by Devin Poore
1/96 USS Weehawken (Old Steam Navy)
This is the Old Steam Navy kit with a lot of extra work. The kit would have built beautifully out of the box, but I always have to go nuts with the detailing. Some of what I did:
I added a "wooden" floor from styrene to the interior of the turret. I also scratch-built the turret's overhead support beam system, replaced the kits cannon carriages with ones scratched from sheet styrene, and added scratch friction clamps and trunnion covers. I wasn't about to hide all of that work, and I didn't have the heart to cut a section out of the turret, so I replaced the cast resin turret roof with one made of clear styrene and individually drilled the hundreds of holes in it (thanks to Ed Parent for that idea).
The ship's deck and hull sides were scribed (the kit comes completely smooth). I also added flush bolt heads to the side of the hull using a jewelers' punch. The resin stack had warped when I left it in the sun, so I turned a new one from aluminum on a lathe. The deck hatch coamings were custom made from styrene and brass wire. The stay rigging for the stack was twist-braided out of picture hanging wire strands.
In "things that can't be seen at completion" department, I built an interior where it is visible through the hatches. In retrospect I should have either skipped this part or put lighting in the thing, but with a penlight you can see the forward berthing deck, the passageway outside of the captain's cabin, and the after prop shaft alleyway. The grain sacks, barrels, valve handles, etc. are all from HO scale Grandt Line accessories.
Being the last items I added, I was short on time to finish the ship's boats, so I replaced them with white metal kits from Amati. Beautiful boats, but a bit heavier than the kit's resin ones, so I also replaced the davits with beefier aftermarket items. I rigged the pulleys as the full sized ones would have been, and they actually worked to raise and lower the boats until I locked them into place with drops of superglue.
The figures are from Cottage Industry Models. They are straight forward except for the deck watch who hold a scratch musket, complete with a hammer assembly built from a 1/350th scale 20mm shoulder rest PE. The rooster is HO scale, and represents Chapman, the ship's mascot.
The ship was primed with Mr. Surfacer primer and then painted with Vallejo Model Color paints. There are no surviving photos of Weehawken, so only written accounts of her could be used in determining her color. She, along with most coastal monitors, were not overall black, despite popular opinion. Several sources, both Union and Confederate, list Weehawken as being "lead" color with a red band around the top of her stack (or chimney, as they were called then). I found a few mentions of the color "lead" in my research, one of them being a test of the paint on the USS Constitution in the 1840's, and went with the common description of it being a blue-gray color, heavier on the blue. I used the Vallejo 907 Pale Gray Blue. If I had to do it again I'd go with the Vallejo 906 Pale Blue Gray, as it has a bit more blue in it; the Gray Blue looked fine out of the bottle, but subsequent weathering and clear coats took a lot of the blue out of it. All wood grain effects in the boats and on the decks were done with Vallejo Iraqi Sand that was then treated with glazes and wipes of darker brown shades for the grain effect. The only non-Vallejo colors I used were for the metallics, steel items were painted with Floquil Old Silver, and the brasswork was done with Testors Brass enamel.
