by Sgt. Ryan Labieniec, USMC
1/350 USS Enterprise CVN-65 (Tamiya)
This is my recently overhauled Enterprise by Tamiya. It is the 3rd or maybe even 4th time I have overhauled her, but hopefully my last! I wanted to bring her up to my current skill level.
It was a labor of love, and probably would have been easier to buy a new kit, as you can see from the first pics, she was in bad shape. This is the only model in my collection that has any sentimental value to me, my dad got it for me for my 13th birthday, I really wanted it, and it was a heck of a task for a kid with a couple cans of testors spray paint. I am now 28, and I really appreciate the canfidence my dad had in me to build this big ship when I had only done cheap 1/700 kits up till then. So I finished her off as a tribute to my dad, to make her worthy of display alongside my other adult builds.
The airwing is a mix of Tamiya and Trumpeter, eventually will be all trumpeter. I had a few sets of Trumpy planes I got a good deal on that I was going to use on a commission build of a Nimitz class carrier, but the buyer backed out, so I had some Trumpy planes to get me started anyways. I wanted a colorful airwing, so I just decided to go with squadrons who's markings were appealing to my eye. Obviously this is not a specific airwing to Enterprise, but a hodge podge that I think looks cool.
The E-2's and C-2's are trumpeter planes with starfighter decals "Tiger Cruise" add on set, and look great.
I redid the entire ship with the exception of the flight deck, the deck painting is the original I did when I was 13 with the spray cans and a lot of masking tape, it came out awesome for just a kid who had no clue, so I decided to leave the deck alone for nostalgia. Unfortunately I did not know how to fill and sand seams at that age, so they are still pretty visible, but I can live with it.
Very rewarding, can't wait for dad to see it, and it just goes to show ya that you might just be able to save an old model if you put in the effort.
I threw in some before overhaul pics to give an idea of what she looked like when I started.
