This afternoon was getting the detailing done on the Lexington‘s gun galleries and boat pockets – steps 3 and 4 in the Trumpeter plans. The catch is that I had to start taking into account that I’ll be using the GMM Lexington/Saratoga photoetch set (shown below), so skipped the parts that require separate assembly with the PE. Here that meant the two ship’s boats (PE railings) and the 20mm mounts (PE shields) were left out for now.
I had already assembled the 1.1 quads and 5 in .25 cal. mounts, and decided the 5″ PE would actually be easier to attach with the mounts in place. In addition to those, I added the bitts, 1.1″ directors and eight .50 cal. machine guns.
I checked the gun mounts against the plans for the Lexington‘s final refit at Pearl Harbor in March 1942 shown in Steve Wiper’s Warship Pictorial on Lexington. Both the bow and stern .50 cals were slated for replacement with 20mm – but the plans tag these as something that would be done in the ship’s next yard period. Both the plans and the excellent annotated two-page spread of the famous photo of the Lexington on May 8 are a good reference for what her final appearance was.
The flight deck is also looking trimmer, with the flight deck safety railings cut off forward.
The kit requires a “lot” of paint touch up, in part because the Scale Colors paints I am using go on so thin airbrushed that they require brush painting the detail pieces before and often after assembly. They’d need this anyway to cover up sanded down sprue marks, but I’m usually brush painting the entire part.
It’s slightly annoying how hard I am working to get the horizontal surfaces covered in Deck Blue and the verticals and fittings in Navy Blue – and they’re almost indistinguishable both in person and in photos. Maybe they’ll read a little difference after a little weathering. But in fairness – they were pretty close on the real thing as well. The horizontal part of this gun shield might have been hull color, but I think it was Deck Blue.
Tomorrow I may install elevator #1 and paint and install the flight deck. I ordered some new flight deck paint from Scale Colors, but am not sure I want to to wait for it to come in. Or maybe I’ll just prime the flight deck and mask it off and do the final coat later. It is going to get a lot of PE attention, since the set includes all the arresting gear pendants, so perhaps better not to do an inferior topcoat.
But I’ve made the big decision to use the PE set – the finished model is going to look very different than the 2017 build, which was largely out of the box.
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