At model shows I often spend a fair bit of time looking at models of ships, particularly those modelled on a sea base.
But I'd never built a model of ship, not even as a kid so at ScaleACT 2025 I picked up this kit from the swap and sell and figured I'd build it pretty much straight from the box and stick it on a sea base.
The Kit
1/700 Trumpeter USS San Francisco CA-38 1944 Kit No 05747
Aftermarket
- AA set No. 1 - 1:700 & 1:350 Series - Royal Navy
- AA set No. 1 - 1:700 & 1:350 Series - United States Navy
- Bofors 40mm AA set - 1:700 & 1:350 Series - United States Navy/Royal Navy/French Navy
- Kriegsmarine Sailors – 27 Unique Poses – 1:700 & 1:350
These were printed on my Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra
The Build
This kit had a ton of tiny parts (who'd have thunk it 😃 ) so a fair bit of time was spent cleaning up sprue attachments.
I really had no idea how to assemble this kit so I started with sub assemblies. I replaced the with main gun barrels with some brass tube.
Painting
I applied a base coat of light grey over the entire model through the airbrush using Mr Color 338 as suggested by the instructions but with a drop of green to get a shade I thought looked closer to the reference material I'd found. At this stage all the sub assemblies were not attached to the hull.
The Blue on the Hull was Mr Hobby H42, again as per the instructions. I enlarged the instructions and cut out paper masks to replicate the pattern.
I brush painted the blue on the sub assemblies using mixes of various Vallejo blues trying to match the Mr Hobby H42 as close as I could.
The deck was mainly Tamiya AS5 navy blue as I thought the gloss sea blue suggested by the instructions looked too dark. I sprayed most of the deck with the airbrush before attaching the sub assemblies.
What followed was a lot of touching up of all colours again using mixes of Vallejo. The metal on the AA guns were painted with AK markers. This probably is inaccurate for the 5 inch guns but it adds some difference breaking up the other colours.
The Base
The base was made from insulation foam, bordered with balsa wood.
The waves were created with the texture paste shown in the images the
The base colour for the sea was a cheap acrylic paint. it was named aquamarine so I figured it would be a good place to start.
It was about now I lost interesting photographing my progress.
Final Bits
The base was finished by adding by some more cheap acrylic paints, followed by gloss coats, more paint, more gloss, then an acyclic gel and a semi gloss coat (which I hated) and then more gel. It's chemical nightmare on there 😃 The wake is mainly the white artists texture paste.
In the end I wasn't really happy with the wake or splashes up the side but fixing would just make it worse so I have decided to chalk it up as a learning experience.
Rigging was AK Rigging (0.2mm). I found a plan online and did some of lines but not all. I hate rigging bi planes so I wasn't going to enjoy rigging this tiny ship.
I didn't like the supplied name plate so I designed and printed my own.
Conclusion
In the end this was a fun little project. The kit itself is ok and there is a lot of plastic there so construction, which is usually my favourite part of the build, took longer than I had expected.
Being a tiny subject the sprue gates and mould line were harder to clean up than usual.
The size and large number of sticky out bits meant that a lot painting was by brush. Brush painting isn't my forte.
I think this has cured me of ship building for a while, especially 1/700 scale .
That said if I do another I think I'd lean towards a 1/350th modern subject, although the PE puts me off those. I'd love to a 1/350 Leander (HMNZS Waikato) but it seems there is not a mainstream kit of the Leander (and I'm not interested in resin or anything else).
The Pictures
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