1/700 USS Arizona (Hobbyboss)

[Tomathee]

Howdy folks, bit of a wordy start but I've some catching up to do. As alluded to when I finished my last build thread in June (plus however long had passed since finishing the model) I put a stop to further work due to the likelihood of a house move. That eventually happened at the end of September and the several weeks since have been mostly filled with decorating and unpacking in any free time. The past week has slowed down a bit while waiting for things to happen (furniture deliveries, free days for painting etc) but by no means are we 'back to normal', if that ever existed. The spare room is a bombsite, there are boxes still at relatives, most rooms are still to be decorated, there's a long list. Anyway back on topic, with occasional glimmers of free time I started putting back together some of the 'fun' stuff rather than endless boxes of crockery and tea lights. Fortunately (depending on how I look at it), the PC gaming I had used to fill the time in the past several months didn't really click (doesn't share a room with main TV to play from the sofa among other things) so I quickly turned back to what I needed to do to get modelling back up and running. I unearthed the box with all the tools/paints etc from my brothers house amongst several tons of Christmas decorations and emptied it into a cupboard space I had secretly been keeping free. However the box(es) with the models were and still have not revealed themselves. Not wanting to wait, as the next several carloads will be the aforementioned decs in time for December and cause another few weeks of delay I needed something new to at least fill the gap. I headed to my local with a spare tenner in hand (note, if I ever had space to grow a proper stash it will be lethal to me currently working within a lunchtime walk of a very good model shop). I ended up in a choice between a Tamiya 1/35 land rover, a Revell 1/700 ship (USS Indianapolis possibly) and what I ended up with, chosen as I thought it would be easier to paint than the land rover, given I temporarily have even less space than the part time dining table I had use of before (sold for a new one so I won't be risking paint spillages etc, and it may be a while for sufficient space to appear in the spare room to look at desks/tables to work on). So I'm currently down to a tray on a corner table in the lounge, by the way plumped for Arizona as the other one appeared to be just a waterline from the wording on the box.

 

 

 

For £7.25 I'm not too bothered about what I end up with, I've never done a ship before so I'm not expecting miracles. Hopefully it will be a fairly quick turn-around to get back warmed up while other things happen (kits turning up, unpacking to clear space at least temporarily to use instead of a tray, boarding the attic to take junk out of the spare room leads to sorting out a permanent desk/table, which leads to opening the door for an airbrush, and so on). In the build-up to moving I wrapped up another hobby and sold/moved everything on (tropical fishkeeping), it had held little interest for me for some years and aside from maintenance I hadn't really wanted to do anything with it, so it's been liberating to have one less thing on my plate. It had played on my mind that perhaps the same would happen here, and that with new surroundings I wouldn't have the same interest. Glad to report from unpacking the boxes of tools and paints I couldn't wait to get started though. I also realised that this week was my 2nd anniversary of joining BM, so I had a push to get everything in place and create a free hour to make a start.

Given the reduced space and some of the frustrations of the three models I've so far completed (I know, terrible work rate), I decided to have a bit of a restart and simplify things for myself. I think with all the reading of magazines, forums, youtube builds etc I'd picked up so many things that I was trying to remember and juggle in when I did my builds that I gave myself a bit of information overload which took away some of the enjoyment. I think I'd become so occupied with trying to follow every applicable tip to reduce the chance of getting something wrong that I was skipping some of the newbie things that I should have been learning from. So with this and a good few of the kits in my modest stash that were bought specifically as cheap practice/trial runs etc I'm going to go a bit more freehand with things and see where it takes me, try to figure out build orders or when to paint certain things for myself and if it goes wrong then meh, it's a cheap kit that would likely never get displayed anyway so no harm done. That said I'd be interested in anything basic I can do to avoid having just a solid mass of grey or navy blue for the majority of the main colour (I did notice the majority of posts were dedicated to the colour argument but I'm going to avoid asking anything on that subject).

 

 Obligatory shot, always something nice about opening them and checking the parts for missing.

 

For the time I had left I put the stand together, but left off the name plate while I figure out how to paint it, to show the name off against a background colour somehow. I skipped the bottom parts such as propellers as they would probably break easily this early on without anywhere to stand it. Instead I moved on to start the turrets, it was easy enough getting them straight, but not so much getting all three of the guns at the same level, and even once they were level and put away upon checking they have either moved or were in fact not level to begin with, may be overly critical though, but given I'll probably do more ships at some future point it's something I'd want to find a better way of doing. Going to press on as much as possible with sub-assemblies such as those before anything bigger comes together while I work out painting and suchlike.

 

Happy to be back on the trail but as always the competition for free time means two nights have already passed without any further progress.

[Tomathee]

Well I knew it had been a while but four and a half months is a poor show, in terms of progress and updates. Having a three year old limits free time to after ~7pm every day, and once chores are done and spending time with the other half I get between one and three (if I'm lucky) hours to myself. Demanding of that is the constant push to declutter following our house move, work on the house, trying to keep up with a select few TV shows and getting some time to model, and that's just the things that come to mind straight away. I feel somewhat fortunate that I didn't begin the hobby pre-child as I don't really know what I'd now be missing out on, as I imagine there would have been opportunities to crack on once home from work, or spend a Saturday afternoon to push on with builds.

