Those lifeboats look really nice, Carl @clipper

Thanks Spiros (@fiveten), John (@johnb), and George(@gblair).

Spiros, 3 times a week, wow. The local club here is also quite small from what I can see. They do have a few meetups during the month.

I did learn a couple of useful tips yesterday, which in hindsight I should have figured out. The best tip is that styrene structural pieces (rod, tube, square and rectangular sections, "L", "I", "U" sections) all will retain their basic shape even when heated and stretched. I had successfully done this with tube styrene and in fact use it quite often. But being able to do the same thing with other types of sections is an eye opener.

George, I should mention that I did not look at pictures of USN lifeboats before detailing these. The PE of course was predetermined by the detail set. But the plastic rudder was simply something I had seen on boats elsewhere and which I felt, made the lifeboat look better, so I added it. What is truly interesting is that these 40 foot lifeboat models are only about 1 inch in length (2.5 cm). For perspective, this is nearly twice the length of my real wooden cabin cruiser (21 feet).

I am about to dive into madness. The ship has 12 (or 14 - I am not sure) 20 millimeter Oerlikon cannon mounts. Eight of them go on the hangar structure I recently completed (along with the lifeboats I am working on).

The Flyhawk detail set has these as twin 20mm mounts but they should be singles for 1942. Furthermore, the detail set has these represented as flat photo etch that needs to be bent up and assembled from several different PE parts. Regardless of how you look at them, the barrels are going to appear flat.

The kit parts are typical plastic molded pieces. The gun bodies aren't too bad, but the base of the gun is incorrect. Furthermore, there are no gun sights. They do give you plastic molded shields to glue to the gun bodies.

I don't really like the flat PE guns, so I am going to use only the gun sights and the round shell magazines from the PE sheet and attach them to the plastic kit parts. Blindness test #1.

The detail set also has resin replacement bases for the guns. I am going to replace the kit bases with these. (Yes, I am!) There are also PE turn wheels that get attached to these resin cone bases which I will be adding. Blindness test #2.

I am making one concession to my sanity by not trying to use the shoulder pads from the PE parts as they are really very tiny.

Okay so how to build and paint these?

Everything will be assembled on the main plastic sprue tree (except adding the resin cone bases). Then the bases and the gun assemblies will be painted while still attached to the sprue trees and over coated with a matte varnish. Then, as I need them for building the ship, I will remove each base and each gun assembly , one at a time and assemble the base to the gun body. Then the complete assembly will be glued to the ship.

So, if you don't hear from me in a few days, it's probably because the guys in white coats have hauled me off to the looney bin! 🙂

Thank you Cricket (@bikequeen). Building ships is definitely outside of my comfort zone. But it will be nice to have one in my collection.

Thanks for the info George (@gblair). I actually just ordered two 26 foot lifeboats from Black Cat from Squadron. I am considering going there to see if they have any of the quad AA mounts because I need four and the kit and PE parts leave a lot to be desired.

Oh my! What an adventure in front of you, my friend @clipper! Still, I confess I love your approach, seeing how far you can push the modeling envelope. Looking forward to your results!

PE drives me crazy, Carl (@clipper), even when it behaves nicely. I would have jumped on those Black Cat 20mm one-piece guns a long time ago. Good luck.