OK, so I finally compared my 1/200th Arizona hull to plans to see if I could figure out what about the blisters was bugging me.
Executive summary: members of the Accuracy Police and Fellowship of rivet counters should just give up and not bother with this kit; even waterline the hull has problems.
So; methodology: took some 1/192 plans from
The Floating Drydock, scanned in the hull lines, and reduced them to 96% original size in Photoshop to reduce to 1/200th scale. Printed out multiple copies and cut on the lines for a few selected stations (Tom chose to not follow the Navy frames and create his own; thankfully they roughly follow a 7.5 frame interval so it's not too difficult to deal with). Station 18 at Frame 135 (roughly the "leading edge: of the rear prop shaft A frame) fit pretty well. None of the others did, but they consistently fit bad averywhere, meaning it's not just the blister that's wrong, but the entire hull.
For example, the forecastle deck is the deck from the break forward; the hull sides below this deck has a slight
tumblehome apparent in both the FDD plans an the Alan Chesley plans provided in Paul Stillwell's "Battleship Arizona" book. The kit lacks this; the hull sides are purely vertical in this area. So does this make the deck too narrow or the hull too wide? I didn't measure to find out.
The forward blister and sections are profiled incorrectly, and the blister is frequently too wide in areas. I may just heavily sand down the blister near the bottom to streamline it a bit more and call it good. To a "trained eye" the lower hull looks too fat and blobby, but 99% of the viewing population won't know any better.
That said, I do plan on trying to fix the prop shafts and struts at least.
_________________
Tracy White -
Researcher@Large"Let the evidence guide the research. Do not have a preconceived agenda which will only distort the result."
-
Barbara Tuchman
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