Puttering in the Study

Revell angled deck Essex - bow "knuckle" & flight deck installation

One of the characteristics of the SCB-125 Essex class carriers was a prominent crease or "knuckle" at the bow which marks where the class' original open bow was plated in from the forecastle deck to the gallery deck. The knuckle disappears where it meets the hurricane bow, which was all-new construction, and this is approximately where the anchor is located.

On the modern carriers there is no crease - it's a smooth curve up to the flight deck - but on the modernized Essex class ships there is a distinct line.

The 1943 Essex model above shows the "lip" at the forecastle deck.  The lower edge is what would become the "knuckle" in the postwar refits.

Unfortunately, when I measured the kit's version of the knuckle - which is really just a bulge - it was significantly below where it needed to be.  The correct location is the upper pencil line, and the kit location was the lower.

So I sanded the existing knuckle down with the Dremel (ignoring the fact that as I've noted previously, the hull is a little wider than it should be here anyway), and glued strips of angled plastic.  That white strip will tell me where the curve changes, and provide a sharp line that will hopefully match that on the real ship.

I did a little more work on the gallery deck and port sponsons before realizing that it was time for the big step - reattaching the flight deck. I double checked that all the gallery deck sponsons were sanded down properly, and marked the parts that needed plastic cement and the ones that needed super glue (the resin hangar deck needs it where it attaches to plastic).
Next step is the one I've been looking forward to for a long, long time - puttying the bow into the gallery deck - now with an accurate "knuckle" to guide the sanding. The selfie at the top is the current status with two applications of putty (too thick and it won't dry properly) - with the lower (hull) section getting a sanding in between.  The upper (forecastle) part will need a couple more applications before I can start shaping it.

 

 

 

The Devil Rides Out - Dennis Wheatley

I don’t know how this happened. Some post somewhere suggested that this was a classic piece of horror fiction from the 1930’s, and it ended up being almost camp.

The summary of the 1950’s Hammer movie based on it (which tells you all you need to know) tells the story:

”When the Duc de Richleau (Christopher Lee) and Rex Van Ryn (Leon Greene) arrive at a fashionable party thrown by de Richleau's protégé, Simon Aron (Patrick Mower), they soon realize that the party is in fact a gathering of a Satanic cult, led by the high priest Mocata (Charles Gray), that plans to initiate the beautiful Tanith (Nike Arrighi) that night. It's up to de Richleau and Van Ryn to defeat the devil-worshiping Mocata and save innocent young Tanith and the others from a terrible fate.”

That’s pretty much it.  The best part of the book was the 1930’s environment it was set in, complete with cars, manor houses and airplanes. It wasn’t bad at all - it was about like watching an old episode of MacGyver. Or, candidly, a dramatic version of a Scooby Doo episode.  That’s just true horror fiction though.  It wasn’t remotely scary or supernatural.

The Devil Rides Out - Dennis Wheatley

I don’t know how this happened. Some post somewhere suggested that this was a classic piece of horror fiction from the 1930’s, and it ended up being almost camp.

The summary of the 1950’s Hammer movie based on it (which tells you all you need to know) tells the story:

”When the Duc de Richleau (Christopher Lee) and Rex Van Ryn (Leon Greene) arrive at a fashionable party thrown by de Richleau's protégé, Simon Aron (Patrick Mower), they soon realize that the party is in fact a gathering of a Satanic cult, led by the high priest Mocata (Charles Gray), that plans to initiate the beautiful Tanith (Nike Arrighi) that night. It's up to de Richleau and Van Ryn to defeat the devil-worshiping Mocata and save innocent young Tanith and the others from a terrible fate.”

That’s pretty much it.  The best part of the book was the 1930’s environment it was set in, complete with cars, manor houses and airplanes. It wasn’t bad at all - it was about like watching an old episode of MacGyver. Or, candidly, a dramatic version of a Scooby Doo episode.  That’s just true horror fiction though.  It wasn’t remotely scary or supernatural.

With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa - E.B. Sledge

This is the first of several books that were required reading for my first WW II Studies course, and while only part was required - the portion on Okinawa, I read the entire thing since I was familiar with the author because he is one of the primary characters in the HBO miniseries The Pacific.

They were not wrong to focus on him.  Sledge had a distinguished career as a college professor and only wrote what was initially intended as a private memoir for his family late in life, but he - like Alvin Keenan, who I’ve written about previously - puts his academic skills for writing to good use here, narrating how Marines were trained and how they fought in two of the worst battles of the war - Peleliu and Okinawa.

The book is rightly considered one of the best military memoirs of all time, and we’re fortunate that someone stared at the horrors of close combat over a prolonged period of time, and had the ability to explain to the rest of us what he saw.

The Shadow Land - Elizabeth Kostova

I am an eternal follower of Kostova because I loved The Historian so much. That means I will (eventually) drag myself through even this book, which tells a lengthy story about political persecution in postwar Bulgaria.  

As always, it’s well-written, but it was mistake to get it on audiobook, where I had to sit (drive, actually) through the endless travails of the narrator, who discovers the story of a political prisoner in Bulgaria during its tenure at a communist satellite of the Soviet Union. I could have sped-read through much of it and gotten the story without marinating in the misery.  Yeah, that’s shallow of me, I know, but this is one I came really close to never finishing.

Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journey - Michael Collins

Collins’ book about his experiences as an astronaut in the space program is hands down not just my favorite astronaut memoir, but probably my favorite memoir of all.  He is good at relaying the relevant information about his experiences in a way that makes you understand what he’s talking about.  And funny - he is so funny.  No matter how serious the issue, he sees the humorous side.

If you’re going to read one book about an individual in the race to the moon - this is the one.

Revell angled deck Essex - gallery deck pt. 2 - gun platforms and sponsons

The Revell angled deck Essex is a little like the AMT Star Trek Enterprise in that I’ve looked at the models hundreds of times more than I have even photos of the real article, so sometimes it’s a surprise that the familiar arrangement of the kit doesn’t match the real ship.

One of the examples of this is the gallery deck platforms for the modernized carriers’ 5” .38 cal. guns.  This became a consideration when I decided that the platforms were far enough off - primarily that they were .04" too low - that I would rebuild them to match the 1966 plans and contemporary photos.

The basic plan was to sand the existing platforms flat and place new correctly elevated and shaped platforms on them, then rebuild the sponsons as needed.  That ended up being a bigger project than I initially anticipated.  (These photos are taken while I'm still sanding and fitting parts together, so the appearance is not final).

Port - forward

The platforms on the port side are original to the ship’s construction during World War II, but there’s a major difference forward.  While the shelf supporting the mounts looked fine at first glance - after all, I’ve been looking at it for 40 years and never noticed anything - when I checked my 1993 photos of the Yorktown I was surprised to realize that the platform doesn’t sit on a shelf at all - it rests on a sponson that’s smoothly faired into the hull. Can’t imagine how I missed that.  

Now the 40mm quad that it once held aft of the 5" mounts was on a shelf, as shown in this February 1, 1943 photo of Essex newly commissioned, and maybe that was the origin of the kit’s configuration, but by 1968 the Essex’ had been removed.  One difference between the kit gun platforms and the real thing was that the former didn’t recess under the flight deck as they should have, so that adds some shadow detail to the model - as shown in this 1968 picture taken during the Apollo 7 recovery operation - precisely the period I am building the ship to.

I built the sponson up using putty, and after cutting out essentially the entire hangar and gallery deck of the kit in this area, I reconstructed it using sheet plastic, and left an opening for the new platform.

