Question with Presentation Montrose APA model

Bondo, maybe you can check my math. I calculate the kit's hull is cut at a draft of about 12 ft. (when measuring the depth of the kit's hull, bear in mind it includes the height of the solid bulwark, which isn't included in a 'moulded depth' deck to keel figure)

Anyway, a draft of 12 ft just about equals the level of the propeller shaft. I don't have my calculations handy for the Revell T-2 kit, but I recall figuring the same thing. The kits seem to show a draft at the level of the propeller hubs.

From the pictures I've seen of actual APAs, they seem to be riding fairly light, but not as light as the kit indicates.  I guess if one was to mount the model on a water base, but without cutting the hull at all, the height of a quarter inch or so of simulated water would give you a fairly accurate representation. More or less. 

Fred

PS, deep draft for the cargo version is 28' 6". Would these ships ever be loaded that deeply? I don't know, but I doubt it.  Landing craft and vehicles are pretty light. Troops and ammo are pretty heavy.

I wonder how the Revell designers decided just where to slice off those hulls.  If I remember right, this one's cut off in such a way that a little of the rudder is visible - but none of the screw.  Maybe a completely empty ship would float at that waterine, but certainly not one that was in any sort of operational condition.

Like I said earlier, modelers in the 1950s were a pretty naive bunch.

A little math. The Revell Montrose scales at close to 1/375.

My VC2 drawing from the Smithsonian, while not nearly so informative as that of the T2, shows the height of the ship at 40' at midships, and lists the draft as 25'. So we'd assume a fully loaded Victory would have 15' of freeboard.

The model hull is .95 inches high at midships. At scale, 15 feet of freeboard would be .48 inches, so one could chop the height down by half and have a heavy ship in the water. Now mind you I haven't seen a picture that looks like that in my very casual research, usually they are at the wharf and look light with lots of bottom paint showing.

Glancing through pictures of the APAs on the web, Revell looks pretty good. The little molded on boarding nets only drop about a 1/2", but they probably should be removed, along with the raised plate lines, which are probably fantasy. There are also really nasty sink marks where three big vertical ribs were molded inside the hull on each side, for what reason I cannot tell. So an overall hull sand and fill would be a good starting point.

That's what I sort of suspected.  How much of an old APA was made of aluminum I don't know; my guess is - not much if any.

I suspect the "yellow spot" phenomenon was unique to the WWII period.

jtilley wrote:

One other thought.  I gather Surface Line's model is going to represent an APA from the Vietnam period.  I'm sure the "scrape, prime, paint" routine was part of Navy shipboard life at that time (some things never change), but I have no idea what APAs were using for primer by that time.  Little yellow spots might well be an anachronism - one that a veteran probably would catch.

We used orange colored red-lead primer on steel for years during this era. Yellow chromate was used on aluminum surfaces.

Lots of good shots of an APA are to be found in the 1956 movie "Away All Boats."  Based on the excellent novel by Kenneth Dodson, the movie stars Jeff Chandler, George Nader, and Richard Boone.  The ship that plays the fictitious "U.S.S. Belinda" is the real-life U.S.S. Randall; Dr. Graham's book suggests that's why Revell picked the Randall as the subject for the kit, which was released that same year. 

The moviemakers, so far as I can tell, made no serious effort to "backdate" the ship to her WWII configuration, so what we see is an APA as she looked in 1955 or thereabouts.  If I remember right, the booms are stowed vertically almost all the time.

According to the TV movies book I have in front of me, the flick is available on DVD.  (I've only got an old VHS copy of it.)  If you do watch it, pay particular attention to the scene late in the story in which the executive officer is bending over the wounded captain.  A corpsman says "They're waiting for him in sickbay, sir."  The corpsman is an incredibly young Clint Eastwood, in one of his first one-line bit parts.

OK, one more:

http://www.navsource.org/archives/10/03/100320806.jpg

Now we can see how that after mast was braced.

Here is an instructive photo:

http://www.navsource.org/archives/10/03/100321606.jpg

I'm thinking this is a view looking aft, and shows a landing craft being lifted off the aftermost hatch using that heavy lift boom aft of the mast. Note there are 4 shrouds on each side of that mast, though it's not real clear how they are arranged.

The other 4 booms are, again, stowed vertically.

Fred

Well, I was just looking at some actual pictures of the Navarro and others of her class, like the one on the homepage of this site:

http://www.ussnavarro.com/

Most of what I said in my post above may not be too usefull. There is just too much difference between the cargo gear on the civilian version and the APA version.

