The Ship Model Forum

Getting ready to start a 1/720 USS Carl Vinson in the 2014 fit. I have the Italeri Carl Vinson 1999 kit plus GMM Nimitz class PE set. I am waiting for the Trumpeter 1/700 aircraft to arrive for her. I have done some WW2 carriers but have never done a modern one so this should be interesting. I will most likely throw in a WIP thread when I get her started.

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Just finished:
1/350 USS Columbia 1945

Current projects:
1/700 USS Catamount 1960
1/700 USS Helena 1942
1/350 USS San Francisco 1944

As we suddenly have an up-to-date injection molded Colossus kit around I think it is time to re activate the 'yard. I have run into serious trouble with my L'Arsenal Glory so I have ordered IHP's new Colossus as well as a 2 level enclosed bridge by Digital Sprue. The kit and the shapeways bridge arrived in a few days. First impressions are really positive. The raised hull detail is excellent and is a good reason to do her almost straight from the box at least once as the plastic surgery for the modernized ships will probably destroy all that detail. The main parts can be assembled without glue or filler though I may be using some of it later.

I have built and painted the gallery deck straight from the box. I did deviate from the instructions by choosing a lighter grey (1:2 vallejo light grey - vallejo white) for the vertical surfaces and 'planking' the quarterdeck in buff.

The gallery deck will need some styrene roofs and some vertical styrene sheet in order to make sure one does not look through the ships.

For my korean war HMS Glory the main changes will be to the island. I have glued in the very nice bridge from shapeways to the island structure and I have built the mast and platforms. This mast has some excellent engineering. It is much easier to do than Flyhawk tripod masts and had the carpet monster not taken the all important part C88 this would have been a quick build indeed. As it was I had to replace that part in .3mm brass. I also redid one of the platforms as it had a different radar in 1952.

Conclusion after about three days' work: very nice kit. Accurate according to my drawings of Colossus and Venerable. In terms of buildability it is closer to Bandai than to Flyhawk. I like that.

Pieter, Last September while at the US National Archives I found and scanned a photo of the starboard side of HMS Glory with a date of June-July.If you are interested I can email a 10.4 MB copy off to you. If you would like it send a PM with your email address. Feel free to check with Martin Quinn, Rick E. Davis or Tracy White.

Pieter, It looks like I left out a small bit of information on my last reply, the date on the photo is June-July 1951

Conclusion after about three days' work: very nice kit. Accurate according to my drawings of Colossus and Venerable. In terms of buildability it is closer to Bandai than to Flyhawk. I like that. [/quote]

Pieter, I'm pleased to see that someone identified that! Bandai currently makes the best plastic model kits in the world, and they were influential in my design of the Colossus kit's engineering. As a modeler myself and a builder of many kits over the years, I knew what I wanted and didn't want in my kit; precision engineering and an easy build were two things borrowed from Bandai, and I guess it shows!

Mike Bartel

Umm, Mike, Bandai usually does not put the ships' boats in reverse in the instructions. You are probably doing it in order to make sure that the modeler is paying attention and is not blindly following the instructions -:)
Anyway, I have placed the boats in the right direction and I have blanked off some of the holes in the hull. I did leave out starboard side jig as this would usually be 'out' and ready to be launched during flying operations.


The island has its first paint on.


And I have started to work out how to build this in 1/700.

That's the direction my drawings showed! So it's technically correct. But you can arrange them how you prefer, or according to the year you're modeling. And I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on 1950s/Korean War fits of these ships and what we'd have to do to configure the kit for them.

Mike Bartel

This is interesting. For Colossus class carriers I am always using the big .tiff files of Colossus (Arromanches) from the old french navy website as they are scans of the drawings the french received when they took over the ship. They were still english language drawings without corrections in french. ARROMAN1943PL235 shows the boats with bows forward.
Other differences...sapguy has already done the new bridge as a 3D print. Glory had a type 293Q 'cheese' antenna on one of her forward mast platforms and a type 277Q rather than a type 277P on the upper bridge. I will be using radars from my stash but it would be nice if a type 277Q and type 293Q would be offered in the new PE set. All other radars and all of the weapons unchanged. HMS Glory seems to have carried a jig on the starboard aft platform at flight deck level during her deployments to Korea. Also the platform at the back of the flight deck was carried around to the sides and boxed in.