 

Anyway to bring the highlights, pressing on with sub-assemblies was fairly straight forward, I've put a couple of pics below, no need to put every section I think. A couple of issues worth mentioning are the windows, I couldn't figure out a way to tidy them up, the windows were usually at the edge of parts that came together like teeth, and they could have done with a bit of filling and sanding but I couldn't think of a way to do it for such a small area without causing more trouble in over-filling and the subsequent removal messing up the shape of the windows or some other detail anyway, perhaps this is something that I could have tried Mr Surfacer on, for future reference. One of the mast/aerials(?) wasn't clear how high it sat, so that was guess work. Some of the locating pins were too large and needed cutting off. I tried to thin them down but ended up shaving off something else on the surface detail. I think I lost one of the floats off an aircraft, small chance it will turn up in the toolbox but not knowing my luck. There were some caps to go under the turrets meant to hold them in place but the pins sticking out of the turrets aren't long enough to be able to get a good bond so I think I'll have to just glue them down, good chance those caps will fall off inside the closed up hull anyway. 

 

 

Battleships!

 

Once I'd done as many as I thought I could ahead of any painting I put the hull top and bottom together, this seemed to need quite a lot of perfect plastic putty to get a level seam line, but I found that wet wipes work pretty well for getting the excess off, rather than getting it all over my fingers. To be revisited down the post as I came back to it after some painting.

 

On with painting and I decided rightly or wrongly to do the deck first. Before anything else was glued on that I would have to mask around, and because it was a lighter colour. I bought a Vallejo Deck tan colour but it looked quite grey to me so again, rightly or wrongly I left it out and went with Tamiya XF57 Buff, I must have picked it up from another thread as an idea, and I wouldn't know if I had the right shade or anything in either case. I had a familiar issue of it being too thick despite flow enhancer and at least 50/50 thinner. It had killed off the lines of the deck so I delicately sanded it back with 1200 grit and redid it just enough to get the coverage and not flood it. If there's one thing I'm looking forward to it is getting a desk space and airbrush bought to start practising with. Unfortunately the combination of using a brush and my heavy handedness wiped out my attempt at preshading the deck boards, below is what they were like before painting commenced.

For a wash I went with Burnt Sienna thinned with turps substitute. It was my first time using these and for once it was something that did what it said, and was fairly straight forward to apply. Before & after;

 

 

About this stage I decided I still wasn't happy with the join between the hull halves. So I masked close to it and went in with more perfect plastic putty, I probably needed to as being around the area with the black stripe along the water line I guess it will draw the eye and the seam will be more obvious.

 

After this I tried to figure out the order of painting - hull red, black stripe, main blue/grey/whatever shade. But I couldn't at the time and just went with doing the red first. Along with the deck tan I bought that I didn't like, I bought hull red from Vallejo that I also didn't like, it's just too brown for me. Maybe it should be like that but everything I've seen leads me to believe it should be red, and at the time I think I read that the vallejo hull red is more aligned to the hull red that would be put on a Japanese ship, but I'm not versed enough to know. If someone comes along and tells me mine is too red and I need to do X instead then I know for next time at least. Being on a bit of a budget I used what I had and found a colour I liked, bit of a crime mixing brands but it was 8:1 Humbrol Bright Gloss Red to the Vallejo hull red. Thinned with water it took several coats but I think it looks OK, it will fit in with the other areas of my level of painting skill.

 

I don't know what the second largest deck above the main one is called, so I went with first floor (sorry). I painted it buff as before but tried a raw umber wash to see what the difference was, it's definitely darker than the burnt sienna but I'm not sure either which I like better or which is a better representation (if either are). So this one is open to the audience...

 

I found a pic while test fitting some gun or other to show the issue I had earlier with the window halves and them needing filler and sanding but not being sure how to do it on such a delicate scale, I'll have the same issue with this when I come to fit it;

 

To bring the content to a close, I was last testing out the main paint colour and order of work. I've read through a couple of amazing build threads on here of 1/200 scale Arizona's and one used the Vallejo Grey Blue so I'm going with that. There's no mention of darkening it however it does seem a bit on the light side for me, purely from a common sense perspective, along with looking at the other build to use the colour and the paint chart in the instructions. The areas in this aren't all solid as I was messing around with thinning but it's a general idea. It brought me into a good idea however, if I were to use black primer (as with the example I read) it should darken the final outcome enough, and if I mask off the hull red I can use that as my water line as well, if that sounds like a good plan, few less coats of paint being slopped on to cause issues? I still need to decide how to mask/paint detail on the deck but I'll save that for another day. 

 

 

Thanks for reading so far, any comments welcome

 

[lars_opland]

Hi Tom,

 

Looks like you're off to a good start on a fine kit. I've never seen a HobbyBoss ship kit before, but I can say you chose well. If the Revell Indianapolis is the old Matchbox kit, as I'm assuming it is, then these moldings outclass those by miles.

 

One thing though. In spite of all the thousands of how-to articles that have been published about painting armor & vehicles, the only way to make one of those truly difficult is by going for a gloss 2- or 3-tone civilian scheme & factoring in chrome details. Military stuff is nowhere NEARLY as complicated to paint in most cases because the basic "challenge" amounts to making a monochrome dull flat scheme appear more interesting by adding dirt, dents, tools & rust...not necessarily in that order....

 

If you're all moved in yet, do carry on. If not, I wish you luck with that.

 

Cheers, -Lars

[Tomathee]

Thanks Lars, it's an alright kit, I've put a couple of issues I've encountered in the updates but I've no idea how it compares to other ships, only the other models I've built, which are low in number anyway so I'm not the authority but I think it's a decent standard for the price of it and hours it will provide.

 

All moved in, unpacked and everything as I'd like it without multiple to-do lists is a completely different matter though.