I got a call on Thursday night from a woman asking me how long it would take me to build a Fletcher model (1/350) for her father…I told her 6-8 weeks…She asked me how much it would cost…I told her her $200…she offered my $500 if I could get it done in time for Christmas…so…Friday night, I opened the box of the Tamiya Fletcher… the customer picked it up at 2pm this afternoon…here’s the model…
Now, it’s not spectacular, no super detailing, and I didn’t even put the hull number on because she didn’t remember what ship he was on, other than a ‘Fletcher Class’ with ‘squiggly paint’…
Not bad for 14 hours of work… $35 an hour to build models is kinda cool…trouble is, there’s just not enough business out there…well, back to the scratchbuilding…
If it were any other time of year, no dice…she would have had to wait in line…but it’s Christmas, and I used the money to get the missus a new living room set (well, a good portion of it anyways).
Go to a craft store and spend $8 on a pre-cut wooden name board…these are the boards you put the numbers and letters on for your house…ya know ‘The Hernes’ or #43…
A $12 tube of acrylic gel medium and you’re good to go…I cut the hull, glued it to the board and poured some resin inside…let it kick, attached the deck, and built it right on the board. Painted it, and sprayed the board with deck blue and navy blue left over from the airbrush… Once the major building was done, I added the gel medium and went to sleep, when I woke up, it was dry. Finished the model, rails, etc, and Dullcoted it…put a wash of blue paint over the gel medium, added the white for the wake and bow wave, then coated it in Future floor wax. And done…
Jeff I noticed you painted the tops of the 5" gun mounts and Torpedo Tubes Deck Blue. How common was this during the war? My refs say to paint as part of the cammo. Just wondering, guess it really doesn’t matter too much.
Gotta look at individual ships…my photos of O’bannon show her with camo on the turret tops when she was working up (without her SC or FC radars) but show her turret tops dark blue going under the Golden Gate bridge en route to the Pacific…
The plankowner also stated that he remembers the turret tops being blue when she was in her dapple pattern…since I built it for him, that’s the way it went, accurate or not…
I got a call from him the day after Christmas thanking me…The first question I asked was ‘What ship were you on??’ and explained the lack of hull number as being too obvious as to give away the surprise. When I told him I was playing 20 questions with his daughter…'Does Fletcher sound familiar? How about Nicholas, Radford, Jenkins, O’Bannon??? He got a big kick out of the that…
Much to my surprise, I found out that he actually was on the O’Bannon, so I sent him a set of waterslide decals of ‘450’ today. He insures me he’s done decals before and he promises not to mess it up…
Although the money was nice…it really means alot to hear someone 1200 miles away get choked up because you took time to model ‘his’ ship correctly. Had I had more time, I would have put 40-60 hours into it really done it justice… but then again, I don’t think he really cares, he’s got his ship model.
Happy New Year folks…and if you make any kind of New Year’s resolution, build a model for a vet…you’ll be happy you did, whether you get paid for it or not.