Some observations from that photo:

There is a heavy lift boom on the aft side of the after mast. I can't make out how many shrouds they have, but it seems like it's more than two per side. Is there one running forward to that raised portion of the deck?

All the other booms on that mast are stowed vertically, in collars around the cross tree. I'd bet that was SOP, since there is so much stuff on deck back there.

All the booms have topping lifts using a block and tackle arrangement, rather than the single wire that the civilian ships had.

For the forward mast, two booms are stowed vertically, but at least one of the ones going forward is down in a cradle located at the break of the fo'c'sle deck. See that?

Fred

Surface_Line,

Bearing in mind that my Garden State is a Victory modified for civilian use, so the arrangements are very different from your AP configuraion, I'll try to answer your questions.

Here is a picture showing the cradle for the cargo boom which runs forward from the starboard side of the superstructure. On the AP, the deck is more cluttered there, so it wouldn't be the same, but you get the idea.

It's the tripod structure just aft of the fellow on deck. I modelled it with an inverted 'V' of brass wire and a piece of PE ladder. The arrangement aft of the superstructure would be similar.

The booms from the masts cradle onto the edge of the superstructure decks, except the ones for #2 hatch run up over the raised fo'c'sle deck. The booms for #1 hatch go down parallel to the sides of the hatch to a structure similar to the one in the picture. For #5 hatch, they cradle along the sides of the after deck house.

Looking at the box art from my Montrose kit, there may be so much stuff on deck that they  always secured the booms in the vertical mode, to collars at the tops of the kingposts and cross trees. 

On my civilian version, there are three pieces of standing rigging on each side of the masts, which brace the heavy lift booms there. You can see them in that photo. The forward mast, having only the 5 ton booms for #1 hatch, lacks any such shrouds ( yours omits this altogether? ). However, it looks like the AP version has only two masts, and the box art shows only two stays on each side. This makes sense if they didn't have the heavy lifts to worry about. On my model I used .010" brass wire, painted white, for these. They would be 'slushed' in a mixture of grease and white lead. Navy practice may vary.

If you elect to rig the booms topped, and do all the rigging required, you are a better man than I. If I recall the pieces from the kit have the booms already in the topped position. This might make the job a little easier. If you already have a diagram I don't need to go into detail, but basically each boom has a topping lift wire, from the end of the boom to the block on the mast. On my version the booms are only 5 ton, so that is a single wire. On yours, it could be multiple parts between two blocks. ( the cargo gear on the civilian Victorys was almost identical to that on a Liberty ship).

Then, each boom has a wire, plus a rope and pulley 'vang guy', which runs from the head of the boom to pad eyes on the bulwark. Then there is rigging between the booms. Then there is the running gear that actually lifts the cargo.....

It's a lot of rigging. Only you can decide how much to represent.

Fred

I'm afraid Surface Line is asking a little more than my poor old memory is capable of providing.  My recollection is that each of those davits (we're talking here about the ones on either side of the midships superstructure, each pair handling two LCVPs) is supposed to have an electric winch inboard of it, and that the cable runs across the deck from a block (pulley) at the base of the davit leg to the winch.  On that scale the winch would be quite small, and mighty hard to see; one's view of it would be blocked by the davits and the boats.  I honestly don't remembr how I rigged the "cables" on that model thirty-plus years ago.  I'm sort of visualizing a black-painted piece of monofilament thread with one end glued to the base of the davit leg and the other disappearing inboard.  But I may well be wrong; it's been an awfully long time.

The Floating Drydock sells a set of plans for three Haskell-class attack transports:  http://www.floatingdrydock.com/MasterPlan.htm#TFW .  (Scroll down that page till you get to the "Auxiliaries" section.  The descriptions may be a little hard to follow; you may want to send an e-mail message or make a phone call to The Floating Drydock before sending money.  The prices seem eminently reasonable.)  Those drawings, presumably, would answer most questions of this sort.  There's nothing like a good set of plans to generate confidence in model building.

When deciding how to deal with the markings on the LCVPs, give some thought to how they're stowed.  In some cases one side won't be visible on the finished model.  My big suggestion regarding the choice of marking options is - experiment.  I think you'll find that applying the kit-supplied numbers takes less than two minutes per boat.  Putting the right numbers together from individual digits would take longer all right, but that sort of thing tends to go a great deal faster once your fingers get even a little practice. 

I sure want to see some pictures of this model.  Good luck.

Thanks, guys.  I'm overwhelmed with your responses.  I guess I should have mentioned that I am building this for a Vietnam veteran, with memories only dating back to 1964, rather than 1945.  And there are a ton of photos of Navarro and other APAs from the Vietnam era available on the internet, so I don't have to do TOO much guesswork.

