1/350 USS Nevada, BB-36 (ISW)
|
by Robert Apfelzweig |
1/350 USS Nevada, BB-36 (ISW)
Here are photos of my latest build, ISW's resin model of the Pearl Harbor veteran, USS Nevada. I purchased this kit new and unbuilt from a private party through the SteelNavy website, and was generally pleased with its appearance and the fit of its parts. As usual with resin kits, the keel had to be significantly filled in with putty. I used Elmer's Wood Putty because it's cheap and easy to apply, and can take a fine polish when it hardens; Evergreen modeling putty was used to finish off the various remaining seams, cracks and pits. Several of the bridge decks were warped, but I emailed ISW about this, listing the unsatisfactory components (some parts, such as the liferafts, were missing from the kit entirely) and they replaced them immediately. I did some scratch-building of the masts, yardarms and support struts, and used some spare Tom's Modelworks radar and 20 mm Oerlikon photoetch components. Brass barrels for the 14-in. guns came with the kit but I am uncertain of their origin; they look a little too long (they are supposed to be .45 cal, these may be later .50 cal models) and used L'Arsenal 5-in. .38 cal. brass barrels and quad 40-mm gun mounts. The OS2U Kingfisher floatplane is from Trumpeter with pontoon struts from the kit's photoetch set. The Nevada is painted in Measure 22 camouflage as she appeared when bombarding the Normandy beaches on D-Day (5N Navy Blue for the lower hull above the waterline, 5-H Haze Grey above and for the superstructure, US Navy Antifouling Red for the lower hull, all from WEM Colourcoats, and Pollyscale 20B Deck Blue for all deck surfaces). I modified the big gun turrets so that they had plastic pins capped with spare polyethylene rings (from some Tamiya Japanese cruiser kits) in their centers underneath, and drilled wells in the barbette centers (three of them already had wells; I widened and deepened them) so that the turrets rotate without being so loose as to fall out if the model is tilted or inverted.
ISW's kit portrays the Nevada after her major rebuilds in 1942 and 1943,
during which her superstructure was greatly modified and she lost all her
old secondary guns, replacing them with eight pairs of 5-in. .38 cal dual
purpose weapons and a host of 40-mm quad Bofors and 20-mm Oerlikons.
After providing vital bombardment services at Normady and Cherbourg, the
USS Nevada then did the same duty for the invasion of Southern France,
dueling for a time (quite successfully) with Vichy French 13.4-in. guns
at Toulon that had been salvaged from the French battleship Provence.
The Nevada then crossed the Atlantic for a refit in New York and then transited
the Panama Canal to lend her guns to the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
On March 25, 1945, she was hit near turret No. 3 by a Kamikaze airplane,
losing 11 men. She finished out the war in Japanese home waters and
was surveyed upon returning to Pearl Harbor. Deemed by the Navy to
be too old and slow for retention in the postwar fleet, she was consigned
to Operation Crossroads, the Bikini atom bomb tests of July 1946.
Painted a garish red-orange to ease targeting, the Nevada survived both
atom bomb tests, and finally met her end (rather stubbornly as it turned
out) from a combination of surface gunfire and aerial torpedoes as a target
off the coast of Hawaii on July 31, 1948.
