Grafting a Revell USS Forrestal lower hull to the 1/547 USS Midway

A lot of great work there GM!

Jim  

Very impressive, GM!  You are a great asset to this forum.

I spent a couple of hours setting up the boot stripe on Midway. At the risk of boring those who know, I offer this mini toot.

Ignore the tape because I staged this after I marked the hull, but set a pencil where you want to draw a line for the boot topping. You will do this twice. Once at the top and once at the bottom.

A boot topping or stripe is not a constant width, if you will. It has a top line and a bottom line that are parallel in vertical axis.

Captain Morrison requesting permission to come on the flag bridge.

The work on Midway's hull conversion is finally over.

I'm quite happy with the outcome. It probably doesn't much match the Midway's finer lines at the stern, but using the successor class Forrestal's hull lower parts made sense. Thanks again to Mike Ashey for the information and to Bill Morrison for the incentive to make a full hull Midway.

I have smoothed the many seams, and put enough putty and time into it to call it finished.

At the stern, I've added the skegs/ keelsons for the inboard props, modified and used several of the shafts that came with the Forrestal class kit for the outer two. Typing this I realize I still need to add a brace at the end bearing of each of those last two.

I want to say thanks to the members on another thread here who suggested thinning Tamiya Gray putty with Tamiya Extra Thin cement. It's kind of a miracle material. Generous use.

Bruce sent me the following marvelous photo which allowed me to build new rudder assemblies.

I then reduced it to scale, and made a pattern for building new ones. The kit parts are also shown here. They are the same half draft depth as the original kit hull.

And the new parts.

In between coats of primer curing, I started work on topside details.

The 5" guns at first seemed to be detailed and look "busy", but closer examination shows that in typical 1960's model fashion; Revell added a lot of made up detail, like those rivets on the roof.

Also the weird draft shapes on the sides and the casting block under the barrel.

Basically I just cleaned it all off. The things look kind of simple now, but they should.

I also clipped off and reattached the barrels at an upward angle, as they normally would be.

The heavy lifting for Frankenship is complete. The Forrestal lower hull worked well, esp. in the middle sections. I did build up a new stern, and had to splice styrene into some of the bigger gaps.

A trick I've learned for filling gaps with styrene. Let's say you have a gap that's more or less 0.020". Rather than try to fish a 0.020" strip into it, take a scrap of 0.020" sheet styrene and force it in edgewise. Do it an inch or so at a time. Flood with solvent cement. When dry, trim off the extra and sand it down to be flush.

Bill

Monday night I finally had a chance to sit down at the bench.

Top: the first of two back-to-back angles glued to the underside of the flight deck. Aircraft carrier models can get crooked if the flight deck is securely clamped down on the hangar deck sidewalls, as those are never all level. I prefer to make the flight deck rigid, attach it, and fill in any visible gaps.

Middle: in similar fashion, the upper hull and hangar walls are all assembled, braced and made square.

Bottom: the lower hull is three parts. The rear two thirds actually fit well to the upper hull. I try not to do too much spreading or compressing as the stress will lead to warping later. Mike Ashey suggested that he caused himself problems by not dry fitting the sections without any force.  I'll glue the several sections together with the splines as shown, clamped flat to the bench so that the keel is straight and level. Then I'll attached the rigid assembly to the upper hull.

Bill

Casting off, headed into the fairway.

I'm generally following an old Mike Ashey article back in 2002 that was in FSM.

The second plastic ship kit Revell ever marketed was the 1/540 scale CV-42 U.S.S. Franklin D. Roosevelt, second ship of the Midway Class. That ship was to be named Coral Sea, but when the President passed away that was changed. CV-43 became the Coral Sea.

The model is very good, the mold maker was one of the best in his time. It stands up well today. I've had this kit for a very long time but was put off by the flat bottom hull.

Not long ago Bill Morrison pointed out the article to me. Mike Ashey took the FDR, and grafted the below waterline hull of a Revell Forrestal to it. As the kits are the same scale, and although a little longer and a little wider, the Forrestal hull is the next class after the Midways and is very similar. I won't summarize the article, and I hesitate to post the link, but it's in the July 2002 issue of FSM.

I bought an old Saratoga glue bomb on eBay for shipping. Here are the two hulls side-by-side.

I cut each one at the waterline after checking to see that each was correct in terms of Sara's draft and Rosie's freeboard.

Before cutting the bottom out of the Midway class ship I installed cross braces to maintain the planform so that the deck will fit. 

That's it for today. I've ordered Star Fighter CV-41 Midway decals, and probably will get some better 40mms. The kit has those funny 20mms molded to the decks that look like a "Y", ala the Iowas models that came before. I'll be using some 1/700 ones I have- those things are always grossy overscale.