¹⁄350

USS Duxbury Bay AVP-38, Seaplane Tender

Some of the after market pieces that I used were the radar (L’Arsenal), the floater net baskets (L'Arsenal), the life rafts (L'Arsenal), the whale boat (L'Arsenal), the 40mm and 20mm guns (L'Arsenal and Tom's Modelworks). The Mk52 gun directors were specially molded for me by ISW. The railings are from ISW and GMM.




The admiral's barge came from an old broken DRAGON Ticonderoga CG kit and the captain's gig is from an old broken REVELL USS Pine Island seaplane tender model. I drilled out and carved open the rear seating area and the coxswain’s cockpit in the bow on the admiral’s barge. I painted it to replicate the barge that my father had taken pictures of.




I made my own decals for the stern ship's name and the "Dux-Bay" decals on the small boats.

I made and rigged small boat handling booms, port and starboard, and added an aviation fuel supply pipe to the aft starboard hull.

I added torpedo handling booms and a scratch built winch forward of the pilot house. The torpedo loading hatch in the deck behind the forward Quad 40mm was already molded into the deck.

For the rigging lines, I used two-pound test monofilament fishing line for the mainstays and backstays; and invisible thread for the halyards.
,br> I am finished with the model, however, I plan to add the ship’s radio call sign signal flags to the port outboard halyard and a two-star admiral’s flag to the main mast (crane mast) when a smaller, and more correct, size of 1/350 miscellaneous flag sets are created by Resin Shipyard / Hawk Graphics. I hope that they will be available by the end of the year.

This was my first attempt at any scratch building, except for my remodeled living room, and my first major try at photo-etched parts. Before this, I hadn’t researched and studied references of the item that I was building. I found this build to be quite challenging, frustrating, and yet very, satisfying. It was a labor of love, really. After discovering that a model existed of this class of ship, I just had to make it. And I just had to make it the Duxbury Bay.

I envision a future project of building the Duxbury Bay in her final 1966 configuration as well as models of the USS Greenwich Bay and USS Valcour. I’d love to see all three of them on one display base. I’d also like to build one as the USS Mackinac just as Commander Series Models, Inc. intended the kit to be.

Editors Note: On Saturday, May 17, 2008, Carl enterered this model in the Region 5 IPMS show, "OmaCon 2008", and took home first place in its category and "Best Ship" overall!