Excellent painting so far, my friend @clipper!

Hi, Carl (@clipper): Dealing with the PE is at another level in model ships. Still thinking about what to add, when in the build, and when it should be painted. Lots of decisions.

Rear deck has really come together, Carl (@clipper). Depth charge racks? Who knew? Another very cool fact. The paint really pulls all the different objects on the deck together. All of your IDs on your photo are correct. I am getting ready to print replacement gun director platforms for mine. They will be solid, so a lot more robust. Looking forward to the next installment.

Those ammo boxes are ammo lockers.

Nice work on this.

Thanks for the clarification and the compliment Tom (@tcinla).

Thanks John (@johnb) for the compliment.

I recently finished re-reading Neptune's Inferno written by James Hornfischer. Excellent book and really puts you into the environment that these brave souls experienced. The USS San Francisco was part of a group of cruisers that fought several battles with the Japanese Imperial Fleet, suffering grievously through a variety of reasons, including inadequate usage of the available technology (SG Radar), an under appreciation of the skill of the Japanese fleet in night actions, and some poor communications. Despite this, they ultimately contributed to defeating the Japanese at Guadalcanal.

I found it particularly interesting that the San Francisco got in a situation where it was able to so seriously damage the Japanese Battleship Hiei, that it was eventually sunk the next day from follow on air attacks. The Hiei was a much larger ship with far larger weapons, but at the range this particular battle was fought, the San Francisco's 8 inch guns did some very serious damage.

Hi Carl (@clipper). I love reading Hornfischer and have read all of his books on the Pacific War. I was sad that he passed away. His books have given me several ideas for kits.

The fore deck has now been detailed and painted. I was a bit confused at first about how to do the anchor chain. Looking at photos, I could see more than one chain going to each deck hawse hole. After doing a bit of research, I found out that there are two chains used. One of for holding the ship while at anchor. The other is a shorter chain that is used to keep the anchor up against the hull side when it is fully stowed.

The deck details molded on the kit are a bit on the weak side so I've dressed them up a bit. The shorter chains would have connected to a small cylinder molded on the deck if I had left them stock. But it looked like the real items are secured using a "U" bracket on the deck and a clevis bolt, so I made some really small versions of this and replaced the molded detail.

I had previously removed the molded in deck chain earlier in the project because the wood veneer kit contained a brass chain replacement.This arrangement on the deck was different in the drawings and photos from how the kit originally molded it, so I installed it to match the photos (at least as best I could).

There was a molded hatch in the center of the fore deck which barely stuck up from the deck, but on the real ship, this is raised up from the deck by an appreciable amount. Since there was no PE to replace this, I borrowed part of one of the smaller PE hatches and stuck it on a small rectangle of plastic which was then glued to a smaller bit of plastic to raise it up from the deck. The entire piece was then glued to the deck.