I’m considering purchasing one of the 1/350 USN pre-dreadnoughts from Iron Shipwright. I’d appreciate your thoughts and recommendations. Right now I’m sure I would go full-hull. Kind of leaning towards the Kearsarge, but any suggestions are welcome.
Bill
Kearsarge is a funky looking ship but you can get the same effect with a truly bizzare camo scheme if you do the ISW New Jersey in her experimental 1918 paint. You can see it on NavSource with several other photos. I have both kits on my to do pile. In fact I have purchased all of the ISW pre-dreads as they are a unique source for these ships. WS
I don’t have any of their pre-dreads, but I do have a couple destroyers and the Vestal in 350th.
Quality in the past has been spotty, with air bubbles in pieces and sometimes a resin “froth” on the bottoms of the ships (indicating that pressure/vacuum pots were not used). Weapons were useless and while they would replace bad pieces at the drop of a hat with no hassle, the replacements haven’t been any better… it was a given that you could use the hull and a few other pieces but would otherwise plan on replacing the weapons with aftermarket.
That said, they recently changed operations and might have solved all of those issues they had in the past. I don’t have any of the new stuff yet to know for sure.
Thanks for the information. It’s a pretty tantalizing selection.
In the last couple of years I’ve built several dozen aircraft models and three ships. I can put together an airplane in a couple of weeks of evenings with good results. A ship tends to take me considerably longer.
Two of my ships are the Revell flatbottomed; the Pine Island and the Fleet Oiler, both 1/400 or so. The challenge there is that they needed to be converted to waterline, and then needed a base about 12" square. Plus, as models they needed tons of scratch adds.
The USS San Francisco in 1/350 took me at least two months, and sits on a base 4" wide by 24" long. I bought a 6’ long piece of 1 x 4 oak from a lumberyard on sale, took it to a wood shop and had them cut me one 24" piece and three 16" pieces and put a dado around the top. One is reserved for the Zvezda Suvorov, one for the Hasegawa Mikasa, and then I got to thinking about how to round out the collection.
So by my math, two crummy Revell ships take up 2 square feet, two model airplanes that take me about a month total take up two square feet, or four detailed complicated ships that will collectively take me a year to build take up 2 square feet. This is important to me.
I’m not ready to chunk out $ 200 just yet for a model that may need a bunch of additional stuff like gun barrels, just yet.
Either Olympia or Maine is available online for around $ 90.00 which suits me about right. Your thoughts?
If you wish to be consistent in your display of the battleships (Suvorov and Mikasa) I would suggest one of the BBs from ISW like Kearsarge or one of the others with the military masts, not the later cage masts (most were added from about 1907-1911). In that case Illinois and Iowa from ISW would fit the bill as well. Another suggestion would be to go for the YS Masterpieces Oregon, a truly beautiful kit that is extremely well engineered and complete with everything you need. Pacific Front carries them. You might want to check that out as well. WS
Wow, that’s a beauty! A little out of my range, for now. But thank you all for the information, and I’ve got a couple of new sources now.
Have a good weekend!