I have a grudging (and largely nostalgic) fondness for Lindberg kits. As a kid prowling dime-stores [remember them?] in the '60s, Lindberg kits were plentiful, affordable, and usually decorated with garishly exciting box-art...which often bore almost no resemblance to what actually lurked inside.
As I got older and moved on to Monogram and Revell kits, I began to understand how poorly-rendered many of those old Lindberg kits were. But to give the company its props: they covered an impressively-ambitious range of subjects...many of which are still-untouched by plastic-model producers all these decades later. And thanks to regular re-releases through those same decades, they're still reasonably plentiful and delightfully inexpensive compared to even mediocre kits by some other manufacturers. They still beckon in their odd way.
My approach to building the bulk of Lindberg kits is what I call 'Low-Budget Hollywood': if a cheapo film's 2nd-unit director comes to you as the 'prop guy' with a broken-down '60s yellow schoolbus and says "You've got two days and two-hundred dollars to turn this into the Battleship Arizona"...you're not going to worry much whether the fo'c'sle draft vent-covers had ten lines of louvers or only eight. In other words, if you're going for respectable scale accuracy, most times it would be simpler and easier to scratch-build. But trying to make a sow of a kit look sort-of like 'real' can be fun...and a useful exercise in 'fixing' without 'rivet-counting.'
Lindberg's ancient combined set of the Ironclads USS Monitor and CSS Virginia (the latter built on the burned hulk of the under-repairs Union steam frigate Merrimack) is notable chiefly for being in two different scales in the same box..with the Monitor nominally 1/210 scale, and the Virginia listed as 1/300. Both are little more than basic shapes with crude detail. The Monitor has slightly-better fit simply due to its simpler design; the more complex construction of Virginia's casemate design inevitably leaves big gaps to putty. (As a side-note, both are mostly-covered in a raised 'plating' texture; while this doesn't look out-of-place for the Monitor, the real Virginia's casemate armor exterior was made up from sections of railroad rail...a whole different look.)
First hurdle for the Monitor was taken from the late (and sorely-missed) Prof. John Tilley's remarks in an old thread (on this forum) on the kits in question: for whatever reason, Lindberg positions the revolving turret shifted noticeably toward the bow. Very odd-looking, and impossible to 'disguise.' After studying the layout, the simplest answer seemed to be to cut out a non-symmetric section of the midships deck containing the turret ring, and flip it around 180 degrees. No way to avoid the annoying puttying and sanding required, but the rescribing of plating lines and 'wheeling' in the rivet-lines was easy enough, since everything is straight lines and evenly-spaced.
From there I built everything 'stock,' merely adding a turret-top with lattice and hatches instead of the kit's featureless one (which had the same 'plating' pattern as the deck). The kit's blocky vent housings and flat-sided pilothouse forward looked 'bare bones' and uninteresting, so I started adding bits, guided by photos and illustrations of Monitor: some HO scale boxcar siding for the sloping-armor 'pyramid' around the pilothouse, and some sections of brass tubing with copper-wire boss rings for the extended vent-stacks used when the ship wasn't in combat. (I ended up making a 'horseshoe' from laminated styrene sheet for the main vents just behind the turret.)
Since I'd stumbled onto a 'non-combat' configuration, the turret awning visble in authentic photographs seemed an obvious choice to add. Twist-tie wire brackets, a bit of stretched sprue, EZ-line and tulle netting worked for the structure. I had originally intended to do the awning itself with white-glue-soaked tissue...and probably should have...but an 'inspired' moment led me to try a 'Kristal Klear'-type application instead. It worked well enough to start...but started to 'shred' here and there (like canvas in a stiff wind) as it dried, and the 'touch-ups' made it lumpier and rougher-textured than I'd intended. C'est la vie. It wasn't worth tearing off and doing again.
Stretched sprue bracing wires for the stacks and a bit of chain for the anchor, and I decided to leave it as-is. Properly 'commissioned' with some paper flags...and my little Monitor awaits its (different-scale) Confederate opponent, which will be 'Part 2.'
