My father served in the Navy from 1964 - 1968 aboard an aircraft carrier. Growing up I got to hear stories of his adventures (some I could tell by heart now). I was always fascinated by his photos of the ship he was on (Bon Homme Richard CVA-31), the planes, helicopters, and various ports around the world. He is very proud of his time in the Navy, and of course we are very proud of him and thankful for his service to our country. During the early part of his service, my mom had bought him a model of the Bon Homme Richard made by Revell when she visited him in San Diego. No doubt he appreciated it very much. At some point after, he started to put it together, but then lost interest. To my knowledge, he’s never been into building models at all, and the sheer amount of pieces and complexity proved a bit overwhelming to him. Many years later my brother and I found it, and with my dads permission, decided to finish it. We did an absolutely horrible job. We didn’t know what we were doing, used way too much glue, never painted it, even broke some pieces in the process. We played with it a lot, then it got put away somewhere. We were young kids and didn’t realize the significance (as my brother would later put it). It’s a good thing my dad wasn’t into scale modeling, or he might have been a bit upset at how we treated it. Sadly, that model has been lost to time and long forgotten. My brother barely remembers putting it together with me. Even I had forgotten about it for a long time.
Important Backstory Stuff:
My father served in the Navy from 1964 - 1968 aboard an aircraft carrier. Growing up I got to hear stories of his adventures (some I could tell by heart now). I was always fascinated by his photos of the ship he was on (Bon Homme Richard CVA-31), the planes, helicopters, and various ports around the world. He is very proud of his time in the Navy, and of course we are very proud of him and thankful for his service to our country. During the early part of his service, my mom had bought him a model of the Bon Homme Richard made by Revell when she visited him in San Diego. No doubt he appreciated it very much. At some point after, he started to put it together, but then lost interest. To my knowledge, he’s never been into building models at all, and the sheer amount of pieces and complexity proved a bit overwhelming to him. Many years later my brother and I found it, and with my dads permission, decided to finish it. We did an absolutely horrible job. We didn’t know what we were doing, used way too much glue, never painted it, even broke some pieces in the process. We played with it a lot, then it got put away somewhere. We were young kids and didn’t realize the significance (as my brother would later put it). It’s a good thing my dad wasn’t into scale modeling, or he might have been a bit upset at how we treated it. Sadly, that model has been lost to time and long forgotten. My brother barely remembers putting it together with me. Even I had forgotten about it for a long time.
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This is part 2 of the story - see part 1 for the backstory of why I built this in the first place. The first step was to get everything out of the box and inspect. Then I did a thorough reading of the instructions and formulated my plan for proceeding. I wasn't building the Oriskany, I was using this as the base, and building the Bon Homme Richard as she appeared in the 60's, so I always had reference photos at hand to make sure I stuck as closely to that goal as possible. The lower part of the hull came in one large piece, but a lot of the upper portion needed to be put together and then attached (platforms, lifeboats, elevator guides, etc.). Nearly everything had some extra flashing (plastic overflow from the injection molding process) around them so each piece had to be carefully trimmed with an X-acto blade before gluing and attaching. That definitely made things a bit more time consuming. Next I trimmed out the deck and set that aside. Then I built the control tower which had a lot of very delicate pieces so I set that aside until nearly the end of the build to avoid anything getting broken off or damaged.
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All blog posts are written by Johnathan Schaaf unless noted otherwise. Archives
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