About a year ago, I picked up this re-issue to do a fun quick build. My dad served on the Lexington on her first cruise after the SCB125 refit. Tragically, he passed away about a week after I started this kit. When going through his office, we found a package full of slides of pictures he took from Vultures Row of air oops. Beautiful Kodachrome pics of Cougars and Banshees. After seeing these, I just had to convert this old Renwal kit to the Lex and portray that day. We are planning to make a shadowbox with his flag and certificates as a backdrop. This is what it turned out as…
Great looking build!!! This is one area that I have not attempted, building a ship. They scare the bejeezus out of me to be honest. I’m not sure my patience level is up for that. Kudos to you for your build and sorry to hear about the loss of your father.
A fine, handsome model indeed - even more so considering the age of the kit.
For what it’s worth - when I looked at the pictures on my phone I thought the model didn’t have any rigging. Those signal halyards only became visible when I opened up the thread on my big Mac monitor. Nice job.
I have a question about the kit. My recollection is that the Renwal warships had flat bottoms, with big, separate panels that were supposed to be glued in late in the construction process. The idea was that the modeler would apply glue from the bottom of the deck, so it wouldn’t show on the finished product. (Renwal called it “No-Show Cementing.”) Not a bad idea, but I wonder nowadays how it affected the underwater hull form. Does this kit have such a feature? If so, did it result in any obvious distortion of the hull shape?
I don’t remember when that kit was originally issued, but I think it was in either the very late fifties or very early sixties. To be fair to Renwal (and, for that matter, Revell in its early ship kits), I supposed it’s quite possible that the underwater hull lines of the Essex class were still classified at that time. I think that explains the ridiculous underwater shape of the old Revell *Iowa-*class battleship.
Good one, Sprue-ce - though it took me a minute to get it.
Scottrc, my deepest condolences on the passing of your father. The only good thing that can be said about that experience is that you only have to go through it once. And you never get over it. My dad died twenty-five years ago, and I still find myself seeing a book or record in a store and thinking, “That would be a good Christmas present for Dad.”
My current project is a generic (i.e., done the way I like it) model of an early-twentieth-century Gloucester fishing schooner. It’s going to be named the G.L. Tilley, after Dad. He was a Navy man, a ship lover, and the most dedicated seafood eater I’ve ever met.
Thanks John, I built a complete radar and communications array for the model from parts of the Gold Medal Models PE set, and had to be 100% accurate since Dad was a ET and his job was to maintain just about anything that had electrons running through it, especially everything on the mast. Hence why he had some great pictures of flight oops.
Regarding the kit, similar to the Revell kit, the hull is one piece and your are correct, all the parts get glued in from inside the hull by accessing up through the center part of the hull that is open. All the details from the waterline up are great and even though there is no hanger, the space is there to do some extensive scratch building. Some of the other details like the elevators need to be discarded and new parts fabricated from the PE set. The Revell kit is more of a symbolic hodge podge of different Essex class carriers both long and short hull representing 3 decades of changes. The Renwal is about as perfect as you can get for the Lex, or any of her short hull sisters right after the SCB125 modernization.
Below the waterline, there is NOTHING. A plastic plate gets glued on over the large opening used to gain access to glue in all the sidewall details. There are pops and shafts, but these are way out of scale and about 20 feet too far up. This kit was released right after the SCB125 program was established and the hulls were vastly transformed from what was built in WW2 and classified. I remember these being marketed as floor models, meaning they were designed to be pushed along the living room floor, hence no need to for a detailed lower hull.
Because of the poor representation below the waterline, I am working on planing a base that will have the model in water. Just waiting on future details of the case that the model will eventually reside in.
That’s a good idea, Scott. I do remember the flat bottoms of that whole series. (Not so far from reality for the battleship, but way off for the light cruiser and destroyer. I think the APA and AKA hulls were reasonably accurate. (Those ships did have flat bottoms.) The finished models certainly looked more reasonable than the Revell APA - a waterline model mounted on “trestles.” In those days, most ship modelers didn’t worry about such things.
The mention of the large, portable crane inevitably stirs up interest in this corner.
I think it’s usually spelled “Tillie.” Alas, no relation to me.
So far as I can tell, the name came from a comic strip, “Tillie the Toiler.” Tillie was a career girl/secretary in New York, who had all sorts of adventures as she tried to struggle her way to the top. Here’s a link to the relevant Wikipedia article - complete with pictures: en.wikipedia.org/…/Tillie_the_Toiler . The author says there was also a movie based on the strip. The movie was released in 1941; I imagine it may have been the immediate inspiration for the name being applied to cranes on board aircraft carriers.
Oops! Since I had your name in my mind it was no coincidence that I used the same spelling. Interesting story in that the girl was compressed in her big city life and toiled hard to prove her worth, young girl in a man’s world type of tale. Although she was always there to get her peers and boss out of a jam, she would remain forgotten and left out until the next crisis arouse. Hence, we could see how sailors would see the relationship of the character to the big crane, limited as to how far it can go in its workspace, and is only noticed when its used to help move or protect planes in in a jam.
