Why this ship?

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The Project 68 bis cruisers caused quite a commotion in the early 50's, when the lead ship Sverdlov was commissioned. Rightly or wrongly, some of the NATO allies really worried at the idea of Sverdlov "swarms" raiding the shipping lanes worldwide, a fact made at least plausible due to their range (estimated 9,000 nm at 18 knots). In a classical example of naval "flexing", one of Sverdlov's first missions was to represent the USSR at Queen Elizabeth II's coronation Naval Review (1953).

 

The Sverdlovs represented an early attempt of the Soviet Navy to develop a serious blue-water capacity during the Cold War. In reality they were excellent ships, but built for a different time. With the rapid development of missile armament and satellite surveillance, they became obsolescent. She was planned as the first of many (up to 30, according to some sources), but only 13 were completed.  

 

Nonetheless, they look fantastic, and this is the real reason why I decided to build one!​

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What was added

• Rigging used a mixture of Uschi and AK elastic threads;

• A soviet naval flag was sourced from the TAURO MODEL 700-A08 set "Naval Flags - Soviet Navy";

• A sea base was created using my usual technique.

Other than that, I'd like to say that this was "out of the box"...except that this kit was unusual in that it did not provide all parts one needs to build it. Instead, it includes a number of "self-made parts" including all masts, yardarms, support poles. And no, these parts don't magickally make themselves - what they mean is "make your own". For these, I used a variety of metallic wires from various sources and diameters (anything between 0.2 and 0.8 mm).

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Hover the mouse over the image on top of the gallery for figure legends

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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What you get the you buy this kit: ​Image 1: The kit comes in a sturdy box, and with a lot of packaging to ensure safe transit. Image 2 : The box contents include many finely cast resin parts, and 2 photoetch frets. Image 3: The decals are simply terrible. Never seen any so out of register. Image 4: The infamous "self-made" parts: for reasons I cannot understand, a lot of parts are not provided in the kit. Find your own wire (several different diameters) and cut to size. Images 5-7: on the other hand, what you get is some of the best quality resin I have ever seen! This does not require a lot of preparation...

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Lessons learned and problems circumvented​

 

​This is the ultimate "for experienced modellers only" kit. Throughout this build I was constantly switching between being amazed by how good the parts are, and being deeply frustrated with the instructions, which were particularly terrible.

 

First, the positives:

• The resin parts are finely cast, don't require any cleaning, and can be used as they come. There was no warping; this entire build was completed without the need to use hot water to straighten parts, or to use heavy clamping.

• The photoetch sheet is also excellent. For example, each piece of railing is pre-measured to fit precisely in a specific place, and, just in case, you also get spares. The railing is not as fine as that provided by other companies (see here) but does the job well.

• The kit also appears to be accurate, matching precisely images of the cruiser I could find for the period I intended to represent. For a while I was puzzled for a while by the large antenna in the aft deck just ahead of the X turret, which the instructions asked for, but was absent in the box art. As it turns out, the Pegmantit 10 radar antenna (NATO designation Knife Rest B) can be seen in later photos of Sverdlov, including in the period I chose to represent.

  • A fun fact that I learned during this build is that the Soviet Navy did not assign permanent pennant numbers to specific ships. The numbers were changed constantly to confuse adversaries with respect to how many ships really existed, and where they were; on occasion, different numbers were painted on the two sides of the hull! The number 102 which I chose to use is historically correct only for a short period between 1964 and 1964.

 

Now, the negatives...​

• Starting with the number one problem: you will never complete this kit if you follow the sequence in the instructions sheet. Indeed, page 3 of the instructions contain the warning: "Please note that the assembly guide reflects the position of the parts when installed only, and not the exact order of the assembly". In other words, you have to figure out by yourself how not to be trapped when dealing with complex subassemblies that have to fit together.

• I had an early warning about this when page 8 told me to build the aft mast entirely (~40 parts, resin and photoetch, plus the 3 "make your own" tripod legs). I dutifully completed it (step A20), but with alarm bells gradually building up. This made me skip a few pages, find out, to my horror, that this now was supposed to fit precisely around another complex subassembly (A24), which in turn had to fit to the aft smokestack (A18). That's when it dawned on me that the makers of this kit have an inordinate amount of faith on modeller's abilities. From that point on, I decided to build everything with white glue first, and only fix with cyanoacrylate once I was convinced that things would really come together. And trust me, many, many steps had to be retraced. I used Micro Krystal Klear, which gave a good bond while also allowing me to dislodge entire assemblies by soaking in water overnight.

  • For the main (fore) mast, I had much better result by building the superstructure first (pages 17-20), then using it as a jig to gradually build the mast, from the bottom up.

  • Whatever you do don't build the fore superstructure entirely (pages 17-21) and then try to fit the fore smokestack (subassembly A19). It is impossible to fit the stack through the hole once everything is built. Build in layers, from bottom to top, with successive decks being added around the stack. 

• The printing of the decal sheet was completely out of register. Basically not usable, other than for the hull numbers (which were, fortunately, simply white) and the ship name at the stern (for which some bleeding of yellow could be disguised as weathering). 

• Some aspects of this kit are so over-engineered that it is not funny. If something could be made more complicated by having you glue sub-millimetre pieces of photoetch, it was made so. For example, in step A5 each of the resin-made arms of the optical range finders for the main battery asked for 4 individual brackets, having you to glue a total of 16 tiny, near-invisible triangles (after losing a couple of these, they were skipped).  

• Another fair warning: All parts that form the superstructure come attached to a thin resin base. This can be seen clearly in this image. I found the hard way that the only way the model comes together is if you sand off this base completely. There is nothing in the instructions to let you know that this is the case. If you don't do this the errors associated with the extra fraction of millimetre in thickness compound, and it becomes impossible for subassemblies to come together. This became painfully obvious when I tried to build the fore superstructure that includes the bridge, which had to be disassembled and reassembled multiple times (again, use white glue, not cyanoacrylate!!!).

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Hover the mouse over the image on top of the gallery for figure legends

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Painting​

• I could find no good surviving colour pictures of Sverdlov class cruisers in the 1960s. Fortunately, a sister ship (Mikhail Kutuzov) was as a museum, and in the absence of any instructions in the kit I used recent photos of this ship (and this blurry old photo of Sverdlov in 1974) to decide.

• Everything was soaked in kitchen detergent overnight, then dried and treated with isopropyl alcohol to remove any residue from the resin casting. Then, both resin and photoetch were airbrushed with Mr. Surfacer 1000 diluted 1:1 with Mr. Color Levelling Thinner, and allowed to dry for 24h before any painting. I am happy to report that there were no dramas with peeling paint at any stage of this build.

• The main colour used for all vertical surfaces was Tamiya enamel light sea grey (XF-25). Grey highlights were done with XF-54 (dark sea grey), XF-56 (Metallic grey) and XF-63 (German grey). The deck planking was painted with XF-59 (desert yellow). One interesting feature of soviet major naval combatants was the use of antifouling red on some of the horizontal surfaces. For those, I used AK11328 (acrylic) Rotbraun. The smokestack caps were painted with Tamiya XF-1. And, yes, in what seems like a decision aimed at creating a whole new way of torturing lowly sailors, the waterline was actually painted white in these cruisers (done with SMS PL72 insignia white).

• The rear mast above the level of the smokestack appeared in contemporary pictures as black, including all radar dishes and other antennas. To try to give this a more interesting look, I tried a new technique where this dark colour was gradually built with successive applications of Tamiya panel line accent 87131 (black). This resulted in a matte black finish, but with some variations that (in my opinion) make this part look more like a real object.

• Everything was covered with SMS Premium clear gloss (PL09) for application of the decals, and subsequently weathered with very diluted Tamiya enamels (e.g. XF-9 hull red for rust streaks in the hull, X-19 smoke to create dirt patches in the greys). The decking was highlighted with Tamiya panel line accent 87132 (brown). 

• The last step, after rigging was applied, was to seal everything with SMS Premium flat clear (PL10).

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Hover the mouse over the image on top of the gallery for figure legends

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In summary: 

This is the only game in town, if you want to build a model of this historically important, and very good looking ship. However, this is a very challenging kit, which may explain why there are so few pictures of it in the Internet.

The instructions are beautifully drawn, but are not meant to be used in the order presented.

• They just show what you are supposed to build, not how.

• It is important to study them from start to end before building stuff. Think ahead, and try to anticipate pitfalls.

• Give yourself a chance by using a type of adhesive that allows you to backtrack when things go wrong. The kit's saving grace is that the resin parts are sharp and clean, and the photoetch parts are dimensionally accurate, making dry-fitting (or glue-fitting) relatively straightforward.

With the benefit of hindsight I feel that I could have done much better. Some of the transitions between surfaces look ​bad, largely because I didn't realise until late in the build the problem with the resin base having to be sanded off completely. I would also have opted for thinner, more delicate railing. But all things considered, I am happy to cross this one off the list. 

 

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