I agree completely with mfsob: unless the recipient of the gift is a model enthusiast himself, it’s counterproductive to get hung up on the details. Normal human beings aren’t accustomed to subjecting ship models to precise examination. We modelers, who do worry about such things as the fonts of 1 mm lettering, are the weird ones. If it looks like the ship in question from normal viewing distance, the recipient will probably be delighted with it.
I do remember two details I put on my old APA model that my father noticed. One was a series of davit cables (I think I used nylon monofilament; if I were doing it now I’d probably use fine wire.) Each of the big power davits holding the LCVPs on the sides of the midships superstructure had a heavy wire cable running straight inboard from the outer foot of the davit to a winch, about eight inches above the deck. It was widely asserted that everybody who ever served on board an APA (or similar vessel) had tripped over one of those cables in the dark and gone crashing to the deck at least once. Some said that the Official Badge of the USN Amphibious Force in WWII was a faint horizontal streak across the front of one’s pants legs. Those cables were always liberally covered with grease, and no amount of washing in the ship’s laundry would get all of it out.
The other detail Dad liked had to do with metal primer. (I’ve mentioned this point in a couple of other threads, but it’s a little piece of trivia that I’ve never heard of except in Dad’s reminiscences.) Anybody who served in the USN during WWII - or, I suspect, any other period - knows that much of the daily routine of shipboard life consisted of scraping paint and repainting various metal surfaces. (“If it moves - salute it. If it doesn’t move - chip the paint off it.”) During the war the Navy apparently abandoned its peacetime red lead primer and adopted some sort of zinc-chromate primer, similar to what was used on aircraft. Dad described it as a sickly, dull yellow. (He recounted how “some of our great geniuses” tried to save some effort by mixing the primer with the haze grey finish coat, thereby producing an ugly shade of green. Dad was partially color-blind; if he thought that green was ugly it must have been really ugly. The chief took one look at it and threw the can overboard.)
Chipping paint, priming, and repainting was a standard routine; the truth of the matter probably is that it was more effective in keeping the sailors occupied than in maintaining the ship. But almost every metal surface in the ship was subjected to it. The only major exceptions were the outboard surfaces of the hull, which were off-limits when the ship was under way. Almost all the other external surfaces underwent the constant chipping/priming/finish painting process. The primer took several hours to dry. So at any given moment some parts of the ship (excluding the exterior hull plating) would be yellow, where the hands were waiting for the primer to dry before applying the finish coat. The yellow areas might range in size from a square foot or so to a fairly large section of bulkhead, or even part of a gun turret.
Remembering Dad’s accounts of all that, I took a 0000 brush and added a dozen or so tiny, pale, dull yellow spots to the model. The look on his face that Christmas morning, when he put on his bifocals and saw those yellow spots, was - well, I still remember it more than thirty years later. I’ve used that trick on several other WWII-vintage ship models, and it always gets a grin of recognition from Navy vets. The key, as in so many other weathering techniques, is to keep it subtle and not overdo it.
In retrospect it seems odd that few, if any, modelers back in the fifties thought much about those flat-bottomed Revell hulls. In some cases there was a reasonable excuse: the underwater hull lines of the Iowa-class battleships and the liner United States, for instance, were still classified when the kits were released. (The U.S. was built with a big federal subsidy, part of the deal being that she’d be made available to the Navy as a high-speed transport in wartime. Lots of her characteristics were kept from the press for a long time.) But surely there was nothing secret about the hull shape of a C-3 freighter, a tanker, or an attack transport. And the combination of the waterline (well, sort of) hull and the “trestle” stands really looks ridiculous to the eyes of a modern scale modeler. I guess we were just naive back then.
Maybe it’s worth noting that one other manufacturer, Renwall, made an attack transport. It was a little smaller (1/500 scale, like the rest of the Renwall warship line), came out a few years after the Revell one, and was, in many ways, quite a bit better detailed. It had individual 20mm guns (really astonishing in those days), and a full hull - complete with screw. (It’s quite a rare kit nowadays; the few I’ve seen for sale have been priced over $100.) I was in elementary school when the two kits were initially released. I remember noticing that the Renwall and Revell hulls looked different, but it took me quite a few years to figure out why. Much later, when I did the Revell version for my father, I just screwed it down to a varnished walnut baseboard. Dad was perfectly happy with it. I wonder what ever happened to that model.
Too long as usual; sorry about that. But this is a fun subject for reminiscing.
