by Bob Nandell
1/540 USS Kearsarge CV-33 (Renwal)
A blast from the past........ Anyone old enough to remember when we rode our bicycles to the hobby shop on Saturday's with our precious paper-route money would recall this old Renwall brand kit from the 1950's. For their day, the Renwall kits were not bad if you considered them to be a quasi-waterline model. Renwall at the time put out models of the cruiser Springfield, the battleship N. Carolina, a Farragut class destroyer, a transport, and, this model of the Kearsarge.These were not the most accurate kits but were easily assembled, easily painted, and in the case of this particular model easily renovated after years of shelf-life. Another plus......to keep grand-kids happy, you could even float the flat-bottomed thing on the wading pool. On board for the photos are some left-over F-11 Tigers from an old Aurora aircraft carrier model. The Kearsarge, commissioned in 1946, was one of the many Essex type slant-deck conversions that survived clear up through the Viet Nam war. Kearsarge after a 1956-57 modernization served as an antisubmarine warfare carrier as CVS-33 and in 1962 and 1963 was a recovery ship for some of the first orbital space flights. Just like the real ship had several conversions, this is the "third conversion" of my copy of this grand old kit.
