¹⁄700

USS Salem CL-3

The Project…

Here are photos of my latest build, the Loose Cannon 1/700 Birmingham done as the USS Salem, CL-3, in a dazzle camo scheme circa 1918. The kit is dimensionally almost spot on, in comparison to the out of production Jim Shirley kit which is noticeably shorter. As the kit is one of Loose Cannon's earlier efforts, some cleaning up was necessary to make it look the way I wanted. I cut the belt armor off, filled in the molding seams, and then made up new belts from strip styrene. The stacks were scratchbuilt, as were the masts, gun directors, flag staffs, and stack vent pipes. Spares were used for the 5" and 3" deck guns and casemate gun barrels, the deck vents (except the 6 largest ones), searchlights, boat cranes, and lifeboats.

I ground off the front molded anchor and chains, and re-made the hawses, and used PE chain and anchors from Gold Medal. I also used Gold Medal ultra railing, although there is a PE fret with the kit. I used the kit PE for the bridge and aft searchlight platforms, and the boat davits. Floquil and Testors paints were used and stretched sprue was used for the rigging. A special thanks to Ron Smith for helping me with the camo scheme and the actual colors to be used.