1/350 USS Irwin DD-794 (Trumpeter)
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by Robert Apfelzweig |
1/350 USS Irwin DD-794 (Trumpeter)
The USS Irwin was a square-bridge Fletcher-class destroyer that saw action during the last year of World War II in the Pacific and then again during the Korean War. This build, based on Trumpeter's USS The Sullivans kit, was a commission for a gentleman who served on the Irwin during the Korean War.
Trumpeter's kit is inexpensive and rather poor in quality; although the upper and lower hull sections and deck fit together very well, many of the parts are poorly engineered and all the molded-in plastic watertight doors are so thick that I had to cut them away with a razor and replace them with spare photoetch doors. The Sullivans kit, fortunately, has an excellent photoetch set for this class from Tom's Modelworks, and this is what I used to detail it, along with Aber 5-in. brass gun barrels. Based on what I could see from the few online photos of the Irwin taken late in or just after World War II, Trumpeter's kit can be used with very few modifications. At some point in the 1950's the ship was refitted with a large tripod mast, new radars and probably lost its seven 20 mm Oerlikon guns, but with a simple Haze Gray paint job and new hull number decals the model probably looks very much as the Irwin did in the late 1940's.
