My club‘s Theme Build for 2018 is the Vietnam Nam war. The Coast Guard played a significant role in securing Vietnam’s 1,200-mile coastline. Some 8,000 Coast Guardsmen and 56 different combatant vessels were assigned to duty there. So I decided to do a USCG Secretary class cutter from Coast Guard Squadron Three, which operated from 1967 to 1971.
I am building the Revell Taney kit as one of her sisters, the USCGC Duane. The seven 327’ Secretary class Cutters entered service in 1936-37, and the last ones were decommissioned in 1986. The Revell kit dates from 1956 and has been sold as both the Taney and the Campbell since it’s original release. The box-scale kit scales out to about 1/305 scale. The kit isn’t an accurate replica of any of the class at any given time, though it purports to be the Campbell from the Korean War era. It is a mix of weapons and equipment from multiple ships at different points in time. But the basic shapes are pretty good…
Gold Metal Models does have a detail set for this kit- I’ll be using at least some of it (railings, for sure) to replace the infamous Revell “railing walls”.
Taney was decommissioned on December 7, 1986. It was a big deal - lots of VIPs. I was a LTJG stationed at the District Office in Portsmouth then, and served ( with lots of others from the area) as a VIP usher for the ceremony. The special guest was an elderly Mrs. Corrine Taney something. (Don’t remember her married name.) She was a descendant of Roger B. Taney, and as a young woman had christened the ship at her launch in 1936.
Yes- the kit’s 5”/38 turret is a little clunky, but I’ll make it do. I sanded what looks like baseboard trim(!) off the bottom of the turret sides, and added the PE doors.
The kit’s main deck has fine raised wood planking detail, but the wood decks were gone later in the ship’s career. The deck is covered with oversize, clunky details— there are vague lumpy things that are supposed to be the K-gun depth charge throwers, and bollards that look like oversized traffic cones. The deck also has various oversized locating ridges for other parts, some of which I won’t be using.
Rather than try to carve and sand all this away, I decided to just make a new deck from .040 sheet styrene and add new details. My model won’t have any depth charges, so the deck extensions aren’t needed, either. I also filled in the stern ports.
I ordered a few 1/350 scale parts- I’m going to use resin bollards to replace the traffic cones.
In 86 I was an ET3 in Kodiak aboard the Storis, another WW2 veteran. Her fate wasn’t as pleasant shall we say. The “Queen of the Fleet” was scrapped after 64 1/2 years of service. The first American vessel to circumnavigate North America. Her max speed was 14 kts but we usually putted around at 11. [8-)]
The library of Congress’ Historical American Engineering Record (HAER) project has a page of digitized information on the cutter STORIS (other USCG craft & stations are also available).
There are some pretty good information presented in the as-decommisioned state including plan views, elevations, and lines. The deck plans should be valuable in determining what needs to be deleted from the Taney kit deck. If you are particularly anal, there are a set pf plate expansion drawings to rescribe the kit hull correctly.
Thanks for the link-- but I must be doing something wrong-- all I can find are the Storis plans and 10 photos of the Taney. Can’t seem to find any Taney plans, after trying multiple searches…
There might not be any Taney plans. It all depends on what the archivists did, measured, drew up, photographed. Then there are items which are identified but have not been digitized & put online. It depends on funding & time
One of the reasons to make my own deck was the desire to replace the foc’sle anchor handling gear with something better.
Here is a shot of the new deck in the foreground, with the kit’s original two part deck in the background. (You can see the truncated cones bollards, too.)
At this point, I still need to add the access ports in the deck where the chain goes down to the chain locker. The replacement chain came out of the scrap box. It isn’t standard navy stud-link chain, but it still looks a heck of a lot better than what Revell molded into the deck…
I also made the capstan drums from some scrap styrene- I glued a piece of tube over a piece of rod, and then clamped it into my cordless screwdriver to turn and shape the piece with files and sandpaper.
The hull is glued up with my replacement deck. I epoxied a strip of 3/4" square basswood in the bottom of the hull, to serve as an anchor for whatever mounting (pedestals, keel blocks, etc.) I end up using for the finished model.
An advantage of the blocks is that I can also mount a handle to make it easy to hold the hull while painting…
The hull was primed with Tamiya rattlecan fine white primer, then painted with Tamiya flat white and hull red.
EdGrune & rcboater, i have a copy of the Taney plans downloaded from the coastguard site before the site was changed. it is a 8.47meg pdf file containing 327GeneralPlansMainDeck & 327GeneralPlansProfile so if you want a copy let me know.
I actually started this kit about a month ago- I’m still catching up with posts. (There’s no way I normally work this fast!)
I masked and painted the CG “racing stripe”. Coast Guard Red is a red-orange color (FS 12199), which isn’t available in any model paint colors. (CG Bob says that ModelMaster Chevy Engine Red is the closest.) That color is only available in enamels, so I kept looking. (I ended up using a color from the Citadel gaming line-- a scarlet with a bit of orange tint to it. The photo makes it look darker and redder than it is in person.)
After I applied it to the model and removed the masking-- I realized that I had made the stripe about only 2/3 as wide as it should have been. So I ended up remasking and re-painting.
