I'm game. So let's try Postimage. I found that Photobucket was unreliable and their ads were boardering on manic and very difficult to work around. Please let me ASAP if the pictures fail to materialize.
I worked on more hull related things. I've gotten into a groove putting in the better, more scale-sized Eduard doors. While I have a ton of full doors left, I'm quickly running out of the nice open door etchings.
I started putting on the remaining gun tubs on the sponsons, but before doing do, scraped off the molded-on WTDs and installed my own. It's a four-step process and goes something like this. I use a dividers to figure out a hole spacing for the extremes of the future door opening and mark this location. I drill the two holes with a 0.032" carbide drill in a pin vice. I then mark an intermediate hole and drill that leaving three small holes.
I found that a #44 drill is the next size that opens the hole, but not too big so it gives me some stock to carefully remove to bring it to size. Sometimes the drill skitters off the center hole, but that's not a big problem.
With a sharp #11 I carefully trim out the interior of the hole to conform to the shape of the door frame. I occassionally hold up the PE to the hole just to get a final size.
If you're careful you can also remove some small amounts when the door is glued in.
I took the above picture with a piece of black paper behind to make in dark inside. Most of these doors are in blind spaces so nothing will be seen inside. In the real ship, whenever a door opened into the hanger deck itself which was well lit, there is a light labyrinth to trap light from getting outside when running dark. I'll build those for the model also.
I had to filled the edges where the gun tubs fit their respective sponsons. Again, early Trumpeter's require a lot of craft if you want to make a respectable model (by my standards anyway).
I added the single 40mm gun tub and its associated director on the fantail. This part actually fit very nicely. I hand painted this also. In comparing deck blue and navy blue, the colors are almost identical with deck blue being just a tad darker than navy blue. I've read that the Modelflex colors aren't very authentic, I don't like Vallejo for airbrushing, and I can't seem to find Life Color in individual bottles (only in sets) and since I only need two of the colors and set doesn't work well for me. So I'm going to try and mix my own shade with Tamiya paints. I really like Tamiya best for airbrushing. I'm not color blind at all and do okay when mixing colors. I'll try with a very small amount to get the proportions and then enlarge the batch to the quantity I need. Navy Blue 5N is basically a very dark blue-gray. I start with medium gray, add the blue and darken it with black and see what happens.
In looking at the above C.U. I will have to do a better job on the deck blue painting.
Last thing I did was add the two 40 mm tubs on the startboard aft deck. The tubs were a no-brainer. I got one of the directors assembled and installed without drama. They're just a silly little two-part assembly. Then while removing the sprue nubs on the other director, it hit the floor, but I actually was able to see it land and try to get away.
I actually voiced "Aha! I've got you." (I often talk to myself when working). Then I was handling this director and it's little tub trying to get it perfectly centered and the darn thing hit the floor again, but this time it entered the quantum rift. GONE! Thought I saw it's trajectory, swept the area with a dust brush, crawled around on my knees in an ever-expanding search grid, but it was gone.
So I went back to my trusty old Missouri and popped one of the two similar director tubs that were on its fantail. An boy! Did it pop! It was very difficult to pry loose unlike other old glued parts. When it finally let go, I heard it hit the light fixture over my work bench then heard it ricochet onto my mobile work bench where I do a lot of the work. And sure enough, there it was right in the middle with a bunch of stuff around it. Whew! So I have one Trumpeter director and one Tamiya on that back deck. That Missouri is really starting to look like a ship that could be used for target practice.
I was looking today to buy enhanced 40mm, 5" single and double emplacement kits from Alliance Model Works. There are only four doubles and four single 5" guns and 8 - 40mms so it wouldn't break the bank to do it, but the Trumpeter guns aren't bad and the GMM PE set includes a lot of goodies to enhance them. Missing are the commanders' hoods for the top of the twin 5s, but I have them left over from the Eduard Missouri set. So I'm going to see how they build up and then decide if it would be worth the $$$ to upgrade. Also, looking at the kits, there's some very small finicky parts to deal with.
Just in case you're wondering or have forgotten how it is that I have all this excess Eduard PE after building a full-workup Missouri, it's becasue I had so much trouble with the Eduard parts breaking that they sent me another full set of four frets to use. As it was I did use quite a bit from that second set, but not all.
Eduard, like some other PE makers, etches the places where you're supposed to bend. The normal stock is 0.010", but it's half that at the bends. Being half-hard material, if it's bent more than once it can fracture. Some of these even broke before I got them off the frets. In some cases, more complicated bends fell apart in three or more pieces. There was some tricky railings on the Mo's superstructure that almost drove me crazy. Instead of being a single, nicely-bent piece, I was fumbling with sticking all these pieces on the model and trying to align the ends with stanchions with the three skinny pieces of brass sticking out where stanchions used to be. As a result, I like those companies that don't do this etching, but leave it up to me to measure and bend appropriately. It may take a little bit longer, but it doesn't break and therefore, takes much shorter.
You can anneal the brass to prevent the breakage (heat with a torch till it glows red and letting it air cool), BUT, and it's a big but, you now have a material that's so soft that it can't sustain its shape and this opens another hornet's nest of annoyance. (talking from experience here).