1/350 USS England DE-635 (Trumpeter)
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by Russell C. Dutnell |
1/350 USS England DE-635 (Trumpeter)
This is the second model I've built since I was in the 8th grade, and I'm 53 so it's been a long time. The first one was the 1/350 scale USS Missouri (BB-63), which I built last month, and was my first submission on this site (or any site). At the time of this writing it has not yet been posted, but it probably is as you are reading this. I am an Air Force brat, but not a military man myself. My dad, though spending a career in the Air Force, was a Naval Academy grad and thus took summer cruises aboard ships, including the Wisconsin (BB-64), the Missouri (BB-63), and the Bennington (CV-20). I built the Missouri to give to him as a gift but then he related a story to me about he and the rest of the football team being transferred to a destroyer in a basket while underway and since I really enjoyed building the Missouri I thought I would make a diorama depicting the scene. He didn't remember the name, or class of destroyer that he boarded, but he knew it was a destroyer escort, so I bought and built the Buckley Class USS England from Trumpeter, and those are the pictures presented here, taken with a borrowed Sony Alpha 200 with a 55 mm lens.
The final model included the kit parts, plus some parts from the "1/350 Scale Buckley/England Fittings Set" photo etch from Gold Model Medal Works. Unfortunately, the MK. 10 Hedgehog was already installed when I got the PE set, and I wasn't about to start cutting on it, so I didn't get to use this much more realistic looking feature of the kit but the railing, yardarms, ladders, etc. really improve the looks of the model. The rigging was made using 40 wt black Rayon thread from Coats. Being new to modeling, I read a lot about how to do this, including which material to use and what color. I also looked at a lot of pictures. Picture don't help. It's wire or cable and the color is not identifiable, especially in the black and white photos of the era. Looking at models others have posted doesn't help because some are light, some are dark and some are thinner than others. I like the idea of using sprue but I can only stretch it super thin which, to me, was difficult to work with, and although it is probably more to scale, it's a model "simulating" reality and I think the effect is more important than sticking to scale, so I opted for the black Rayon thread. I found it fairly easy to work with and I think the results came out pretty good. It doesn't dominate the scene but it is clearly visible.
I had painted the Missouri in Measure 32, so I opted to paint the England the same. Based on information obtained from Timothy Choi's Gallery submittal of his USS England (which is really awesome and if you haven't seen it, you should), I opted for Design 3D using colors in the design change specified on Snyder & Short's camouflage site, which were the same I used on the Missouri. Finding the right colors was not an easy task. I was surprised because, I mean, how many colors did the Navy use and how many Navy models are built every year? I thought for sure that in this day and age it would be easy to find the right colors, but it was not. After hours of looking on the internet I found paints that were recommended for the primary colors I needed that I could find locally. The paints I used are shown below and you can see that it is quite a hodge podge of enamels.
Horizontal Surfaces
Anyway, enjoy the photos of my USS England model in her temporary berth.