It's funny, I normally lead the charge recommending to people "just make a representation, not an IPMS contest winner", and here I am getting sucked into some of the same issues.

It turned out that my vet remembered quite clearly that Navarro didn't have any 20mm or 5" guns, only four twin 40mms and a quad 40mm, so I really needed to follow the guidance from the small drawing in Friedman's "U.S. Amphibious Ships and Craft - an illustrated design history" that showed the FRAM modification that five of the APAs received in 1963.  It helped a lot, but still left a few questions.  Apparently, for Vietnam they were down to around 20 LCVP/LCPL types, but that was still more than the kit provided, so I needed to cannibalize another kit for extra boats.

My friend served as coxswain for the LCPL (which acted as the ship's gig), so I am spending some effort on  making the deckhouse for it, per photos from the web.  I hope it looks familiar to him.

He was an ammo handler on a 40mm gun, so I have gotten some L'Arsenal resin & brass 40mm mounts.  They are beautiful and lift the Revell kit up a notch without any extra work at all.  I am considering putting a single 1/350 scale figure near the fwd stbd 40mm mount, because that is where his eye will be drawn to, since that was his gun.  (that was a trick Loren Perry did with his huge model of USS Long Beach, now at the Los Angeles County Maritime Museum)

I agree about the "flat-bottomed" nature of the kit - I have already mounted it in a water base.  I' will post WIP photos shortly.

My original question was about what to do with the numbers on the sides of the LCVPs.  I know what they should look like, and I have lots of candidate decals, just short on patience and sanity.

1) use decals that are too big?

2) try to use small correct-size decals, at expense of possible 1-2 hours/boat for 19 LCVPs?

3) blank sides (this would look to me like a NASCAR racer without a spnsor on the side, but would the veteran notice?) 

Next, for onyxman:

 I'm at the stage of preparing to install the booms (fewer than the kit supplied because the fwd ventilator posts are cut way down).  Your thread on making the SS Garden State discussed topping the booms or laying them on cradles or having a rig in place...  I understand pointing the boom veritcal is one mode, horizontal is another (requires a cradle) and diagonal ("topped"?) is only appropriate when in use.  I have Knight's "Modern Seamanship"with a nice drawing of cargo handling gear, just don't know how much to use.

My model will be at sea, but  realism is not paramount, coolness is.  Can you explain again the different reasons for having a boom horizontal, vertical or diagonal?  For the life of me, I don't see in the kit anything that seems to represent a cradle for the booms, and I haven't found a photo for same.  Do you have any guidance about the cradle?

Also, how many shroud lines should each mast have on a side? 

For Prof Tilley:

I really appreciate the mention of the rust and winch near the davit with the wire to trip on.  But I can't find any winch near the davits on the kit.  From your 30 year perspective, do you remember what you were referring to?  Did you add winches, or just add the wire to structures that Revell had somewhere on the kit?  (And I will cerainly add some primer spots - I never would have thought of that, even though I spent a tour as First Lieutenant, responsible for the deck force who wielded those paint brushes)

Thanks,

Rick 

onyxman wrote:

Note: I didn't really put mine on a water base because I'm just not that confident in making realistic water. ( I intend to do some practicing) Mine just sits on sea green colored matt board. Fred

Gentlemen! We must face our fears and meet them squarely head on, eyes clearly fixed on the end goal and our hearts filled with a sure and certain purpose! There is nothing we cannot do, no obstacle that cannot be overcome, no final result that it outside our grasp, if we only square our jaws, pick up our weapons and charge resolutely forward into the very teeth of the foe, prepared to laugh in the face of death as we wrest certain victory from the gnarled hands of defeat and despair! 

Oh ... wait. This isn't the office contest for morale-boosting quotes, is it? *sheepish grin*

Here's a model airplane trick for pieces of straight rigging. Go buy a decent nylon paint brush- the house painting kind. I've got one that has bristles in many thicknesses, both clear and black. The clear ones seem to be thinnest, they mic down to about 1/2" at 1/72, which would be 3" here which is not bad. Cut pieces and trim to length, they'll be at least an 1" long. Perfect for those fussy little rigging jobs.

My father in law could not tell me the color of the fighter he climbed in and out of for three years, he was obviously in a different mind set.

