1/125 Fletcher class USS Gregory DD-802 (1944)

Victorious · Post by **Victorious** » Sat Mar 11, 2006 5:35 pm

As ever Steve, BRILLIANT WORK

Post by **Dave Wooley** » Sat Mar 11, 2006 7:06 pm

Hi Steve a superb piece of work .
Dave Wooley

Post by **ModelMonkey** » Mon Mar 13, 2006 10:00 pm

Thanks again for the very encouraging remarks!

kennylibben · Post by **kennylibben** » Tue Mar 14, 2006 8:23 am

looking great steve! love the extra stuff you've added, and the old pics help alot!

Post by **ModelMonkey** » Sun Mar 19, 2006 9:22 pm

Thanks, Kenny! Jay Milliken's photos are very helpful.

Rudder, propeller shafts and struts have been fabricated and installed.
The rudder has a working hinge though I may fix it in position to keep it
from swinging freely. The real ship's propeller shafts were painted. Had
the real shafts been left natural steel as they are on many other ships, I
would have used aluminum tubing instead of styrene. Styrene tubing is
easier to work with and since the shafts are to be painted I chose styrene.
Also note that on a Fletcher, the shafts exit the hull offset; one shaft being
longer than the other. This is due to the machinery and engine layout
inside the hull.

Hull plating has begun. The real ship's hull plating is 1/4" thick steel. In
1/125 scale, 1/4" = .002 inches. Since that's pretty thin I chose to
replicate the subtle plating by making the raised plates from thicker
layers of primer.

Victorious · Post by **Victorious** » Mon Mar 20, 2006 5:18 am

Hi Steve,
Being an ex Stoker, I am always interested when it comes to fitting the running gear. It was quite unusual for prop shafts to be off set and you have replicated this quite well.

I always use car body Red Oxide for my hulls. Red Oxide is what is used now on real ships, although years ago, it was in fact Red Lead, which is now banned.

Nice update Steve, I look forward to more progress on this model.

Post by **Dave Wooley** » Mon Mar 20, 2006 5:53 am

Hi Steve Are you using a shell expansion drawing for the plating? I found when plating Rurik that having no shell drawing made the whole job very problematic and left me rather uneasy as to whether I was correct or not but having a good library of books on ship yard practice helped enormously. I eventually ended up using gum strip paper at around 20thou. The laps are almost invisible which at 1:96 is as it should be. I enjoy very much your postings as you also deal in styrene a medium I use often.
Dave Wooley

Post by **ModelMonkey** » Mon Mar 20, 2006 7:43 pm

Thanks again, gents!

Dave Wooley wrote:Hi Steve Are you using a shell expansion drawing for the plating? I found when plating Rurik that having no shell drawing made the whole job very problematic and left me rather uneasy as to whether I was correct or not but having a good library of books on ship yard practice helped enormously. I eventually ended up using gum strip paper at around 20thou. The laps are almost invisible which at 1:96 is as it should be. I enjoy very much your postings as you also deal in styrene a medium I use often.
Dave Wooley

Yes, indeed. Bruce Ross was kind enough to send me shell expansion drawings. It made life so much easier. Love your Rurik!

Ah yes, red lead, not red oxide. Correction made to the post above! I do remember a fun movie called "Operation Petticoat" starring Cary Grant and Tony Curtis where a Gato/Balao class submarine is hurriedly repaired
using the two primers available at the port: red- and white lead leading to a pink boat. Very funny movie.

Yep, thanks to one of my heroes, Bruce Ross, I am following scans of a Bath Iron Works shell expansion drawing for late war Fletchers built there. Photographs of DD-804 and others built at Seattle-Tacoma show slight differences in the stern plating but the rest looks identical. The overlapping stern plating for those built at BIW is a distinct
band that runs round the transom. Seattle-Tacoma ships' plating appears to wrap around the bottom (and the bottom corners of the transom are rounder - not as pointy as BIW-built ships). You can see in the photo of the model above how the red overlapping plating wraps around the bottom.

Post by **ModelMonkey** » Tue Mar 21, 2006 11:14 pm

Hull plating is complete.

The hull is now ready for anchors, hawse pipes and painting. The area
below the boot stripe will remain unpainted red primer.

Also visible are the offset propeller shaft openings.

Post by **ModelMonkey** » Sat Mar 25, 2006 8:06 pm

Replacement brass 5-inch/38 caliber main gun barrels turned by Steve Nuttall.

Victorious · Post by **Victorious** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 5:22 am

Nice observation there Steve, of the correct barrel alignment, something that many modellers would have not noticed. The barrel is certainly an improvement on the one from the kit.
Good upgate.

