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Wasp Refueling Buchanan
by James Kloek

1/700 USS Wasp + USS Buchanan (Corsair Armada/ Pit-Road)

The diorama, in 1/700 scale, depicts an actual event which took place on August 3, 1942, while both ships were steaming towards Guadalcanal. Color photos of this are on both covers of Clasic Warships Pictorial #12, Benson/Gleaves Class Destroyers.

The Buchanan is the Skywave injection molded kit, while the Wasp is the Corsair Armada resin kit. Clearly both built up into good models. The Buchanan has been detailed with GMM photoetched parts, including rails, 20mm Oerlikons, radars, depth charge racks, etc. The Wasp kit came with an amazing photoetch fret, but the rails are GMM Ultrafine. The aircraft have also been detailed with GMM photoetch. Demonstrating a severe case of AMS (advanced modelers syndrome) I removed the wing mounted landing gear molded on the F4F Wildcats, and scratch built landing gear on the fuselages. There are also over 100 GMM photoetech figures on the two ships. I opened many of the hangar deck doors on the Wasp, and finished the hangar deck. There are several aircraft and more figures on the hangar deck.

The diorama won both Best Ship, and Judges Best in Show at ROCON 24, the annual Rochester, NY IPMS contest held recently.

The pictures were shot on Kodak High Definition, ASA 200 film with a 25 year old Canon AE-1 SLR. I shot at f-16 with shutter speeds varying from 1/8 to 1/2 second. The camera was on a tripod, and I shot using natural light coming through a sliding glass door on a day which was alternately sunny and cloudy. The images were digitized on a Kodak Picture CD using Kodak Perfect Touch processing. (Yes, this is a shameless plug, I work for Kodak, but there are a lot of questions posted about how to take pictures of models, so I thought I'd pass along how I do this.)

James Kloek