by Paul Helfrich
1/240 USS Olympia (Revell)
This model of the USS Olympia (Admiral Dewey's flagship at the Spanish-American War Battle of Manila Bay) has been around forever, and has been issued by Revell, Lindberg, and probably many others.
With that said, it was a very well-detailed model, for an old tooling. It even included railing stanchions, which could be rigged with thread to produce a reasonable facsimile of railings in the days before photo-etch.
The real USS Olympia is the only ship of its era to have been preserved. It can be visited in Philadelphia, PA. I painted it as it appears today.
The next time I build a model from this era, I'm going to try and get the buff paint a little more yellow in tone. Other than that, I'm pretty happy with this model. It earned a 2nd place in the 2006 Kanawha Valley Scale Modeler's contest. I built the model about 11 years ago, but I've always thought it was one of my best, and was glad to see it do well in the contest.
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