Greetings, fellow warship enthusiasts!
At last, I have joined the ranks of the obsessed and begun construction of my first warship hull, the Iowa-class battleship U.S.S. Illinois, BB-65. Unfortunately, the real BB-65 was canceled not too long after being laid down, but this just means that I get to be... creative... with some of the ship's details because it was never finalized.
The hull itself is one of the excellent Strike Models products and was first purchased by Bob Amend; I was lucky enough to acquire it from him last month, and for the last couple of weeks I've been doing some work on it with the hope of getting it pond-ready by the end of July or in early August. However, before you Allied captains facepalm and you Axis captains start licking your chops, bear this in mind: the primary intention for this ship is to be a big, shiny showboat for the rest of the year, before being converted into a big, shiny target for next year's festivities. Between now and then, I'll have time to learn a whole bunch before joining the mayhem.
I've barely begun to really get into the hobby before I had to learn something right away: hull repair. The boys at UPS are pretty good about getting things to people in a timely fashion, but every now and again, they forget to read the "FRAGILE" and "DO NOT CRUSH" labels that sometimes find themselves affixed to packages, such as the extremely large box that contained my shiny new Iowa-class hull. The bow got mangled pretty badly, with huge chunks of gel coat being knocked off and even some of the fiberglass damaged. Fortunately, the structure of the bow itself wasn't damaged, just the very exterior. My solution? Well, epoxy, naturally. But not just any epoxy. No, I went over to Lowe's one evening and made a fantastic discovery: epoxy putty. Now, it's been a few years since I've had to deal with epoxy, so it stands to reason they've made some changes. This putty is magic, however. Cut off a bit, work the two ingredients together, slap it to whatever you want epoxied, press and mold a little bit, let it harden and cure, and voila! A sandable, paintable, waterproof surface. It made repairing the bow incredibly easy. Now, most of you veterans will probably cry out in favor of the more traditional liquid tubes of the resin and hardener that you mix together and slather onto a ship for various purposes, and rightly so; that stuff is dynamite, too. I just didn't want to make a huge mess, so I took the easy way out. We'll see how hard use over the next few years returns on my investment.
Here's the hull as I opened the box at the bow with the shipping damage shown:
Bow View after applying the dremel to the rough edges:
Bow View after applying (a little too much) epoxy putty:
Bow View after grinding down the excess with the dremel and some light sanding:
Another Bow View, this time with hull upside down:
As you can see, there's still some work to be done with the bow, but the biggest issue was dealt with, at least for the time being. After I finished with this repair job, I started work on scratchbuilding the superstructure levels. The reason for scratchbuilding is so I can have a Sunday-best superstructure with all sorts of pretty detailing, and then a superstructure for getting shot up. Who knows, I might just use the Sunday-best SS all the time, just for kicks.
Amidship from forward, elevated to show the first two cut levels of the superstructure, with A and B turrets in their places:
Similar view, this time without A and B turrets and with another deck set in place:
None of these levels have been permanently affixed together, yet, since I still have some corrective work to do with them. Over the next few days I'll be working on the superstructure more, as well as finishing the turret hole cutouts.