by Robert Apfelzweig |
1/350 USS Wyoming 1927 (SSModel0)
The USS Wyoming, BB32, was commissioned in 1912 and was the last American battleship to be armed with 12-in. guns for its main battery; as with all dreadnought- type battleships built for the US Navy, they were all on the center line. As originally equipped, she also had twenty-one 5-in. .51 cal secondary guns, with the odd one protruding from the fantail. Until 1927, she also had two cage masts and coal-fired boilers, but that year she was partly modernized, with a small tripod replacing the cage mainmast (and located between the 4th and fifth turrets), oil-fired boilers replaced the older ones, torpedo blisters were installed on her hull, eight 3-in. AA guns were installed around and behind her bridge and the six 5-in. broadside guns amidships were placed within a sort of armored citadel on the main deck (the secondary battery was now sixteen 5-in. guns). She was in this form retained on active duty until the London Naval Treaty of 1930, when in 1931 she was partly disarmed (losing half her big gun turrets and her belt armor) and converted into a training ship. In 1942 the remaining turrets were removed and an assortment of 5-in., 3-in., 40mm, 20mm and .50 cal. weapons were installed and in this form she trained thousands of US Navy seamen in gunnery techniques. Based on Chesapeake Bay for most of the rest of WWII, she became known as the ”Chesapeake Raider” and ended the war by firing off more ammunition than any other ship in the Navy (none of it in anger, of course). With the war’s end her services were no longer needed, and she was sold for scrapping in 1947.The Chinese company SSModel has issued this ship in 1/350 scale kits in two forms – as built with two cage masts, and in the 1927 partially modernized version that I chose to build. The hull is cast in solid cream-colored resin in upper and lower sections; for a full-hull version, these must be glued together, but they do not match very well for much of the waterline areas where they intersect and, once glued together, a considerable amount of puttying and sanding had to be done, including adding several lengths strips of Evergreen plastic strips to the forward half of the hull to fill in the resulting gaps. Also, the deck’s planking appears to be significantly overscale, and there were numerous identical small raised square fixtures on the deck that I determined (from scrutinizing various online photos of the ship) should not be there, and so were chiseled or cut away. The keel had molded into it six blocking and bilge keels, but a man on the Ship Model Forum provided me with a blueprint image showing that the existing short bilge keels were too high on the hull and an inner pair of longer keels were completely missing, so I repositioned and added these bilge keels with Evergreen strips. Of the attached photos of my completed model, three of the last four showed the hull after gluing the two sections together (this required clamping to best align them and then I drilled three screws into the keel to further immobilize and squeeze them together).
The rest (mostly 3D-printed) parts of the kit were less problematic. The six turrets were beautifully crafted and fit snugly into their barbettes so that no glue was needed to secure them and they could still be rotated if desired. The 12-in. and 5-in. gun barrels were all in brass and fully satisfactory. The orange resin used for the printing is brittle and required very careful removal of parts from their attachment points – especially so for the masts and bridge. The latter, which included the cage foremast, came in one part and included overscale 3-bar railing, which I removed and replaced with photoetch (my own from previous builds; no photoetch is supplied in the kit). That bridge structure was also slightly warped to the extent that I had to use a belt sander and VERY CAREFULLY abrade away the center bottom so that the outer edges would fit flush onto the hull. I used spare photoetch ladders and 3-bar hull railing and scratch-built the boarding booms and small fantail crane, and used long steel pins for the flagstaffs. Rigging was made from stretched black sprue. The four casemate gun ports at the stern were not well-defined and I had no way to add the small missing overhangs from the deck, but I added (again, from Evergreen strips) the four armored doors that would have covered the open ports. The kit comes with small and barely adequate assembly instructions, and I had to provide my own decals for the hull and both Vought 02U-1 spotter planes.
SSModel is to be commended, I suppose, for issuing decent kits of unusual warship subjects, but I will not purchase any more of them with solid resin hulls.