Liberty ship Airplane Transport

I've started on a water base. It's plaster poured over pebbled bathroom glass as a mold, painted with acrylics and coated with Future. It's supposed to look 'tropical'.

For a means of transporting your aircraft ashore, check with Carl Musselmann at Back Aft Models for pontoon barges and floating wharf sections

Carl also has a link to a 1946 Popular Science article with diagrams of different pontoon barge applications

Thanks for that Ed. Floating docks would make sense to me given the time and place. But I just consulted with my 88 year old eyewitness and he is sure it wasn't a floating dock. It was a dock parallel to the shoreline long enough for two Liberty Ships. I also took a reconnaissance flight over the south and east coasts of Biak via Google Earth ( what a world we live in!). Just off the modern airport is what looks like a long submerged causeway going perpendicular to the shore. Dad says that is not familiar either. So i guess I'll go with pilings.

I've gotten underway on this. The first step is to cut out all the old hatch locations from the deck:

Do you have any transport photos etc.? Great project!

Those drawings remind me of my only visit to the JOB.

My daughter was dating a guy who was a volunteer steam engineer on her. He did all kinds of stuff to get on my good side- pieces of plate and cable, and a tour behind the scenes in the engineering spaces.

He got a big kick out of the bubble levels built into their big lathe, useless as anything.

My daughter had been on board before and was eager to get me to go down the shaft tunnel to the end and back- oh hell no! That one lonnng shaft!

Did she have those big racks on deck, or was it all in the holds?

When I was on the JOB years ago they had the engine turning over slowly. On the big crank shaft they had a plunger that went up and down in a 55 gal drum, their laundry machine! It was interesting and discouraging that the bridge and quarters were very familiar to me. I could test gear and sail with almost no orientation, in 1988.

Dad says all the planes were below deck on his trip. I'm going to have all or most of the hatches open.

Wrong ship, but I reckon the Lightnings were wrapped up thus.

http://www.steelnavy.com/TomsP38&P47.htm

But it's not in their catalog and I couldn't find any on eBay.

Tom's discontinued those metal planes, but I have a few.

Hatch openings are roughed out. They'll be a little wider than shown, but you can see that getting a P-38 in there required some careful stevedoring! It's so tight that I checked with Dad to be sure the planes were whole, minus the outer wings. He said they were. Looking at this, it seems the best use of space would be to stow them nose/tail athwartship. Doing that, I can see you could get about two dozen aboard.

Hatch coamings done and kingpost assemblies started. There is this strange system of girders on deck. I suppose the holds are so large they needed extra stiffening. I must say, the fit on this Trumpeter kit is not nearly as good as it was on the first one I purchased some years ago.

Cool build ! 

onyxman

I must say, the fit on this Trumpeter kit is not nearly as good as it was on the first one I purchased some years ago.

None of us are as fit as we were "some years ago" 

But in a slightly more intelligent vein ---GREAT Job! on your work so far this is a good example of how to:  model the model you want, from the model you have....

This is a cool project.  I think L'Arsenal has some shore (piers, pilings, moorings, etc.) stuff but can't remember the scale if that helps at all.  I'll be watching this one!  

Groot

Thanks everyone! As I get along on this I see why they needed those girders on deck. Usually the hold would have columns inside. But they had to have large open spaces to get the big planes in there, so the strength had to be on the outside.

That makes sense. It would be faster to cut where needed and add where needed than re engineer the design. Not elegant, but effective. That had to make the deck detail miserable though.

I am amazed that those Lightnings could get below. And I agree there's not really any more disassembly possible than shown. Would involve a lot of tipping, tilting and probably shouting. But without wings I think they'd weigh less than 10,000 pounds.

My father in laws squadron was issued P-61s in Italy in November 1944. For the ocean voyage they had all of the open joints between the airframes and the movable (all metal) control surfaces thaped up. When that was stripped the black paint came off too. Really looked like hell. Just like a bad day at the bench!

I just resolved the one detail I had doubts about, the number of windows on the bridge front. The plans don't show them, but grainy pictures showed more than the three small windows that the JOB kit has. On Navsource there are plenty of clear pictures of these ships in their later careers as radar picket ships. The Frank O. Peterson became the USS Scanner. It turns out they had a line of portholes, not windows, all the way across the bridge front. All the pictures are from the 1950s, but I am going to assume this detail was not changed in the conversion. If they were going to change anything there they would have made them windows, not portholes.

Hi ;

    Looking at these plans ,can you see where the Liberties had an inherent problem ? You do know of course that some of these as well as the regular Liberties developed a problem of snapping  in two just forward of the Deck-house in rough weather , especially if loaded to their maximum planned gross weight .         T.B.

That was story that had a lot of legs back in the day. It seemed to center around Kaiser built ships.

My grandfather would rant that welded hulls were an unfortunate innovation. But then he felt that way about a lot of things like smog devices on cars.

Fred what's the plan for paint. She was a Maritime Commission ship in 1945, correct?

Does that mean generic Ocean Gray? Were the decks really darker like Trumpeter shows on the box?

I always thought they were all one color.

Well I thought I was at the point that it was mostly just building the kit, but as I dry fitted things here I see that the 20mm gun tubs on top of the bridge are in the way of the two kingposts right in front of the bridge, so they will have to be moved outboard some. The plans show it but I didn't notice until now. The 20mm forward had to be moved forward to be clear of the #1 hatch.

Yes, painting. I have no pictures of these during wartime. The oldest pictures on that German Maritime Commission site are in 1947 when the armament was taken off and they were sailing for Military Sealift. Then they had white superstructures. I am sure during the war they would not be like that. I'll go with the all gray scheme usually recommended for wartime Liberties. In all the photos I looked at of Liberty ships, only a few had decks painted a different shade than the rest of the ship. 

Hi ;

I believe you are correct there .Olympic Steamship Co. Back in the seventies bought some VICTORIES and they had gone to the moth-ball group from the yard .They were all grey too .Deck -house, decks and hull .

I'm all for replacing splinter shields anyways. I usually make a horizontal saw cut across the base, sand the deck down a little and glue on a curled strip of beer can aluminum. Yep gotta take one for the team...

But you'd be moving them too.

Thanks you guys for the clarification on deck color- not too late to correct on my JOB.

I have it from a reliable source that one of the Oerlikons "works".

Late at night outside the Golden Gate...

Not surprising, but the cost of a short burst probably is more than the fuel oil cost of getting out beyond the Golden Gate.

TB said;

"I believe you are correct there .Olympic Steamship Co. Back in the seventies bought some VICTORIES and they had gone to the moth-ball group from the yard .They were all grey too .Deck -house, decks and hull."

 I have been thinking about what an interesting project this is and what I could do to the JOB model. In the end I think I'll go stock 1944 because it is a classic, I see her most every day and as noted before, I have excellent access to her.

But, I got to thinking and see that about 2400 of 3200 survived the war, and 800 or so went into civilian service. Over 600 were donated/ sold to the Greeks and formed the backbone of those dynasties. There's a pretty one on display I think in Piraeus.

Several friends of mine were part of the crew when they went to Normandy. I mean recently, not in 1944.

Here is one of the better photos I found of the type, though it's post war and the armament has been removed: