1/72 Scale Sea-going Vessels

(from 1930s to 2020s)

So far I have collected a fair number of 1/72 scale model kits of sea-going vessels. In 2016, I finally finished building one. I expect the progress on this page will be slow, but someday I hope to display on this site 1/72 scale models of a World War Two Royal Navy Flower Class Corvette, a WWII Kriegsmarine U-boot, and a WWII US Navy Gato Class submarine. Other possible subjects include a WWII US Navy PT Boat and a 1790s Indiaman square-rigged sailing ship.  

Kriegsmarine Kriegsfischkutter
(World War Two)

The Kriegsfischkutter was a patrol boat/mine-sweeper/submarine hunter used by the German Navy in World War Two. Based on an actual German fishing trawler design, over 1,000 Kriegsfischkutters were ordered from shipyards in Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, the Netherlands and Ukraine, and over 600 were built before the end of the war.

Kriegsfischkutters were 78 feet 9 inches long, 21 feet wide, had a draft of 9 feet and displaced 110 metric tons. A crew of 18 operated the steel-framed and wood-clad, diesel-powered vessels. Armament on Kriegsfischkutters varied, but the typical vessel shown in the model below had one twin 20mm gun (aft), one 37mm gun (forward), and six depth charges. (Wikipedia)

 

This Special Hobby kit of a Kriegsfischkutter was an interesting and challenging build. I knew next to nothing about and had little interest in the vessel before I bought it, but after seeing the kit in person at a model convention, I couldn't resist adding it to the collection, just because it was 1/72 scale.

This injection-molded styrene kit was obviously designed in 3D software, which made for excellent detail and fit of parts, but I suspect from much experience with computer-designed model kits that the 3D designers do not build the kits they create. For example, the stanchions along the sides of the vessel to support the guard wire were exquisitely small and fine, with a tiny hole through each stanchion for rigging the guard wire, but they were impossibly fragile. Once installed on the hull, I couldn't handle the model for painting without breaking stanchions off, left and right, with even the most care and lightest touch.

I ended up searching the web and ordering from the UK about fifty tiny, turned brass stanchions that were vastly stronger than the kit's styrene stanchions. After machining away much brass and cutting them much shorter, I was able to securely anchor these brass parts deeply into the side walls (gunnels) of the kit.

Another interesting challenge was establishing the waterline on the exterior of the hull, for painting. Full and very grateful credit to Special Hobby for providing a deeply-struck score line on the INSIDE of the hull halves (in case I wanted to cut the lower hull for a waterline display?), but how to transfer that information to the EXTERIOR? My solution was to (early on during construction) score this interior engraved line with a scribing tool so deeply from the inside that the plastic turned white at the waterline as seen from outside the hull. I then masked above the waterline and airbrushed the lower hull. Masking the painted lower hull gave me the demarcation I needed to much later paint the upper hull.

All paint on the vessel was Testors Model Master enamels; all paint on the splendid CMK resin crew members was Humbrol. Final clear coat was Testors Model Master Clear Lacquers: 40% flat and 60% semi-gloss.

Click on the thumbnails below to see larger images:

Royal National Lifeboat Institute Severn Class Lifeboat
(1990s to present)

The Severn Class lifeboats of the Royal National Lifeboat Institute are the latest, largest RNLI vessels in service. The Severn lifeboats are 56 feet 9 inches long, 19 feet 4 inches wide, displace 25 tons and have a draft of 5 feet 10 inches. The crew of 6 can rescue up to 25 people within the cabin and up to 185 people both inside and out on the decks. Top speed is 25 knots (29 mph) and range is a maximum round trip of 250 miles. (Wikipedia)

This Airfix kit of the Severn Class RNLI lifeboat is another model I bought and built just because it is 1/72 scale, although I did become quite interested in the vessel itself, once I read up about it. The kit was a good challenge to build, with some tricky areas where painting and assembling it required a lot of added mechanical connections.

When I was a child, plastic model kits of boats and ships almost always included some suggestion of a waterline molded on the exterior of the hull. A very good approach, I've always thought. As now seems standard in the plastic model kit boat and ship industry, this is almost universally no longer done. I don't know who made this decision, but I wish I could have 5 or 10 minutes of their time. This Airfix kit tried to help with this issue a little, by scribing an indication of the waterline on the INSIDE of the three pieces that make up the hull, so I made a few micro holes through the hull pieces from the inside, before I assembled the hull.

Unfortunately, comparison of this waterline on the kit did not match the many, many images of Severn Class lifeboats afloat on still water that are available on the internet. Instead, I modified the included kit base to become a cradle that held the hull "level" at the waterline (bow up, somewhat) and then used a Micro-Mark tool designed to score a line at any desired height around any object, such as a boat hull.

All of the many, well-detailed, delicate railings in the kit had just a molded suggestion on the kit's decks to locate where the railings went. I had to drill a 0.026" (0.50mm) diameter hole into the bottom of every railing post, drill a slightly larger, corresponding hole in all of the decks, and install more than 50 tiny brass wire pins at each railing post to make a positive mechanical join between railing and deck. Tedious, but very strong, precise and effective. The crewman at the helm of the open bridge is a CMK resin 1960s USAF fighter pilot wearing the vivid color scheme of a RNLI survival suit, painted with Humbrol enamels.

All other paint was Testors Model Master enamels, including the winning attempt of a dozen custom paint mixes to get a color approximating the RNLI orange of the upper cabin. The decals were from the kit, and worked quite well, with a drop of dishwashing detergent added to the warm decal water. Final clear finish was Testors Model Master Clear Lacquers: 40% Flat and 60% Semi-gloss.

Click on the thumbnails below for images of the model:

U S Navy Patrol Torpedo Boat
(World War Two)

For an excellent, thorough description of US Navy PT Boats, please click this link: PT Boats

This build of the new tool Revell of Germany kit of a US Navy PT Boat was a smooth, fun, easy project. The kit included a lot of interior details which would be impossible to see inside the finished model, so I omitted most of them. Based on my references, I added a few improvements: scratchbuilding the front scuppers at the bow, and adding photo-etched sights to the rear 20mm cannon and brass barrels to the .50 calibre machine guns. The hull needed the waterline scribed on it, to make masking possible, so I built a cradle to hold the hull "level", and then used a Micro-Mark scribing tool to score the waterline. A very handy tool for boat and ship models.

The hull paint below the waterline was a custom mix of Humbrol paint, to try to create the appearance of the various verbal descriptions and color drawings of the unique PT Boat red. All other paint was Testors Model Master enamels. Decals were from the kit. Crew figures were CMK resin, painted with Humbrol enamels. Final clear finish was a 60:40 mix of Testors Model Master Clear Semi-Gloss and Clear Flat Lacquer.

Click on the thumbnails below to see larger images:

Kriegsmarine S-100 Schnellboot
(World War Two)

The Kriegsmarine S-100 Schnellboot was a fast, well-armed Motor Torpedo Boat of the German Navy, during World War II. The S-100 version was the latest design to see combat, with an armored bridge area, up to 4 torpedos, up to 4 mines or 6 depth charges, and at least 3 separate gun emplacements of 20mm, 37mm and/or 40mm. (Squadron/Signal)

This Revell of Germany kit of an S-100 Schnellboot was a good challenge to build and reasonably fun, too. One small design issue in the kit was the lack of any real mechanical connections between the deck and the side railings; I had to drill out 24 holes in the railing stanchions and 24 holes in the deck to receive 24 small brass wires to make a physical connection between stanchions and deck. Based on my reference materials and chatter on the internet about the kit, I ended up scratch-building the three propellers.

The two crew members were CMK resin, painted with Humbrol paint. The wireless antennas were rayon thread. Tiny metal chains were added at the depth charge stowage.

