by Julian Marsh
1/700 USS San Juan CL-54, 1945 (Dragon)
This is the light anti-aircraft cruiser USS San Juan, as she may have appeared in early and mid 1945. The build of this model closely follows the blue-prints for the ship's late 1944 refit, from the ship's Booklet of General Plans. These blue-prints were obtained from The Floating Drydock. Other references included the Navsource website and the book, Atlanta Class Cruisers in World War Two, by Glen R. Arnold.
As a result of variations of design introduced during the refit process, by 1945 the San Juan differed from the USS San Diego (and other ships of the class) in a number of details. Starting with the Dragon USS San Diego kit, made a number of modifications and scratch-built details using Evergreen plastic. I've included several pictures of the partially complete, unpainted model, which show some of the modifications. Most of the photo-etch details are from the Eduard San Diego-specific PE kit, while yard arms, a few bits of railing and a few other parts came from the Gold Medal Models Light Cruiser and Destroyer set, and PE elements used in the 40 and 20 mm mounts are from Flyhawk sets. As is evident in one of the "in progress" pictures, I decided on a hybrid of PE and plastic parts for both the 20 and 40 mm guns. I used a number of plastic parts from the Skywave E-9 set, most notably the twin 5 inch mounts. I briefly considered using Paperlab 5 inch mounts, but decided it would be more fun to build up my own, starting from the skywave parts (see close-up picture of unpainted mount). streched black sprue is used for the rigging and the flag is a double-sided computer printing on regular printer paper, using my own strategy for obtaining good registration of the two sides.
Overall, I'm very please with the final results. A few innacuracies remain from the Dragon kit, most notably the somewhat incorrect positioning of the bow knuckle, and the overall length of the forward superstructure, but I decided early on in the build that I could live with these.
