1/350 USS Pittsburgh, CA-72 (ISW)
|
by Robert Apfelzweig |
1/350 USS Pittsburgh, CA-72 (ISW)
The USS Pittsburgh was a Baltimore-class heavy cruiser that saw action in the Pacific during the last year of World War II. This ship towed the heavily damaged aircraft carrier USS Franklin away from the Japanese home islands before the latter ship was able to resume steaming under its own power, and the cruiser is perhaps best known for the loss of her bow up to nearly the first 8-in. gun turret during a typhoon on June 5, 1945. Fortunately, no crew members were lost and both the ship and its detached bow (christened, in a manner of speaking, the McKeesport -- a suburb of Pittsburgh -- by the cruiser's crew) were saved. The ship was repaired and saw action again during the Korean War and in defense of Taiwan in 1955, subsequently being decommissioned and then ultimately scrapped in 1973.Iron Shipwrights kit is typical of their production from a few years ago -- a generally well-cast hull with numerous superstructure and armament resin parts and a good pair of photoetch frets for radars, and railings. The resin gun barrels, however, are often poorly cast and so were replaced in this build with brass 8-in. (Mark 12; Mark 15's were installed on the actual warship but are said to be nearly identical to the Mark 12's) and 5-in. .38 cal. barrels from Aber. I also used L'Arsenal 40-mm quad Bofors and Model Master 20-mm Oerlikons for a more realistic look, as well as some Tom's Modelworks photoetch for the fire control radars (slightly easier to work with than the kit's own parts), and a Trumpeter Kingfisher floatplane (I only had one left, and will add the other one some time in the future). Rigging was from stretched black plastic sprue. The ship is painted in its initial MS32 camouflage scheme with my last WEM 5-L enamel, Pollyscale 5-O acrylic, ModelMaster 20B enamel for the deck, a mixture of Tamiya Flat Black and German Grey, and water-based Liquitex Cadmium Red Medium Hue sprayed onto the lower hull.
ISW's assembly instructions are quite extensive with lengthy descriptive texts; the illustrations, however, are still rather primitive by today's standards and sometimes almost look as though they were taken from an Etch-a-Sketch. Several photoetch parts are mislabeled and a few resin parts are not shown or included in the kit (but could easily be scratch-built). Online photos of the ship and various previous builds of this kit were helpful.One curious feature of this particular model from ISW was the apparent warping of the hull, with both the forward and rear thirds slightly bent upward. After unsuccessfully trying to flatten the keel by immersing the hull in hot water and then clamping the bow and stern sections onto a flat surface (this provided only a temporary fix) I hit on the idea of using a hacksaw to cut through nearly the full depth of the hull, from the keel upward, and then to glue the separated sections together with superglue, after first slightly softening the deck area (which was uncut) with a heating gun to avoid breaking off the bow entirely; the cut was made between the first and second turret barbettes. This was successful, and the resulting crack was filled with putty, sanded and painted over. I decided that the rear section of the hull was not sufficiently warped to try my luck at this again, so I left it as is.
