just a couple more requrests for Ryan concerning the communications gear on the gun house rear wall, and the geometry of the cartridge chutes.

The sight setter's seat came out better than expected. The support post is delicate, but the new 3.1 second printer settings are producing small details that have some strength. I post-cured these last two batches BEFORE cutting off the supports to impart more strength to withstand the support removal. It worked well.



This little bit of floor has to key into the flanking gun mounts. I needed to find out if I could install it after the sighting system part was installed. Luckily, it could be.

This was the test.



I now had another decision facing me. Do I paint the sight system before installation or after. I put it together now. It required a lot of pushing and shoving to get it all aligned during the tests, and I even broke one of the cross-rods. This led me to believe that I would really mess up the paint job in the process. I bit the bullet and permanently glued it in now and will wrestle with the painting going forward. What I can't reach with paint won't be visible anyway—or so I'm assuming.



For some reason—probably some warpage—the trainer's regulator console didn't sit down on the frame. Rather than continue to force it, I made a shim. Again, no one will notice this when painted and enclosed in the gun shield.



Right now I'm about designing the cartridge chutes. I have good orthographic line drawings, but they don't show the contours. I don't believe these sheet metal contrivances are rectangular in cross-section. I'll do the best I can, and then, after New Years ask Ryan for some pictures of its true shape.

This is that punch list to which I referred:



Everyone have a safe and happy New Year and I'll see all y'all in 2024!

Nicely done and a happy, healthy, safe, and prosperous 2024 to you and yours.

Thanks and same to you and yours!

Looks great so far!

All the best for your wife going forward.

Thank you!

It took some extra effort to create the full ammo racks with the cartridge tanks and projectiles showing the illusions of all the ammo, but with some trickery to use less resin and make the print simpler. I got input from the SketchUp forum on how to simplify the drawings. I just pulled a huge print off the machine including all the ammunition racks for the Upper Handling Room (UHR). With the 3.1 second exposure, it seems that everything I want to print, prints, and prints perfectly. Moreover, all the tiny features have strength that I didn't think was possible. Case in point. Get a load of the Gun Captain's fold down platform. The side supports are really fine, but strong.

This post is going to have a lot of varied stuff.


I drew this part so the back frame was curved to conform to the curved rear wall and this worked nicely.

I drew and printed the massive support girder ring that holds up the massive weight of the entire rotating structure. There are form legs that support the ring and take the load into the ship's structure. The walls of the UHR doesn't actually support the gun house. I chose to draw and print the ring and legs integral with the UHR roof and the armored ring that surrounds the actual base. This includes the weather seal ring at the top. This was I was ensured that the ring would be centered with the rest of the structure.

Here's the drawing:



And here are several shots showing it in a test assembly.





I'm thinking that instead of cutting away some of the structure, I'm just going to leave the front wall off.

While many of these parts were in various stages of printing, cleaning and post-curing, I was getting to work on the gun house shield. I thought I was being smart by pre-installing the angle edges that would provide more gluing surface. Unfortunately, my first go was wrong. This was it.



It was wrong because the upper surfaces go inside the edges of the right and left walls. However, I had them flush to the edge, not leaving the single material thickness needed for the proper joint. Happily, the ABS angle pieces, don't weld well to styrene with normal styrene liquid cement and I was able to pop them off. The bottom edge angles DO glue flush to the bottom edge.

Instead of fussing with the spacing I just glued them on the roof pieces flush with their edges, which, in this cae, was the correct way to do it.

I had printed some angle pieces to hold the roof pieces at the proper angles. I also finally cut the front gun shields. These were tricky piece! There was no way to really understand their shape and how they interact with the rest of the inner structure. I made them a little longer than needed with the thought that I'd make field mods. And that's exactly what I did.

This is when I glued them to the front two angled sheets. They serve as a weather seal around the rotating gun shield and they help me join the angle pieces together. After installation the first piece I trial fit it to the gun house and found that it needed a lot of trimming. I was using liquid cement, but found it was causing the styrene to fracture. I switched to good old standby, Testor's tube cement.



