USS Columbia in dry dock

Tom B.
Very interesting project idea 👍 Looking forward to what eventually becomes of it!

Treehugger
How long is it? No jokes please. 😄

Steven Van Dyck
Well, I did put this up as an idea because there will probably first be another large ship project in the future, but this one made me decide to do the Columbia in stead of the Birmingham. I saw at least the radar antenna is correct and different from the first Cleveland kit. The dock will only arrive as early as october. It seems at least some figure sets will be needed. This does give a good opportunity to show a full ship hull and a waterline model at the same time. As the length is predicted to be almost 80 cm, this will take as much space as the Zuikaku showcase.

Steven Van Dyck
A review of the ABSD kit and the Birmingham kit used on it:

Used out of the box:
- All allied 1/350 ships can be placed in the dock, that still seems widely available everywhere. The period of use of the dock as an ABSD is restricted to 1944-early 1945, after that they were changed to AFDB status and an expansion was built around the walls. Maybe this can be scratched onto the kit without much reshaping.
- Cleveland type light cruisers are frequently portrayed on old ABSD pictures. This makes them easy subjects in a diorama, but some problems arise. You can't use the complete ABSD kit, remove two of the pontoons for a correct proportion. For me this discovery came too late. Also, the Veryfire Cleveland and Birmingham hulls have apparently an intentional kink in the keel, necessitating a rework of the first part of the keel to make them fit on the blocks. The builder is also completely left on his own device for the docking plan of the ship. Seemingly an Iowa hull was used as the manual example, but it is not reproduced correctly. A lot of blocks have to be tripled in number, I only nearly had enough of them for a cruiser. The tripling of the blocks is made more difficult because they are not perfectly square, the result has something of a wedge shape.
- The modules can also be used individually, for a port diorama or the towing by a tug. The walls can be shown down or maybe even angled halfway up. This would reduce the dio size.
- The berth of the pontoons is minimalized in the kit, most of the pictures show them sunk on par with the accompanying barge deck heights. This I also discovered later on. I could only provide access to the YRDM's on their main deck. Some of the YF barges have cabs built on them, these would be accessible then. A solution is using resin water to fill the gap, but you would need huge amounts.
- Make sure to use the wall tops as the base for the construction of the wall sides. I first squared the sides and then added the top, leading to a skewedness causing a bad fit between the pontoons.

Embellished with aftermarket:
- The ABSD is an extremely detailed upscaling of Snowman Models' 1/700 dock, making the builder level quite advanced but not extreme. Yes, there's a lot of PE, but the parts are large enough to manipulate and prepared to fold easily. But it is not complete for a real ABSD setup. Therefore you would need about 240 centimeter of two-chain railing on top of the one provided for the catwalks, assuming you wouldn't sink these down the waterline and use it on top of about half of the walls.
- Maybe you want to replace the 500+ slightly wedge-shaped keel blocks by nice rectangular ones, about half of them in a triple configuration. But that's a lot of sawing. At the other hand, the kit ones all need clean-up to glue them flush to the deck.
- None of the specialized auxiliary boats are available in 1/350. Type YF en YRDM are visible on most period pics, accompanied by a floating crane, a tug and multiple LCM's. I could have used the new Black Cat one, but I veered back from the 30 euro shipping cost compared to my usual 6 euro L'Arsenal one.
- For the Cleveland and Birmingham upgrades I can give good acclaim. A pleasure to build and perfect detail.
- Also a thumbs-up for Ion figures. I now prefer them to North Star because they don't break (and don't arrive broken either).