Hi again gents. See there are still some kits building so I'm not alone. Dio looks very good. IL-2 and P-51 are coming along - I may be going over old ground for the 1945 build. I'm thinking of starting out with either a Meng P-51D (very neat kit - Zero seams, perfecto for NMF) or the great looking Tamiya IL-2. We'll see. (I've got a Hobby Boss FW-190D, an important plane that's been very poorly served by Eduard and Tamiya - the HB looks very good.)
Real world has slowed down important things but I do have some progress. I actually thought that I'd have the Bogue finished by year's end. Events didn't cooperate, but neither did the kit. I figured a 1/700 small vessel with a pretty low part count and not a lot of rigging would be a quick build - for a ship. Hmmm....wrong. First of all, this kit was produced in the early 80s (maybe earlier methinks) by a Japanese company called Pit Road. Tamiya picked it up, reboxed it and through in aircraft found on its 1/700 kits - late war Enterprise and Saratoga, so only the TBF is really authentic. No matter there. This kit was crude. The fit wasn't bad, but it had no holes and pegs - none. Fortunately the hull and deck were all one piece, but everything else had to go on via eyeball. I was using a lot of my mix of Tamiya thin and regular (orange cap) - could only use Extra Thin to finish off the pieces. There were a lot of small bits - 20mm guns, rafts, spotlights etc - easy to get that stuff on the floor and very trying on my eyes that are not getting younger.
And then there was the PE. I got a generic set for a US CVE from Tom's - a good PE vendor in my experience, although the set I got didn't not match the instructions exactly. (I didn't make PE 20mm - that would have taken a very long time - and there weren't anywhere near enough of them.) But there are rails here and there around the hull - you actually have to kind of look for them. Those are worth the bother. So was the PE radar setup on top of the bridge - the plastic was a real dud. It looks okay now. However, ships are so delicate that I worry about breaking something just handling it. Things are tense until it's all done.
The pic below is the kit complete. But what comes next? I think I'm going to black base a ship - hoping that will work on the deck. Definitely going to take some liberties and put it in the standard Atlantic markings (Navy Blue, Haze Gray, Deck Blue) and forget splinter - that would not be worth the serious time - and extra handling - required. And then we have to make a base. And paint the 1/700 scale airplanes. This is a couple or three weeks off from finis. But I will finish barring a California earthquake.
Eric
Kitfinish by Eric Bergerud, on Flickr