Bill

I agree completely with mfsob:  unless the recipient of the gift is a model enthusiast himself, it's counterproductive to get hung up on the details.  Normal human beings aren't accustomed to subjecting ship models to precise examination.  We modelers, who do worry about such things as the fonts of 1 mm lettering, are the weird ones.  If it looks like the ship in question from normal viewing distance, the recipient will probably be delighted with it. 

I do remember two details I put on my old APA model that my father noticed.  One was a series of davit cables (I think I used nylon monofilament; if I were doing it now I'd probably use fine wire.)  Each of the big power davits holding the LCVPs on the sides of the midships superstructure had a heavy wire cable running straight inboard from the outer foot of the davit to a winch, about eight inches above the deck.  It was widely asserted that everybody who ever served on board an APA (or similar vessel) had tripped over one of those cables in the dark and gone crashing to the deck at least once.  Some said that the Official Badge of the USN Amphibious Force in WWII was a faint horizontal streak across the front of one's pants legs.  Those cables were always liberally covered with grease, and no amount of washing in the ship's laundry would get all of it out.

The other detail Dad liked had to do with metal primer.  (I've mentioned this point in a couple of other threads, but it's a little piece of trivia that I've never heard of except in Dad's reminiscences.)  Anybody who served in the USN during WWII - or, I suspect, any other period - knows that much of the daily routine of shipboard life consisted of scraping paint and repainting various metal surfaces.  ("If it moves - salute it.  If it doesn't move - chip the paint off it.")  During the war the Navy apparently abandoned its peacetime red lead primer and adopted some sort of zinc-chromate primer, similar to what was used on aircraft.  Dad described it as a sickly, dull yellow.  (He recounted how "some of our great geniuses" tried to save some effort by mixing the primer with the haze grey finish coat, thereby producing an ugly shade of green.  Dad was partially color-blind; if he thought that green was ugly it must have been really ugly.  The chief took one look at it and threw the can overboard.) 

Chipping paint, priming, and repainting was a standard routine; the truth of the matter probably is that it was more effective in keeping the sailors occupied than in maintaining the ship.  But almost every metal surface in the ship was subjected to it.  The only major exceptions were the outboard surfaces of the hull, which were off-limits when the ship was under way.  Almost all the other external surfaces underwent the constant chipping/priming/finish painting process.  The primer took several hours to dry.  So at any given moment some parts of the ship (excluding the exterior hull plating) would be yellow, where the hands were waiting for the primer to dry before applying the finish coat.  The yellow areas might range in size from a square foot or so to a fairly large section of bulkhead, or even part of a gun turret.

Remembering Dad's accounts of all that, I took a 0000 brush and added a dozen or so tiny, pale, dull yellow spots to the model.  The look on his face that Christmas morning, when he put on his bifocals and saw those yellow spots, was - well, I still remember it more than thirty years later.  I've used that trick on several other WWII-vintage ship models, and it always gets a grin of recognition from Navy vets.  The key, as in so many other weathering techniques, is to keep it subtle and not overdo it.

In retrospect it seems odd that few, if any, modelers back in the fifties thought much about those flat-bottomed Revell hulls.  In some cases there was a reasonable excuse: the underwater hull lines of the Iowa-class battleships and the liner United States, for instance, were still classified when the kits were released.  (The U.S. was built with a big federal subsidy, part of the deal being that she'd be made available to the Navy as a high-speed transport in wartime.  Lots of her characteristics were kept from the press for a long time.)  But surely there was nothing secret about the hull shape of a C-3 freighter, a tanker, or an attack transport.  And the combination of the waterline (well, sort of) hull and the "trestle" stands really looks ridiculous to the eyes of a modern scale modeler.  I guess we were just naive back then.

Maybe it's worth noting that one other manufacturer, Renwall, made an attack transport.  It was a little smaller (1/500 scale, like the rest of the Renwall warship line), came out a few years after the Revell one, and was, in many ways, quite a bit better detailed. It had individual 20mm guns (really astonishing in those days), and a full hull - complete with screw.  (It's quite a rare kit nowadays; the few I've seen for sale have been priced over $100.)  I was in elementary school when the two kits were initially released.  I remember noticing that the Renwall and Revell hulls looked different, but it took me quite a few years to figure out why.  Much later, when I did the Revell version for my father, I just screwed it down to a varnished walnut baseboard.  Dad was perfectly happy with it.  I wonder what ever happened to that model.

Too long as usual; sorry about that.  But this is a fun subject for reminiscing.

Bondoman speaks the truth--"kind of flat bottomed". It doesn't even have a very sharp edge around the bottom so it sits comlpletely flat on a base.

