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There she is.......There she is.....
My long lasting in the stash Tamiya USS Enterprise. I got this off a trade with
Tony H several years back. It sat in the stash as I waited and waited for
the right group build so I could build it. Well, no-one seemed to start the
right group build so I started my own. The Enterprise group build. This way I
can also build my NCC-1701 Enterprise too!
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images below to see larger images
The Tamiya kit while wonderful
in sheer mass is lacking in detail. Things which really should be
included but are not. include the landing signal officers spaces, nets and
most glaringly absent, THE HANGER BAY!!!! Now, I figured you would not see
much of the hanger bay once the entire ship was completed. But in every
photo I have ever seen of a modern carrier almost all the big hanger bay
doors are open. In the group build pages you can see how I did it. Simple
cardboard floor painted grey and white bulkheads. That's it. To super
detail the hanger bay would take months for details that no one would ever
see. Seemed a waste of time so I kept it simple. The things you do see are
the aircraft. That's something Tamiya did not do the greatest job on.
The Tamiya aircraft are blobs of plastic and lack detail. Trumpeter
aircraft replaced the Tamiya ones. To make the Trumpeter aircraft
even better I used STARFIGHTER decals CVN-65 CVW-8 2001 cruise
decals. Dang, 1/350 scale aircraft decals are tiny. Their application was
easily the most time consuming part of the build.
Starfighter gives you enough
decals for every plane assigned to CVW-8 during the cruise. Even the C-2
Greyhound. For the Greyhound I used a Tamiya E-2 Hawkeye without the rotor
dome. The thing is so misshapen it looks much more like a Greyhound then
the Hawkeye it was supposed to be. It also saved me from having 5
extra Greyhounds as the Trumpeter replacement aircraft come in packs of 6.
The Tamiya aircraft are not all awful. The Phantoms and Corsairs were
great, but were long gone by 2001 so I used some of them for practice, and
placed them deep inside the hanger bay. The Sea King was also very nice so
I did one of those up as a hand painted visiting Canadian CH-124. Its on
the flight deck in the ready area.
Other stuff you need when building
this ship was provided by Gold medal models. Stuff like railings and the radar.
Tamiya does not include the very noticeable railings and their radar was just
plain wrong. Gold Medal also gave me the required flight deck decals. To expect
one to hand paint 1/350 white and red warning stripes let along the elevator
warning markings is beyond silly on Tamiyas part.
Many things as the radar tube
looking things and their support tables on the front and rear of the island were
hand fashioned by me using the two photos I could find of Enterprise in 2001.
The final touch for mind numbing realism is the flight deck crew members, they
are annoying as the day is long to apply but really help the overall effect. I
got them from Eduard.
Shawn Phantom Weiler
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images below to see larger images
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