Some of the fittings I have for Victorious, are a bit crude and will need some altering to make then look better, eventually.

Post by **ModelMonkey** » Sun Mar 26, 2006 11:04 pm

Thanks, Vic!

Replacement barrels installed. Detailing the gun- and deckhouses
continues.

les · Post by **les** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 10:50 am

Steve, how are you going to finish the hand rails? I'm finishing up fitting the last of the pieces between the stanchions on the Revell Flower. Very tedious work. Still haven't figured out how I'm going to do the cable rails.

ARH · Post by **ARH** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 12:32 pm

les wrote:Steve, how are you going to finish the hand rails? I'm finishing up fitting the last of the pieces between the stanchions on the Revell Flower. Very tedious work. Still haven't figured out how I'm going to do the cable rails.

The handrails, you should have dumped them Les and done a proper job, like I did with my 1/72 scale Flower in the gallery,

les · Post by **les** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 9:58 am

Should have done a lot of things differently. But, I wanted to do it all in plastic.

Post by **ModelMonkey** » Sun Apr 02, 2006 10:31 am

Gents,

Your Flowers are superb!

Les,

I haven't yet decided on how best to finish the rails. There are two
different types on the real ship:
1) Fixed two-rail welded metal pipe on top the pilot house and
funnel platforms. The rails are flush with the stanchions.
2) Steel cable (wire rope) passing through rings on the inboard
side of stanchions. This is what is on the rest of the ship.

I originally intended to use Toms PE set for the "Blue Devil Destroyer"
which has a lot of nice parts. But there are a some problems in using the
rails meant for the Lindberg kit:
1) the PE set's rails are all three-rail which work well for the main deck
and aft deckhouse. The fixed rails on top the real ship's pilot house and
on the funnel platforms are two-rail.
2) stanchion spacing on the real ship's deckhouses and pilot house is not
uniform; Tom's PE set's rails are uniformly spaced but this is easy to
adjust where needed.

I do in fact really like Tom's PE set and recommend it.

Options: for fixed rail on top the pilot house and funnel platforms I
may try cutting down three-rail PE rails from a larger scale like 1/96 to
make two-rail. Not sure.

Another option: fabricate the fixed rails from styrene rod which would
have a better 3-D look to them. The curved funnel rails would be tough
to do this way.

For the main deck rails which on the real ship are of the other type:
cables-through-rings. I will most likely use the same technique or similar
to that used by Ron. I have found some good small-scale "wire rope" in
both the hardware section at Wal Mart and the sewing section. I would
like to use some kind of small guage twisted wire for a good look.

johndon · Post by **johndon** » Sun Apr 02, 2006 1:38 pm

Looking very, very nice Steve

John

les · Post by **les** » Mon Apr 03, 2006 9:54 am

Steve said:

The curved funnel rails would be tough
to do this way.

(Curved rails on funnel)

Have you tried Midwest's curveable plastic??? I haven't used it, but have seen the ads in FSM. Built my solid rails with plastic. A very time consuming process. Didn't turn out bad though. The cable rails have me stumped for the moment. I may have to break down and buy the stanchions. The only thing I can think of is to build them from two pieces of round stock with beads for the cables to run though. That would be four pieces for each stancihon. Possibly you could make a master and cast the rest. Don't know. Will have to talk to my resin casting guru (R&J Products).

ModelWarships Gallery Page · Post by **ArizonaBB39** » Mon Apr 03, 2006 10:22 pm

Stephen Larsen wrote: Ah yes, red lead, not red oxide. Correction made to the post above! I do
remember a fun movie called "Operation Petticoat" starring Cary Grant
and Tony Curtis where a Gato/Balao class submarine is hurriedly repaired
using the two primers available at the port: red- and white lead leading to
a pink boat. Very funny movie.

That is a funny movie!! Your ship is looking beautiful Steve, keep it up!

Post by **ModelMonkey** » Sat Apr 08, 2006 7:32 pm

Thanks, fellas! Abe your Liberty Ship is looking great. Les, I will certainly check out those rails. Thanks for the tip!

Hull is painted. I just love camouflage. There is some touch-up to do. The flat "red lead" below the waterline and the flat black are simply automotive primer sprayed from a can. I really like the slightly brownish look of red automotive primer for use in painting the bottom of model ship hulls.

The lightest color, Haze Gray 5-H, is actually Model Master "Light Ghost Gray" which looks less violet than their Haze Gray and better to my eye. The medium gray, Ocean Gray 5-O, is Testors Poly Scale Ocean Gray 5-O. Neither was toned down for scale effect. These two colors were airbrushed using a Badger 200.

The colors were masked with Tamiya Masking Tape (very good stuff).