1/720 Italeri USS Constellation (CV-64)

by James Griffiths

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Hello, fellow ARC’ers, it’s been a while…..

I thought you might like to see some pictures of my carrier, not an aircraft I know but the aircraft carriers section of the gallery was looking a little sparse!

Brief History

The Constellation or ‘Connie’ was commissioned in 1961, and was one of only three conventionally-powered carriers to remain in service with the US Navy into the 21st century. She saw action in Vietnam and the Middle East . In the early 1990’s she underwent a SLEP (Service Life Extension Program) to update her systems so she could continue to stay on active service. Despite this, the Constellation was retired in 2003. Her sister-ship, the USS Kitty Hawk (CV-63) remains on active service.

Click on images below to see larger images

  

The model

My model of the Connie is based on the Italeri 1/720 kit. This kit needs serious, serious work to make it anywhere near accurate. I stripped it completely back to the hull and rebuilt it from there, including cutting the hull to the ‘water-line’. The weapons platforms either side of the forward deck were repositioned and I began the laborious process of scratch-detailing the hangar deck, all the catwalks and platforms and extensively rebuilt and detailed the island. The needless and ugly deep seams in the deck that Italeri insist on including in all their carrier kits was filled in and sanded smooth.

For the more visible details I got the excellent Gold Medal Models (GMM) photo-etch ‘supercarrier’ set, which gives you just about everything you could need to detail out a 1/720 carrier: radars, railings, nets, even propellers for the Hawkeye aircraft!

On to painting, a straightforward mid sea grey was applied to the hull and a very dark grey (almost black) to the flight deck. As I was depicting the ship just before she was retired, I weathered the model quite extensively, with brown and black pastel to simulate rust staining on the hull; and various shades of grey applied over the deck markings to simulate the faded, dusty appearance of carrier decks. The deck markings indicated by Italeri on their instructions are completely wrong by the way, I consulted photos and cut a lot of spare decal sheets to get them right! Finishing touches on the island were authentic flags and insignia printed on decal paper from my printer.

On to the airwing. The Vikings, Hawkeyes, Intruders, and some of the Tomcats and Hornets were from a Skywave set, and the rest of the Tomcats and Hornets are the new Trumpeter sets. The Seahawk helicopters are resin items from White Ensign Models. All the aircraft have authentic homemade custom decals for the CVW-2 airwing, including ‘modex’ numbers. All aircraft received a light enamel wash to weather them to various degrees.

The finishing touches were GMM crewmen, painted with difficulty as they are so tiny! I also added deck tractors from Skywave and sundry other items (e.g. a missile trolley were scratchbuilt). The ‘water’ in which the ship sits is a technique I read in Fine Scale Modeler; take some tin foil, rumple it gently, paint it blue/green and cover this with a glossy, glue based sealer called Mod Podge. The waves are acrylic gel medium and white paint.

My advice is not to take on a project like this if you value your sanity! The model is immensely fragile and with this in mind I bought a plastic dust cover that slots into the wooden base. Despite almost losing interest several times my perseverance was rewarded when the model took a bronze medal in its class at Scale Model World 2006 in Telford (IPMS UK Nationals). Thanks to fellow ship-modeller Jim Baumann for taking the pictures at the contest.

Hope you enjoyed the article

James

Photos and text © by James Griffiths