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Kombrig 1/700 USS New Jersey BB-12


Ron Bell

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This was my first resin ship kit. I was always intimidated by these as the ones I saw built up at contests were so delicate and detailed. Turns out, I was right to be intimidated. These kits are not for the faint of heart. Many tiny resin and PE parts and unlike on, say military vehicle kits, they are not glued to larger parts and then painted one color. They are separate entities that need painting themselves and even sometimes with multiple colors. Kombrig makes it as easy as they can as the model is beautifully cast and everything fits very well, but still, there are a lot of itsy bitsy teeny tiny parts. List the mounts for the 2pdrs are starlike and need to be folded, but are only about 2mm across when completed AND they need to be mounted onto a base ring that is thinner than a human hair it seems. Anyway, this ship is 1/3 of a project I have in mind to do a "changing of the guard" with BB-12, BB-62 and SSN-796, all New Jersey's, sailing past each other. We'll see if that every comes to the light of day.

 

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She's sharp looking Ron! Did you hand paint the deck, or air brush it, mask it, and then paint the superstructure parts?

 

Coincidentally, the newest Scale Modeling Quarterly has the Niko models 1/700 USS Virginia, BB-13. The builder echoes your sentiments about having to work with such tiny parts! Congrats! Looks great!

 

GIL :smiley16:

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Gil,

Painting order was white hull first as it's easy to mask and I left the masking on during assembly to keep the white, well, white.

Then the decks. Deck and hull were airbrushed. Then I airbrushed any parts that were either all or mostly the ochre. The vertical sides of the superstructure were brush painted.

 

John,

i hear you on those small guns. The 2 pdrs on this thing had four PE parts and a resin barrel the size of a human hair! When done, they would have been about 1mm square in size. However, I found a sprue of parts that I couldn't at first identify that turned out to be resin representations of the same guns. Still had to add the shields, but that's only two parts instead of five and no bending. Also found the PE boat racks, for lack of a better word, that go on the bottom of the boats so they have something to sit on, also had duplicate resin parts that were much easier to work with and looked just as good.

 

General note. The sides/bulkheads on the upper decks are actually just railings covered with canvas. You could cut them off and replace them with PE railing and the ship would look much more "open".

 

 

These kits are very labor intensive. I think the only subject that could tempt me to try again would be one of the monitors, like the Amphitrite, Miatonomoh or other such. Always liked the looks of those weirdos.

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Yeah, I found the PE boat cradles - they survived longer than the resin ones did.

I also think I spotted the resin gun parts, but make a note to go back and look.

 

I'll recheck my bulkheads vs railings, I thought I had a good handle on them - although I might be too far along to change any without making a bigger mess. BTW, you railings look really good ! Mine are better canvas-covered ....

 

I hope you agonized as long over the real ochre as I did - I see we have different answers :smiley4:

Edited by JohnRatzenberger
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That ochre is almost as debated as the various RLM 20's,87.5's, etc. The real problem lies in the fact that there are no surviving examples, unlike the luftwaffe colors. i have a post card collection and several paintings of all these ships and the ochre is different in each one. 'Course that could be a printing problem, but it just shows nobody really knows. Your guess is as good as mine.

 

And cool idea to do her with a cage mast.

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