A lot of careful Tamiya tape masking was required for the paint scheme. I used a set of Griffon Models turned brass barrels for the three cannon mounts: one quad 20mm, one twin 20mm and one 37mm. Paint was a combination of Humbrol enamel at the hull below the waterline, and Testors Model Master enamels everywhere else. Final finish was a mix of Testors Semi-Gloss and Clear Flat Lacquer. Click on the thumbnails below to see larger images:

Royal Navy Vosper MTB
(World War Two)

This Airfix kit dates from 1972, and by now the molds are pretty worn out. The first copy of the Vosper kit I bought (too long ago to remember when) was an MPC rebox, and it had a lot of sinkholes in the moldings (areas of the kit parts that are too thick and cause the injected styrene plastic to shrink while cooling, creating actual cavities in the part surface). When I got serious about building this model, I bought an older, actual Airfix issue of the Vosper, which did not have sinkholes.

As I started building the kit, I had fun scratchbuilding replacement parts, for the areas of the kit that were too poorly rendered or incompletely detailed to suit me. I had drawings of the twin 20mm gun and the 2" rocket flare launchers from a book about the Fairmile D class of large MTBs, but other than that, I had limited reference material (two books concerning Vosper MTBs plus some Google photos), so in the end, there was a fair amount of guesswork, but this was meant to be a fun build, not a museum-quality masterpiece, so I was fine with not being obsessive about it.

Then, four-fifths of the way through my build, while surfing the internet for additional info, I came across a 20-plus-page web record of a build by a modeler with the screen name "longshanks8" who WAS obsessive about building his Airfix Vosper. He must have had excellent references, including scale drawings that you can see in the background of some of his images, and he did a magnificent job of superdetailing the old but worthy Airfix kit. Naturally, once presented with this source of research info, I felt compelled to try a little harder. In particular, I detailed the smoke generator and torpedo tubes based on his information. Thanks for posting your beautiful build story, longshanks8.

In the last picture above, you can see the "traction" set up I created to pull the rigging taut while I applied the Superglue. I had the alligator clips with the fishing weights attached left over from my biplane rigging days. I taped loops of thick brass wire to the arm of the adjustable lamp to act as pulleys from which to hang the weights. Once I had superglued the invisible thread nylon strands to the deck, I fed the loose end of the thread up through the appropriate anchor point on the mast, then up through the pulleys, then down to where the weights would hang, well clear to the right of the model. The weighted lines were pulled taut, and I ensured that the mast was vertical, not bent by the pull of the weighted lines, by carefully moving the whole boat around, under the first pulley. Once all was just right, I applied the Superglue to the top anchor points on the mast. After letting the Superglue set, I trimmed the excess line above the mast. It took about four rounds of this traction approach to rig the various areas of the boat.

The Technicolor grid behind the bridge is the signal flag locker. The anchor rope on the bow is a coil of aluminum wire. The ventilator funnels all over the deck took a LOT of filing, filling, sanding and cleaning up to look acceptable. The clear windscreen is .010 thick Evergreen clear sheet, with brass wire framing, with quite a few attempts at cutting each of the three pieces.

All paint on the Vosper was Testors Model Master; I selected stock paint colors that would provide the scale-effect shades I wanted for the model. However, all paint on the two Airfix crew figures was Humbrol; I still get a lot better results hand painting with Humbrol than Model Master. You can tell I am inordinately proud of my stalwart crew figures by the excessive number of images of them, but I know that I am not very good at figure painting: the farther away you get, the better they look. Flat finish was Testors Clear Flat Lacquer.

Click on the thumbnails below to see larger images:

Kriegsmarine Catapult
(World War Two)

The earliest models that I assembled where I really cared about trying to build a kit as authentically detailed as I could were several Airfix 1/600 scale warship models. And the first Airfix ship models I built were of World War II British and German warships. My interest in these subjects was triggered by my purchase in about 1971 of a paperback from the Ballantine Books "History of the Violent Century" series entitled Hitler's High Seas Fleet.

While I had zero admiration for Nazi politics and the World War they caused, for some reason I did find the warship designs of the Deutsches Kriegsmarine elegant. Hitler's High Seas Fleet related the short, exciting life of the German Navy in World War II, and it was illustrated with line drawings of many of the warships German naval architects developed in the 1920s and 1930s. As I learned the histories of these ships, in 1972 I started buying and building Airfix and Aurora kits of German and British vessels. One really nice feature of Airfix kits was that they usually included a couple of tiny, 1/600 scale seaplanes to mount on catapults on the warships. I loved this extra attention to detail, and I would carefully paint and decal these 3/4" wingspan seaplanes.

 

Above is an image of DKM Gneisenau (ca 1939) that I very mildly converted from a Revell 1/570 scale DKM Scharnhorst (ca 1944), with two Airfix 1/600 scale Heinkel He 114 seaplanes mounted on the catapults. I believe I built this model in 1978 or so, not too long before the advent of photo-etched details for plastic model ship kits. Below is a detail of the He 114 on the 280mm Cesar turret. I was so proud of these ship models, forty years ago.

Eventually, I started building 1/72 scale versions of these ship-based WWII seaplanes: an Arado Ar-196 (Heller), a Vought OS2U Kingfisher (Lindberg), a Supermarine Walrus (Matchbox), a vacu-form Heinkel He 114 (Airmodel), a Curtis SOC Seagull (Hasegawa), and a Fairey Swordfish with floats (FROG). As I shifted away from 1/600 warships (in the late 1970s) to pursue exclusively 1/72 scale airplanes, tanks, missiles and so forth, I wished I could build 1/72 catapults for my seaplanes, but at that time no such kits of catapults existed.

In the 1990s, Hasegawa produced a plastic model of a Japanese catapult for several of their Imperial Japanese Navy seaplane kits, and I built and painted the catapult, but wasn't interested enough in Japanese seaplanes to build one to mount on the catapult, so it has languished on the Shelf of Forgotten Models for the last 15 years or so.

Finally, in 2018, I was able to purchase a new Modelcollect 1/72 scale kit of a 280mm calibre triple gun turret of the Kriegsmarine battlecruiser DKM Gneisenau. The kit was intended to model the historically factual re-use of the turret as a coastal battery in Norway in 1944 (see the image above of the Big Green Gun), but I believed I could build the turret back-dated to its appearance on the deck of the battlecruiser DKM Scharnhorst in 1940. I thought I could scratch-build a catapult mounted on the roof of the turret, and then build a Sword 1/72 kit of an Arado Ar 196 and mount it on the catapult.

Click on the thumbnails below to see the start of this adventure:

In the images above, the dark grey plastic is the Modelcollect kit of the 280mm turret, and the white or brass portions are the scratch-built parts. As per the coastal gun installation, the Modelcollect turret lacked the ear-like housings of the original range-finders of the turret, when it was mounted on the DKM Gneisenau, so I had to build them: you can see an image (blue background) above of the extrusions I built out of Evergreen styrene plastic, to achieve the desired cross section for the range-finder housings, as well as for the deck details.

Below are images of the completed model. The Arado Ar 196 seaplane is by Sword. As a typical limited run kit it was a bit of a challenge. Lack of any mounting slots and tabs at the struts between the pontoons and aircraft meant that I had to build a jig to attempt to align the pontoons with each other and with the fuselage. In the end, it turned out that my jig was not very successful, and the left pontoon is noticeably lower than the right, in relation to the rest of the aircraft. I have cleverly concealed this by not showing any pictures of the aircraft, head on. I think the radio aerial is nicely thin and to scale, but I think the x-bracing wires between the pontoons and the fuselage are too coarse in diameter. Better luck next time...

All paint was Testors Model Master with Testors Clear Flat Lacquer. I have found that the Testors Model Master paint is exceptionally great for airbrushing. I lightened all of the Luftwaffe colors on the Arado with flat white for scale effect. On the turret, to make airbrushing the yellow easier, I masked the grey painted areas and airbrushed bright aluminum as an undercoat for the yellow.

