by Bill Liebold
1/350 USS Lassen DDG-82 (Trumpeter)
This is a pretty well done kit. It has problems but I can live with most of them. The hull has the bumps found on the other kits in this scale but they sanded off easily. I filled the inside of the sonar dome so I could refine the back half of it and bring the trailing edge to a knife edge.
The directors in the kit have round dishes so I replaced them with scratch built dishes that are elliptical. That’s something that really bothers me, I guess because I see them every day at work. If you build this kit check photos of the real ship with respect to the radome arrangement. The kit directions show an arrangement that I have yet to see on a real ship. I couldn’t do the Lassen’s radomes 100% with the part that were provided. The real ship has four radomes on top of the deckhouse that have the knuckle where the round top meets the sloped sides, but the kit only has two, so I used two of the smaller radomes as substitutes.
The sponsons on the side of the front deckhouse for the SLQ-32’s are made so they can go on either the port or starboard side. The part has a little walkway on the front and back end. That connects the sponson to the deck behind it, the front walkway should be trimmed off.
The angle on top of the aft stack is too high. That was fixed by sanding it down to the same angle as the front stack with a sanding block.
I used the Gold Metal photo etch. It worked out well. The side helo nets had to be shortened to fit, no problem there. The kit photo etch didn’t have enough five rail pieces and it didn’t have any three rail pieces. The Gold Metal three rail system was shortened by cutting off the top rail to make the railing around the mast platforms. The kit fret also didn’t come with the foot rail system for the mast yard arms.
I only used the emblems on the forward stack and the name on the stern from the decal sheet. The rest of the markings are painted on. In the one photo you can see the 82 on the decal sheet next to the painted on 82. The numbers on the sheet are way too big and they are white and black, not two tone grey. The lines for the deck markings are too heavy and I don’t like the gun circles that are red and white dashes. I’d rather paint on a solid red circle and leave off the small white stenciling.
The topside was painted with Tamiya Sky Grey, the decks are German Grey. The red for the hull is a mix of Flat Red and Red Brown.
