by Ron Smith
1/350 USS Southerland DD-743 (Yankee Modelworks)
Old BWN USS Gearing kit now released by Yankee Modelworks
Finally an experiment that worked!!!! I experimented with blowing up and printing a camouflage pattern and laying waxed paper over it; then I applied Tamiya tape to the waxed paper and traced the pattern. A few slices with a new scalpel and I had a ready to use mask.
This particular kit is probably one the last Gearing kits cast by Mike Bishop of BWN and it showed, lots of pinholes and tearout. Other than that it was a fairly easy build with better than usual instructions for BWN. Lots of little details were scratchbuilt, like the entire mast except the radar screen. Rigging is all tippett that was heat tensioned. Floaters nets are gauze rolled around a styrene rod then coated with thinned white glue. Most of the splinter shields aft of the stacks are styrene strip, the locations of everything from the aft stack to the aft torpedo tubes were altered to match drawings. You may notice turret #2 does not have blast bags, Southerland didn’t when she wore this scheme. The blast bags on turrets #1 and #3 are made from sections of styrene discs glued to the barrels to provide bulk with Micro Krystal Klear used to fair them in and smooth the contours.
DD-743 along with a few other early Gearings wore Measure 33a/28d on
her trials in the Atlantic, most of them painted into Measure 21 before
heading to the Pacific. Paints are acrylics. Colors are 20-B deck blue,
5-L light grey and 5-O ocean grey.
