Hideous seam - how to hide it?

Well, I must say, after a LOT of puttying and sanding, the overhang isn't really that noticeable - I'm hoping the bootstripe will hide the rest, and I still have some filling and sanding and respraying to do, but SHEESH ... This is what makes me glad I started out with a small waterline kit when I first got back into the hobby. If this beast had been my first attempt, I'm not sure I would have been motivated to keep at it.

I agree with jwintjes - for a couple of reasons.  In the first place, I built most of those old Revell 1/720 kits when they were new, and the hull parts didn't fit well back then either.  In the second place, though my own tastes tend toward waterline warships and I don't normally pay much attention to the fit of the lower hull halves, most reviews of such kits that I read nowadays comment that the top and bottom of the hull don't fit together right.  That seems to be the case even with the big, expensive Trumpeter 1/350 kits.  Here are just three examples, from the FSM Workbench Review Archives:

Trumpeter 1/350 North Carolina - Oct., 2005

Trumpeter 1/350 Hornet - April, 2003

Dragon 1/700 Bismarck - Nov., 2004

It's pretty clear that the idea of molding the top and bottom hull halves in separate molds just isn't a good one.

I don't fault those old Revell designers for not having solved the problem.  My point was that the manufacturers of today ought to be able to deal with it.  Airfix had the right idea - almost thirty years ago.  When that company dropped out of the warship field it was producing some really nice, well-engineered kits.  It's a shame there haven't been any more.  I see, though, that Airfix has produced a new, 1/600 Queen Mary 2.  Does anybody in the Forum know whether it has the full-hull/waterline option like the Belfast, Repulse, etc. did?

Ed,

the Italeri kits mentioned are nearly as old as the Enterprise (they must be around 30 years old now).

Incidentally the question isn't so much why the venerable Enterprise kit doesn't have this feature, but why trying to fit the lower hull of, say, the new Baltimores by Trumpeter has to end in an orgy of puttying and sanding, or why there is no easy way to waterline the Dragon/Revell Invincible CVs.

I think that's a very valid point.

Jorit

jtilley wrote:

Why in the world can't the modern companies figure out how to do that?

Except the kit in question is the old 1:720 (or is it 1:700) CVN-65 Enterprise by Revell.   You are looking at a kit which was at the cutting edge of the state of the modeling art  THIRTY-to-FORTY years ago! 

Revell of Venice, CA (don't blame Revell of Germany on this one) was using the tried and true method of attaching a lower hull which they had been using on their [Ahem  - marvelous?] 1:720 scale Arizona.

Bert Kinsey's review of the kit in Detail & Scale found that the ill-fitting lower hull was the major problem with the kit that he could identify.    Kinsey describes his method for working with the warped hull in his review.

From the sounds of the thread -- the course of the construction has progressed too far to back up and use Kinsey's recommendations.  

Don't bash a company's re-releases of an older kit that doesn't meet many of today's plastic kit production standards.    You are comparing apples and oranges.  Technologies of mold engineering have advanced in the past 30 years.  A simple google will return you with the pedigree of almost every kit model kit which is or was  ever produced.   An informed modeler will use these tools as well as an Xacto knife.

I continue to be surprised that the manufacturers keep having problems like this.  They persist in producing kits with separate parts for the above- and below-water hull sections.  That almost always produces fit problems, largely because the pieces are so big.  Plastic shrinks a tiny bit when it cools, and the shrink rates of different parts aren't absolutely identical.

Two companies actually solved the problem about twenty years ago.  The Italeri 1/720 German pocket battleship kits (Graf Spee, Deutschland, Sheer, and Lutzow - some of the nicest small-scale ship kits ever, in my opinion) come with the lower and upper hulls molded in one piece.  They're attached to each other by a series of thin "gates," which can be sliced through with a knife in a few seconds.  Because the whole hull came out of the same mold, a perfect fit is guaranteed.

The other, perfectly practical solution was the one Airfix used in its last few 1/600 kits (Belfast, King George V, Repulse, and maybe one or two others).  The hulls were cast in port and starboard halves, with a shallow groove running along the waterline on the inside.  For a full hull model, the modeler left the parts as-is.  To make a waterline model, you ran an Xacto knife along the groove and the underwater hull came loose in a few seconds.

Why in the world can't the modern companies figure out how to do that?

A spread of six torpedoes, set to varied depths along the hull, and you'll never see it again.

Hmmmm, I didn't think about using brute force to make it stay. Oh, well. I'm on about the third round of trying to feather in the edges of the styrene strips I used to fill the gap. I'm hoping that by the time it gets covered in gray, black and red paint, it won't be TOO noticeable.

About hiding this seam overhang I would think your idea with sheet styrene would be about the best.

What I would have done in this case, though before joining the upper and lower hulls in the first place, is install cross-braces inside the lower hull (made from spare parts trees, etc) and in fact force the lower hull seam out to fit the upper hull at its point of joining, and apply copious amounts of Ambriod plastic welder from inside the seam as well as to the braces to ensure it would stay even.

If it is not too late, and you can seperate the glue joints along the seam, you still might be able to try this.

Good luck.

  Tom T