Port - aft

The aft platform was correctly shaped, but extended significantly too far out, so I cut the sponson back, sanded the existing platform flat, and added the new platform on top of that.  Kudos to the designers of the original 1957 kit here - after studying a Yorktown photo closely I noticed that the forward edge of the sponson was slanted slightly as a result of the hull being slightly wider here after the SCB-27A conversion.  Sure enough, the kit’s sponson is slightly slanted the same way.

Starboard

The starboard sponson was new to the Essex class ships, but reminiscent of the same platform on the older Yorktown class ships and appears to be the same as the existing port sponson , although the platform somehow extends further from the flight deck, and the recessed area is less.

But in studying the photos it became clear that the sponson extended significantly further back than the model - so I added sheet plastic platform deck and framing and puttied it in. As the existing platform stayed in place it shows how much had to be built up.  I then placed the new platform on top of the old.

More sanding next, and finishing up the hull and getting the platforms glued in place, then I'll prime everything to make sure it's good.  Then it's time to start adding railing to the platforms.

BTW there is also a completely new sponson on the starboard side aft - it's already had railings added and been painted, so it doesn't show up as well as the three new platforms.

When the flight deck is added, there will be yet more extreme puttying and sanding, of almost everything forward of the sponsons, so we're a long way from starting detailing still.  But I thought I'd bring out the 3D printed gun mounts for the overall picture at this stage.

Revell angled deck Essex - hull reshaping

What a mess.

I didn't have the Floating Drydck plans when I widened the hull the appropriate 4' each side and faired it into the bow and stern using photos of the Yorktown from 1993, assuming that the Revell hull was accurate except for the widening, so with the additions being no more than .08" how wrong could I be?  But the further I got into looking at photos I realized that my Essex was looking kinda stout around the forward midsection, so today I cut out the hull sections (focusing on 26, 41, 51 and 62) and attached them to a jig set alongside the model base to see how accurate the forward hull really is.

It's not good.  As shown to the left, fames 26 and 41 - especially 26 - which are forward of the added hull width - are hopelessly too wide. By (aggressively) sanding with the Dremel  I was able to get frames 62 and 51 (shown to the left below) almost dead on, but couldn't get much more than a quarter inch in the forward sections without sanding through the original kit hull.

The problem is the the original Revell hull is too broad through the waterline.  The Essex class had a hull shape not unlike the Yorktown that has been analogized to a Coke bottle shape - very narrow as it goes forward. This was missed most famously by Trumpeter's 1/350 Hornet (CV-8), but this is a similar error. The hull shape is just a generic barrel, narrowed at the bow and rounded at the stern. In fairness, it's much more accurate than the other ships Revell was putting out in 1956 - the flat-bottomed Missouri and Midways come to mind - but it isn't accurate for the Essex, either as-built or modernized.

I didn't fully realize this with respect to the SCB-27A ships until I saw a video about the 1/350 Intrepid kit (hull shown at right) and realized that the Revell hull shape was too far off to let alone, even this late in the build.

But what I discovered was that the error was much more than the thickness of the hull itself.  So while I could theoretically sand through the hull and reframe the entire thing from the inside, that was more work than this resurrection build really needed at this stage.  So I sanded as much as I could to try to get a concave hull cross-section, and puttied over it. 

Now I already knew the bow was not fine enough and had hollowed out the extreme bow to try to get a better shape for the cutwater, but the problem just got worse from there, it turned out - the model is just too broad back to frame 51 or so.

I would recommend that anyone seeking to accurize the Revell kit use the FDD cross-sections and rebuild the forward hull from the forecastle deck down - essentially start the rebuild by accurizing the entire hull, rather than just slapping on a double layer of .04" sheet to represented the widened hull as I did.  That gets you most of the way, but if you want the best result - rebuild the forward hull.

 

Revell angled deck Essex - gallery deck pt. 1

The whole reason for this resurrection build of the 1957 Revell kit I first built in 1981 was to get the hangar deck walls - which were originally the outer hull of the ship all the way down to the waterline - to line back up with the flight deck. The Revell kit has the hangar wall inset, as shown at right in a picture of this kit as CV-31 before I took it apart to start this build.

As the above photo next to the 1/700 1943 Essex shows, the flight deck is finally aligned (there's now a tab near the stern that holds it in the right position) so that the hangar sides match it exactly.  This alignment will be even better when the flight deck is glued in place, but then obscured when the catwalks are added, but it's rewarding to see it now.

With  the flight deck aligned, the next step is adding the gallery deck around the sides of the flight deck.  I measured the precise height using the FDD plans and cut strips of plastic the appropriate widths, keeping in mind that the flight deck is approximately .06" thick already, generally over a third of the finished height.

The starboard side needed an additional 5" gun gallery aft so after a couple of false starts on the measurements I finally got that built into the hull with a recess in the gallery and flight deck above it. 

Next was the very odd shaped section over the forward hangar deck opening (the white plastic in the photo to the left below).  The photo to the right, taken shortly after the Essex' SCB-27A modernization, showed the shape of the gallery deck, which in most photos is obscured by the catwalk. With this photo as a guide, I was able to locate the right lines on the blueprints and duplicate them in the right scale. Again, it'll be obscured by the catwalk, but it'll be right.

Essex (CV-9) off Japan or Korea - Summer 1952

 

 

Setting the correct elevation for the new 5" gun tub on the starboard side made me realize that the two forward 5" tubs would need to be raised slightly - in fact completely rebuilt - so for a change of pace I moved to the port side and did the corresponding weird forward section, as well as some initial bracing for the angled flight deck sponsons as I start to figure this area out. 

The thing about the gallery deck is that contrary to how almost every Essex carrier model is built, the gallery deck needs to be full height all the way to the hangar deck walls (in most cases it runs all the way across the ship) and not just a flat panel hanging off the side of the flight deck. So once I had the outer face in place I put spacers and a bottom all the way back to the hangar deck - which is why the above photo is from below.  This ended up being a lot easier than I had feared, so when I got a few minutes later in the day I went back and added the same thing for most of the aft starboard side as well.

 

Essex (CVS-9) in Hamburg - 1968

As this (right-side up) photo from the Essex' 1968 visit to Hamburg shows, this area will be covered with a lot of detail once the catwalks and life rafts are in place.

 

Marshall: Organizer of Victory - Leonard Mosley

Several years ago, when I was looking at whose portrait I would put over my non-naval military history shelves, I had a hard time deciding on someone. Naval was easy - the steady hand of Chester Nimitz during the Pacific meant he was the first of the bas-relief medallions. 

But who for the military?  I considered Winston Churchill for a long time since there are few leaders who make the decisively right choice at the right time with such enormous consequences as his in the summer of 1940 to stand against Hitler.  But even before reading Hamilton's complete trilogy, it was already clear that Churchill as a military leader had serious flaws, and his support for colonialism was a bridge too far.

But who else is there?  Most good military leaders have limited scope, and few are free of bad decisions.  Patton?  Not MacArthur, certainly.  Montgomery, Eisenhower - maybe Grant? 

 

Finally I realized that there was a single figure who was the indispensable man at the center of the U.S. preparation for war, whose integrity and good sense made so much of what the Allies accomplished possible.  To be sure, his strategic sense can be questioned.  His belief that France could be invaded by Allied troops in 1942 or even 1943 was wrong, as was his opposition to the peripheral operation that did make sense - the November 1942 invasion of North Africa. Nor is his management of the Army before Pearl Harbor beyond reproach, although there he had a lot of company.

But George Catlett Marshall was a man of honor and accomplishment, as this book I picked up two months ago at a HPBooks in Waco makes clear.   It was actually a really good read - but what I'll always remember about it is the incredibly poor quality of the paper.  I've never seen such a relatively new book (1983) so eaten up with acid. The paper was substantial but quite brittle.  I was glad when I finished it, not because I was glad to be done reading it, but because I was glad to be able to stop handling such a fragile book.