1/350 USS New York, BB-34 (Trumpeter)
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by Robert Apfelzweig |
1/350 USS New York, BB-34 (Trumpeter)
This is my build of the Trumpeter USS New York, augmented in a very impressive way with the extremely detailed Pontos upgrade set with blue wooden deck. This is one of Pontos' most recent detail sets, and a marked improvement of their earlier kits in that the instructions are much more complete and show various complicated assemblies, such as the bridge, fighting top, tripod mainmast platforms and catapult at successive stages of completion and then the finished view from multiple angles, so that nearly every part -- and there are a great many of them -- can be seen in its proper location and configuration. The Pontos set includes all gun barrels, even individual ones for the quad 40 mm Bofors. I chose to depict the ship in its Measure 31a, design 8B, for late 1944/early 1945, and used ModelMaster 5-N, 5-O, 20B and 5-H enamel paints, along with my usual Liquitex Cadmium Red Hue sprayed onto the lower hull for the antifouling red. Rigging was made from stretched black sprue.Trumpeter's kit has many fine features but its rather egregious exaggeration of the width of the torpedo blister's "shelf" is already well-known and there is no easy fix for it. I was, at least, able to sand away the grossly overscale hull plating seams that for some reason Trumpeter insists on placing on many of its newer 1/350 scale hulls. As designed, the turrets are merely set in place and meant to be glued, but I was able to easily engineer them to rotate while being secured to their barbettes. However, with the Pontos set, the third turret's catapult doesn't quite allow full rotation to starboard.
Commissioned in 1914, The USS New York served on blockade duty following America's entry into World War I, was present at the surrender and internment of the German High Seas Fleet, was rebuilt in the late 1920's, replacing her cage masts with tripods, and served in the Atlantic theater of World War II until after the Normandy invasion, when it was refitted for the Pacific war and finished off its service there after bombarding the beaches at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Following the war's conclusion she was consigned to the Bikini atomic tests, but survived both blasts in July 1946 and was eventually sunk as a target off Hawaii in July 1948.