Click on the thumbnails below to see larger images:

U.S. Navy LCAC
(1980s to 2020s)

The U.S. Navy operates 91 LCAC (LandingCraftAirCushion) amphibious cargo carriers. The LCAC was developed starting in 1970 with three, different-sized proposed vehicles, designed by James L. Schuler and his team at the USN Naval Sea Systems Command. Following extensive testing of the middle-sized design (named "Jeff" after one of Schuler's three sons), in 1982 the U. S. Navy ordered the first six LCAC vehicles. By 1993, the run of USN LCACs was completed, plus eight units built for the Japanese Naval Self-Defense Force, delivered in 2004.

The LCAC uses four MTU Vericor TF-40B gas turbine engines (3,995 shaft horse power each) to power four lift fans that inflate the rubber air cushion and blow lift air out from under the rubber skirt. Twenty percent of the air thrust is diverted to the bow thrusters (the dark grey, elbow-shaped nozzles on top, just ahead of midships) to enable the crew to counteract crabbing of the LCAC due to wind and wave. A Service Life Extension Program will upgrade the engines to ETF-40B turbines at 4,745 s.h.p. per engine.

The engines also power the four-bladed propellers that provide forward thrust, achieving up to 50 knots of speed in calm ocean conditions, even at a full normal load of 169 tons (67 tons of payload). The LCAC can operate over water, swamp, ice, or land, making nearly 80% of the world's shorelines accessible.

With fully inflated rubber skirt, the LCAC is 91 feet 9.5 inches long, 47 feet 10 inches wide, 25 feet 10 inches high (34 feet 5.5 inches with navigation lights mast upright), and has a maximum range at full load of 300 nautical miles at 35 knots speed. (Squadron Signal Publications)    

Years ago, I saw a scratchbuilt 1/35 scale model of an LCAC at an IPMS national contest; it was huge and magnificent. I thought "I'd love to build a kit of that, but no one will ever manufacture such an unusual subject." How glad I am that I was mistaken: In about 2012, I bought this Trumpeter 1/72 scale kit of the U.S. Navy  LCAC as soon as I spotted it in a now-closed hobby shop (Chesterfield Hobbies) in Richmond, Virginia.

I started work on it almost immediately, but a search of the web for reference books revealed there was only one, very lightweight kid's book about the LCAC available. I searched the web again for pictures of the LCAC, and found many full-view shots, but very few closeup images that would help me add texture to this rather bland, under-detailed, unfinished-looking kit. 

My internet research did provide enough information to allow me to draft in AutoCAD the black and white line art I needed to order some custom photo-etched brass for the screens at the giant, hoop-like shrouds around the propellers. While I was drafting and ordering this custom photo-etch brass,  I decided replace all of the the kit's unduly coarse photo-etch screening with new PE, as well.

 

To amortize the expense of the custom photo-etch, I ordered a dozen or so sets of the brass PE, selling the extras on eBay. But the lack of really useful, comprehensive detail images of the LCAC ultimately caused me to set the kit aside on the Shelf of Forgotten Models. I was unwilling to finish it without better information to add detail to the model.

Finally, in 2016, Squadron Signal released an "In Action" booklet on the LCAC. I promptly ordered the book and dusted off the kit in anticipation. The "In Action" book was very helpful (a Squadron Signal LCAC "Walk Around" booklet would have been even more helpful) and I quickly spotted images in the booklet that helped me finish out some of the bare areas on the kit. Studying the pictures in the booklet made me aware of the relatively wide variety of subtly different versions of the real LCACs that were in service. From these photos I selected one particular vessel, LCAC-69, that most closely resembled what the kit gave me to work with, and postulated a very similar sister-craft, LCAC-68.

This was the largest, most multi-colored model I have built in a long time. Planning out the paint colors to use and the sequence of masking from color to color was challenging and fun. Attaching the one-piece, flexible vinyl skirt to the hull was particularly challenging. I never could get it perfectly straight and level in some spots. 

All paint was Humbrol except for Tamiya acrylic at the white parts; small decals were from the kit; large alpha-numerics were Press-Type from Woodland Scenics; flat finish was Testors Clear Flat Lacquer. 

Click on the thumbnails below to see larger images: