Hasegawa 1/350th CVE-73 Gambier Bay Build Update

One of the features that initially looked promising with the Gambier Bay was a page of the instructions manual that had templates for the Measure 32/15a camouflage pattern; while not strictly necessary, I thought it a nice touch. However, when I tried using it I found yet another company that doesn't understand algebra and geometry. The templates are just copied from the original flat paper of the design sheet and don't take into account the horizontal shift as well as vertical. Pythagorean theorem, any one?

Below is a photo of the model on top of the templates, with a copy cut out and placed where it is supposed to go; as you can see, it's not even close to covering the right area. I suppose the templates will work for the straight areas, but those are the easy parts, so it's really not going to be a good help to people new to dazzle painting.

1/350th USS Gambier Bay CVE-73 Model Pt 1

My "gateway drug" into researching was plastic model building, which I have been doing as long as I can remember. I started as an "airplane guy," and while I have a collection that consists of mostly airplane kits, a good portion is (unsurprisingly) ships. I've been working on a Hasegawa 1/350th Gambier bay for about nine months, mostly not working on it due to weather and burn out. However, we had an exceptional weekend and I decided it was time to take it beyond just the antifouling on the hull. So yesterday and today I painted the black boot stripe, and today I started on the 5-P Pale Gray of the Measure 32 design 15A she was painted in at the time of her loss in 1944. Here she is with the boot top and below taped off and the 5-P painted on. Paints used so far are White Ensign for the Norfolk Anti-Fouling and 5-P Pale Gray, and Model Master's basic flat black for the boot topping.



This is part of a review for InternetModeler.com and as I'm not a fan of leaving tape on for a long time (particularly with a few issues I had with Tamiya primer recently) I should be hitting this fairly heavily in the next week or so, so stay tuned!