Keith Bender
1/350 UUSS New Jersey BB-62 (Tamiya)
This is a Tamiya 1/350 Missouri kit. I was commissioned by the battleship New Jersey museum in April 2001 to build five different models of BB-62 for the ships museum display. This one is the fourth of the five and my favorite. I used four Missouri kits for the first of four ships and one modern NJ to build her as 1982, This one had the most re-work. First thing to do was make a new rudder pattern and cast two per ship. The Tamiya rudders are far too small in the fwd. to aft measurements. I added the butt strap plating to the hulls as well. There are two rows of them from the main deck down to the first deck on each side and they stand out like a sore thumb.
The Jersey still had all her quad 40mm guns when she was taken out of mothballs in the 60's and with this I had to use a Missouri kit to preserve the guns tubs which are empty. Now I painted the two fwd. 01 level gun tubs light blue as they were done so on the ship. There is a photo of Capt. Snyder on an air mattress floating in one of them. Using the life rafts from the 1982 version I made more by casting in resin. Resin was used for several parts including the chaff launchers, MK-56 directors, ships boats and boat racks.
The flightdeck was built up with a plastic sheet and the planked deck was removed from this area before the plastic was put in place. Why ? Because when I did the Korean War version she had no catapults and this area needed to be filled in with a cleanly scribed deck and this area fit perfect. As on the 1969 version I built up the main deck under the flightdeck first, confused yet ? All I did was cut on the plank lines and fill it in with a fresh piece of deck.
The six pack off quad 40mm bank was still there but change a little. They put four chaff launchers up there and used the two highest tubs for MK-56 directors. That area had to be modified. After that I moved to the fwd. tower. The ECM's went up there and the boxy like structure had to be built for them on either side of the tower. To this day NJ is the only of the four Iowa's to have this structure. Next was the mast. These are completely scratchbuilt using brass rods, wire, brass tread plate and some PE radars. This is probably the most interesting part of the model and required allot of time but I like it better then any of the Iowa's past or present. Something else I did was order a new fwd. deck section from Tamiya. It was easier to do that then try and blend in all the removed gun tub placement areas with planking. The stacks are cut open and new grills put in place. One of my biggest pet peeves is not many modelers open their stacks so one can see right down there at least to the deck where it is so dark it won't mater that far down. But it bothers me to see a stack that is about .062 deep. As I said sometime before " where does the smoke come from ?"
I went with white paint on the inside of the aft quarter 40mm gun tubs. These had a hawser reel inside and at one point were white. The photo I've seen also had laundry hanging over the tub sides. I liked a little more color to the ship with out the laundry. In all this was a good project to make from a Tamiya MO. I would do this one again. The plans came from the Stillwell book on NJ and it was completed in one month.