I've shown this in other threads, but it bears repeating. I cut circles in styrene with a specially modified machinst's dividers. I sharpen on point to a chisel edge that's parallel with the circular path. I can then scribe perfect circles that can be snap cut. I find it easier to spin the part and hold the dividers stationary since I can keep it at a uniform cutting angle.


This closeup shows the chisel edge.



Another detail that needed work… I found that when the access doors are opened, they are swung all the way open. I had originally shaped the hinges for a 90º opening. And I wanted to have the screw holes empty and have a inner edge of the hole. I used some thin styrene sheet with 0.020" holes drilled in the matching pattern. The illusion is a good one. I've printed new doors with the hinges fully folded and no bolts.



The outside joint needed some filling and sanding. This was nice, normal, old-school model building job.



I drew and printed the last details for the gun house; the cartridge discharge chutes, and the cam brackets that sit at the back of the gun pan. With these parts everything in the gun house is printed and ready for paint and assembly.




The next up was the ammo racks that line the rear wall of the UHR. After trying different methods including those offered by readers, I was able to draw and print the 80 cartridge and 20 cartridge arrays for the powder tanks, and the projectile rack. In each case there is a big chunk of plain resin so the printer didn't have to cope with all the intersections therein.



This is what all of this looked like in the slicer. I was confident that it would all print successfully.



It did print perfectly. In the cleaner now.

Lastly, I fit the ceiling beams into the now-constructed from glacis plates. It needed a scosh of trimming to fit. I didn't allow for the over-scale thickness of the gun seals.



Here're all the racks for the UHR. I print doubles of everything, I only need one of each type, but experience tells me that all kinds of things can happen before the model is finished.



Tomorrow's Saturday, so no work in the shop on the weekends. So all have a nice weekend. Don't do anything stupid shoveling snow, it you're in an area where it going to hit and I'll see y'all on Monday.

Spellbound and gobsmacked. No snow down here, just cloud, rain and some sun.

I am often cobsmacked too when I look at what's coming out of my workshop.

When I did the 16" gun, I was also collecting reference material for the 5", but frankly, wasn't sure if I could pull it off. It's more congested and had geometries that weren't obvious to me. But like rigging a full-rigged ship model, you just do one line at a time. You don't build it all at once. You concentrate on one little thing, understand it and then attack it. You keep checking back with the total so you don't box yourself in, but you're just handling one detail at a time. Viewing the total is overwhelming.

Ah yes! The middle of Summer in Canberra. Louisville is sort of in a sweet spot weather-wise. We're south enough so our Fall and Spring are a bit longer and Winter shorter. And north enough to actually have some winter and maybe an occassional snow. UPS put their global hub here in 1996. They run 300 flights a night out of Muhammed Ali International Airport. Their facility is in the middle of the greatly enlarged airfield which has 80 gates. They chose this spot because it had the least number of shutdowns/year due to weather. If you go 30 miles north into Indiana you get much more cold and snow. If you go 20 miles south you get many more severe thunder storms and tornadoes. The same goes for Indiana in the warm seasons. I haven't gotten the official report, but I am surmising that being in the Ohio River Valley and havind a ridge that spans the river on both the Kentucky and Indiana sides to our west, creates a micro-climate that splits the bad weather north and south and tends to miss Louisville. This is not scientific. It's just my observation living here for 15 years.

incredible work !

Great work so far!

Whenever I get a little full of myself, I see a model like you constructed and it brings me back to earth. That B-24 is clearly worthy of a museum and I'm glad it's in one. I'm working in the same scale and could, if I were so inclined, to go even further with all of the tubing and wiring that this model could support. I don't think I'll go there, but what you have done clearly shows what's possibe. Thanks for sharing it with me.

While we're still talking music… Leo Fender never learned to play guitar. His forte was amp design and the electronics. The inventor of the Hammond Organ didn't play organ either. They're very different skills sets. I forgot about the Precision Bass when discussing the Strat. Same basic body design.

Short session, but productive. The circuit panels that line the side wall of the Upper Handling Room were fun to draw and even more fun to see how nice the prints came out. The printer has been effectively flawless. Even the FEP with the new Elegoo formulation has been working for months. It's very forgiving. If there's anything sticking to it, you pop it off and you're back in business. I used to be happy to get a couple of weeks without wrecking the film. Now I go so long I forget when I last did it.

