1/350 USS Bass (Yankee ModelWorks)
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by Martin Quinn |
1/350 USS Bass (Yankee ModelWorks)
Another of the group of subs I worked on post rotator cuff surgery, USS Bass is another old resin model kit from the Blue Water Navy/Yankee Modelworks stable.Per Wikipedia, one of the V class boats, Bass?s keel was laid at the Portsmouth Navy Yard. She was launched as V-2 (SF-5) on 27 December 1924, and commissioned on 26 September 1925. Like her sisters, Bass was designed to meet the fleet submarine requirement of 21 knots surface speed, for operating with contemporary battleships.
V-2 was assigned to Submarine Division 20 and cruised along the Atlantic coast and in the Caribbean Sea until November 1927, when the Division sailed for San Diego, California, arriving on 3 December 1927. V-2 operated with the fleet on the West Coast, in the Hawaiian Islands, and in the Caribbean Sea until December 1932. During this period her 5 inch (127 mm)/51 caliber deck gun was replaced by a 3 inch caliber weapon.
Renamed Bass on 9 March 1931, she was assigned to SubDiv 12 in April. On 1 July, her hull classification symbol was changed from SF-5 to SS-164. On 2 January 1933, she was assigned to Rotating Reserve SubDiv 15, San Diego. Bass rejoined the fleet again in July and cruised along the West Coast, in the Canal Zone, and in the Hawaiian Islands until January 1937. She then departed the West Coast and arrived at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 18 February 1937, where she went out of commission in reserve on 9 June.
I built Bass to represent her sometime in the 1930s, to match a photo of her underway from NavSource. The kit was mostly built out of the box, with a deck gun from BlackCat Models (I goofed and put a 5in gun on her it should have been a 3in). I also added periscopes and mast from brass rod. I could never make out the deck markings seen in the photo (are they a 6? are they a B?), so I left them off. The model was painted overall black, using Tamiya rattle can paints. Decals are from various old YMW and GMM sheets. Many thanks to Ryan Labieniec, who proved extra letters for the name on the bow, after I screwed those up!
My seascape was made using insulation foam, using the Chris Flodberg method as seen in the April, 2016 edition of Fine Scale Modeler.