We have the enclosed bridge and the 277q radar parts done already; in fact I have a ton of each part here after manually cutting them off the sprues since they weren’t needed in this kit. We intended to do enclosed bridge versions later, this is why they were done. So we are part of the way there even though the plan was only to do as-built ships. Looks like we aren’t far off.

Mike Bartel

Some progress. I noticed that the flight deck on Korean was Colossus class carriers was much lighter than the other decks and that these flight decks were incredibly dirty. There is some nice color footage on youtube that can illustrate what I mean. I think they started out from the dockyards in the color scheme Mike gives us and they quickly bleached out. Note that the deck markings were carefully maintained, unlike the rest of the flight deck. So as a start I have painted the flight deck in tamiya XF-53.

The hull is has now been spray painted in gloss varnish so the decals can be put on. I will be painting, decalling and weathering the flight deck before I add any sponsons or any other detail to the hull. This will keep the carpet monster away as long as possible. I have also picked out the windows on the island by drybrushing. Will need some tweaking later but it is getting there.

And now the fun part for the day. The youtube videos of HMS Glory mentioned earlier show some really nice footage of small streamlined deck tractors re-spotting airplanes. While I will not be doing that specific scene the deck does need some tractors. Some internet research came up with 'Clarkat B's with broadened wheel bases'. L'Arsenal gives you some tractors which are the right size (2.5mm in length) but not streamlined at all. So I decided to scratchbuild a few. I first sanded a strip of evergreen 8610 into a half-oval shape.


Using a small file I opened the 'driver seat'.

The tractor was removed from the strip using a micro saw.

And back wheels were added using.5mm brass. The front wheels are hidden under the front of the tractor.
So these are my prototypes. I think the right one came out best. I will be doing more of these.

Pieter, Did the photograph of HMS Glory make it to you?

Just found it. It is a really useful photograph, thank you. In other news: 10 year old decals can fall apart. Sigh.

I wouldn't mind seeing some of those photos and drawings of the 1950s ships myself, especially if future 1950s fits are to be considered. Can Mike start getting a little consideration?

Mike Bartel

Glad to see that this thread is still alive. Nice build coming along

Thanks. Feel free to post your progress.

Hey Mike,
you do not seem to be taking pms so pm me an email adress and a specific question and I will see what I can do.

Sure, ihphobby@hotmail.com

Last post of the year...
The hull is getting its next layer of gloss varnish to seal in the decals so it is time to look at the airgroup. As luck would have it I have some 8 Fujimi clear Seafuries lying around. I like clear aircraft so combined with L'Arsenal PE from kit they now look like this:

There are no clear Fireflies around so I am stuck with the resin version. L'Arsenal only gives you 5 in the kit and as I managed to destroy some already while trying to figure out a reasonable way to fold the wing I have ordered 10 more of them. This is the prototype:

And this is how the airgroup looks now.

I have put some maskol on the clear canopies and they are currently being primed in black primer. They will be thoroughly dry next year.
So from the Amsterdam branch of the carrier builders' yard: Happy New Year and stay safe tonight!

The yard has been smelling of paint lateley. Glory now has its decals on. As some of my old L'Arsenal decals broke apart when applying them you are looking at a combination of IHP, L'Arsenal and Aoshima decals.

Typical of Korean War era British carriers flight decks is the way they weathered. It looks like a combinations of multiple slightly different colored panels. The effect is most unlike the weathered stained wood of US carriers of the period.
In order to 'get' this effect I started with masking off panels on the deck while looking a pictures in order to get the pattern right.

These panels were brush painted in tamiya neutral grey with some drops of white added to it.
After the masks were removed it looks like this.

After this was dry I started adding black washes and painting the barriers and cables. Using thin white paint I re-painted some of the deck markings as this seems to have been happening on the real ship all the time.

This is far from finished, I hope to do more weathering and repainting over the weekend.

I want to finish this :

But I don't like what I did with the rear and I think I'm going to scrap some part (it' suppose to be a flugzeugträger C interretation by the way,at first I was going to make him as a hybrid with 6 203mm but I did it badly so I changed for a flugzeugträger C base on those original document)




(I wonde rwhat those number correspond ,the total is identical for the for aircraft carrier)