BB-39 Arizona Project II - Upgrading the Parts

As I mentioned in the previous Arizona post I found a number of excellent WIPS on various forums. I have picked out one in particular to use as a good online reference for changes that can be made to increase the accuracy of the Trumpeter kit.

The forum is "The Ship Model Forum" found at shipmodels.info its apparently part of the modelwarships.com forum. This particular thread is titled: "1/200 Arizona finally Done!" and the author is Jeff Sharp, 23 pages of mind boggling detail. There are a number of other good ones in that forum but his is definitely the best.

Along with the online WIP, I'll be using the two books mentioned in the previous Arizona post; "Battleship Arizona, An Illustrated History" by Paul Stillwell and "USS Arizona" by David Doyle part of the Squadron/Signal Squadron at Sea series.

Then there are the parts (I'm listing these because often the WIPs that I have seen don't mention where the parts they used came from):

KA Models - the deluxe accessory pack MD-20001 which includes a tone of photo-etched parts as well as wood decks. Most of the parts are going to come from this.

Eduard Model Accessories - USS Arizona part 3 Life Boats #53104

Floating Drydock - Studded Anchor Chain

Shapeways/Model Monkey (model-monkey.com) [Steve Larsen] - Steve has created a ton of 1/200 scale parts for ships and many are specific to the Arizona. I'm not sure what I will use if any. He makes a replacement for the turrets that are exquisite but very expensive.

Northstar Models - makes four sets of US Navy crewmen in various working positions. Three of the sets are pretty large and would amount to just over 200 crewmen for the deck. They are the best looking crewmen I have seen in this scale so far, but they are likely in the wrong uniform for deployment in Hawaii.

I have also decided that I'm going to build this as a waterline model. That means I won't have to work on the lower hull or figure out how to mount it which sounds like a royal pain. At this point that's the grand plan. We will see how well I bring the to fruition.