Note: I didn't really put mine on a water base because I'm just not that confident in making realistic water. ( I intend to do some practicing) Mine just sits on sea green colored matt board.

Fred

mfsob wrote:

First things first - don't get so hung up on accuracy that you end up doing yourself in with an  X-acto blow to the jugular. I say that because, well ... the person you're building this for isn't going to remeber all of the itty bitty details. I ran into the same thing when I was building a 1/700 Victory ship for my Dad - I would ask him specific questions and he would think for a minute and then say, "Jesus, son, I don't know that was 60 years ago. I think ..." and we'd go from there. As long as it LOOKS like a Montrose-class transport, and has his ship's name and/or number on it somewhere, trust me, he's going to be happy. One possible source for tiny white letters and numbers - http://www.whiteensignmodels.com - White Ensign Models. Do a site search for 1/350 and 1/700 Modern RN aircraft/ship decals, Nos. D 3502 and D 701. They have small white letters and numbers on those sheets.

that was more than thirty years ago.  (Gawd I feel old.)

   The "america" in my avatar was built almost forty (1968) years ago......"Gawd" I know the feeling!

I think Prof Tilley has the answer.  Decal sheets almost never match the numbers, and letters provided with kits. I have gotten used to totally removing car numbers, and replacing them, because "one or two" changed letters stick out like a sore thumb. 

First things first - don't get so hung up on accuracy that you end up doing yourself in with an  X-acto blow to the jugular. I say that because, well ... the person you're building this for isn't going to remeber all of the itty bitty details. I ran into the same thing when I was building a 1/700 Victory ship for my Dad - I would ask him specific questions and he would think for a minute and then say, "Jesus, son, I don't know that was 60 years ago. I think ..." and we'd go from there. As long as it LOOKS like a Montrose-class transport, and has his ship's name and/or number on it somewhere, trust me, he's going to be happy.

One possible source for tiny white letters and numbers - http://www.whiteensignmodels.com - White Ensign Models. Do a site search for 1/350 and 1/700 Modern RN aircraft/ship decals, Nos. D 3502 and D 701. They have small white letters and numbers on those sheets.

I don't have a magic solution for this problem.  I honestly don't remember what I did about the numbers on the landing craft of that model I built for my father; that was more than thirty years ago.  (Gawd I feel old.)

I do know that the painting of landing craft varied a great deal from time to time and from place to place.  There probably were some basic rules about the subject, but photos make it clear that experience and individual circumstances had a great deal of impact on what those boats actually looked like.  Sometimes they had the full letter/number combination ("PA123") painted on each side of the bow, and on the transom.  Sometimes the "PA" seems to have been omitted.  Sometimes a huge single letter, presumably the first letter of the ship's name, was painted on the face of the ramp.  In photos of the Normandy Invasion, some landing craft have the letters "US" painted alonside the numbers (presumably to distinguish American boats from British ones).  And I've seen pictures from the latter part of the Pacific war (Iwo Jima and Okinawa) in which new, much larger lettering has been painted alongside, or in some cases overlapping, the original lettering.  I suspect the crews were, in some cases, painting things on the boats right before - or even during - the operations, and nobody was worried much about regulation paint jobs.  After the war things settled down.

My best suggestion is to look for photos - and, if possible, pick the brain of the person for whom you're building the model.  The latter approach isn't always reliable, though.  My father remembered that his ship, the Bollinger, just had the letter "P" painted in front of her hull number; a photograph from the period when he was on board clearly shows "PA234."  In wartime all the numbers and letters were the same size - and painted white.  After the war the numbers were made bigger than the letters, and all the characters were "shaded" - as, if I remember right, the Revell decal sheet shows them.

Could you turn "212" into "215" by slicing off the second 2 and turning it upside down?  The "224" decals would give you plenty of spares.

I think I do remember one nasty little problem with the LCVPs in the old Revell kit:  the bulkheads dividing the "troop well" from the "cockpit" are missing.  Making those bulkheads from plastic sheet wouldn't be too difficult - but it sure would be repetitive.  On the other hand, lots of those boats are stacked on top of each other; if one left the bulkheads off the boats on the bottom of the stack, nobody would know.

Dad was also quite emphatic - and in this case I think he was right - in asserting that his ship carried a total of 36 landing craft - 4 LCMs, 2 LCPs (one serving as the captain's gig, the other as a utility boat), and 30 LCVPs.  He wasn't able to remember just how they were all stowed, but the Revell kit (which I guess was based on a ship in her early 1950s configuration) obviously doesn't have enough boats.

I'm afraid I haven't helped much.  Good luck.