USS Wilkes Barre
by Paul Helfrich

1/700 USS Wilkes Barre CL-103 (Skywave)

This is the Skywave USS Miami kit. The kit allows you to build a number of the later ships in the Cleveland class of WWII light cruisers.

I enjoy building ships named for places in my home state of Pennsylvania, so I built the kit as the USS Wilkes Barre, CL 103. She will eventually be joined in my collection by the new Trumpeter USS Pittsburgh, a Baltimore class CA, but that's a project for another day...

She's equipped with some details from Gold Medal Models. It's a nice kit, although a bit expensive compared to the latest Trumpeter offerings, which have the added bonus of offering a choice between full hull or waterline. Cleveland class cruisers are not real well represented in kit form, at least not in plastic...before this Skywave kit, there was an old tooling which Lindberg had marketed as the USS Manchester, in a rough 1/600 scale, but that kit, as I recall, was pretty crude.