Here's a view of the actual wall in the Upper Handling Room. The projectile dredger hoist upper is in the view. As you can see, I can't model it becuase I have no information about the lower parts of it.


As you can also see, part of the view is obscured by the open projectile dredge hoist lid. There's a lot of cabling coming out of the tops of the panels. I may or may not add that with wire during the build. It will be hard to see.

Here's my interpretation of the wall.


And here is the printed part. First sitting on the blank wall, and then sitting with the ring frame support separating the two parts.


It ain't perfect, but it supports the illusion. I had absolutely no definable dimensions on any of this equipment, so it's all and educated guess.

I glued in the angle brace for the lower front to glacis plate joint.


I then glued the front plate to the rest of the shield assembly. I also added some more angle brackets to support future assembly. All these resin to styrene joints are with thin/med CA with accelerator applied first.


The resultant joint needs filler and will be done later.

Lastly, I finished drilling out the open bolt holes on the now-open acress panel. I bought a whole bunch of 0.022" caribde drills from Drill Bills Unlimited. In this case I bought a shorter length and re-sharpened to save some money. I don't know what it is, but I was breaking them light crazy. I used four drills opening up these tiny holes. At a $1.50 each, this adds up to real money pretty fast for just one part.

Tomorrow my wife goes through the first of four chemotherapy sessions. She'll have one every three weeks ending in mid-March, so I may or may not be in the shop tomorrow. She's supposed to be done at 1:30 and I'm going to stay with her the entire time. I'm bringing my laptop so more design work could still get done. I can't do much more with the UHR until Ryan gets me the dredger hoist images I need.

I hope your wife's therapy goes well. That is not going to be easy.

SaparotRob said:

I hope your wife's therapy goes well. That is not going to be easy.

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Thank you! Re-read the post, there's more images on it. We're in the treatment room now. So far so good. They give a lot of auxiliary meds to prevent some of the nastier side effects of the chemo itself. Hope it all does what it's supposed to.

I've been getting more quality drawing time since I'm not in the shop. I helping my wife recover from her first chemo session. I know why people don't look favorably towards chemo. It beats the heck out of you!

With Ryans new images, I was finally able to draw the access door correctly. It boggles my and Ryan's mind that there are so many types and sizes of doors on the ship. I originally assumed that the handling room access door was the same as the access door to the gun house and drew it that way. I was wrong. As you can see it has 6 dogs, not three. It's also tapered for explosion resistant like that of the armored pilot house, although that one is 18" thick!


The inside flange has brass cams that bind against the dogs sealing the door. I'm going to model this door open. I'm going to get some of the new Real Metal Foil gold foil to simulate any brass surfaces in this model with real reflective metal.

Drawing the upper handling room hoist structures took over a day and half. I originally had it a bit too long. Ryan came through with 18 images of the hoists (upper and lower), even including a tape measure in many of the shots. It was difficult reading some of the numbers, but I was able to muddle through. There aren't many square angles. There are lots of fillets, curve edges, things lying at weird angles and mechanisms that needed to engage with one another. SketchUp is not particularly happy working with shapes such as these.

I drew it so the lid can be printed open or closed. I was thinking of displaying each unit in one of two configurations, but this woud prevent me from having either a projectile or powder tank peeking out of the top. I'll print enough so I can make a field decision.


Here's a nice rendering showing the color scheme. Any surface that can be in direct contact with either projectiles or powder cannisters is made of brass to eliminate spark hazards.


Here are the two hoists in place in the handling room.



I'm going to print this tomorrow or Thursday. The lower hoist is significantly more complicated than this one. It is the power section so there's lots of hydraulics, piping and odds and ends besides the actual hoist mechanisms.

This is what I'm talking about…


I am also going to reprint some other parts needed for the magazines, especially the scuttle doors. These were printed with the old settings and aren't up to the quality I'm now getting. I'm going to review all the previously printed parts and reprint any that compromise the quality I'm trying to hit.

Great stuff and good luck with the print. Good luck to your wife as well, she will need a lot of TLC for as you say, chemo knocks seven bells of s*** out of you, not to mention the effects of all the drugs she will be having to take.