USS Crockett, Finishing the USS Crockett Options

[devans]

Sounds like an odd title for the topic doesn't it. It fits in this case however as I'm not the original purchaser of this kit, as a matter of fact I'm at least the third or forth owner.
I will try to document what I'm doing as well as throw in some questions here and there and wait with baited breath (no that doesn't mean I had sardines for lunch) for an answer. If you haven't guessed by now I'm a bit of a wise acre and I like to have fun so don't take it seriously if I fire one across your bow and I'll do the same with you. Now for a small bit of history as to how I ended up with the ship. The last owner, a very good friend of mine, plays host once a month to the model club I belong to The Subcommittee. Yes this club is about R/C submarines but some of us do like to play with targets as well. I would go over to the shelf it used to sit on and check it for progress and at first there was some but as time went on he eventually started loosing interest in the Crockett and focusing on his other boats. On one particular day while I was looking it over he said if I wanted it to get it out of there but there was two conditions for me to take total ownership. One I had to finish it, two I had to let him drive it when it was done. I'm now working on part one and as for part two he can drive her anytime he wants. So in true warner brothers cartoon fashion the ship left the shelf so fast there was a dust cloud outline in the shape of the Crockett as I took it to my car. He also gave me a Dumas PT 109 (built) that I want to add more detail to, but thats another thread for later after I finish the Crockett.
Now, the Crockett was at about 90% complete when I got my hands on it,the hull is all but done and painted I will post a picture when I get one. The super structure is built with the stacks in place, the hand rails done and doors installed. I sent to Dumas to get a copy of their plan for the kit (the ones that came with the kit were long gone) this is when I noticed that the details that were done so far were not exactly right or at least per the plans from Dumas. So I stripped the super structure back down to the basic shape and started redoing most everything. I don't want people to think that the previous owners were dopes, the items I am redoing are just me being perhaps more nit picky than I need to be.
Note: I had a picture inserted here but upon further investigation I set up an album with all the pictures I have so far.
The pictures in my album show where the super structure stands to date. Notice you can still see where doors and ladders and such were. I rebuilt the 15 man lifeboat stowage using 0.020" styrene but I kept the rails from the original attempt. The first attempt was done with 1/8" plywood and the rails poked through the bottom, what I did was use one piece of styrene and placed the rails on location and glued them in with ca, then I carefully ground the ends flush and glued a second piece of styrene to the bottom thus hiding the ends of the stantions and cut the deck to size. The two rear funnels were next on the list. I photo copied the print and cut out the templates, glued them to wooden blocks and sanded them down to size using my disk sander. I then drilled out the tops fixed my ooppses with putty and now I have something I'm happy with. The next item on my hit list is the mast. This is something I've never done before so after a lot of thought I dove in. I want the mast to have working lights and radar, there are a lot of lights on this bad boy so I decided to try hollow brass tubing for the vertical portion and for the yardarm. I managed to find brass tubing in the diameters needed at the LHS by starting from the smallest size and progressively going larger until I met the size called out for on the plan. Now you may be thinking oh man is he stupid, that brass is going to be heavy. Well your right... (wait for it..) it would be heavy. I saved on some of the weight by only using enough brass stock to solder to the next bigger piece, in other words the smallest diameter per plan should be 6 3/8" long, but I only made that section a little over 2" where it attaches at the very top and so on for the rest of the mast. Time will tell if it was enough and if not well I'm not afraid to say I was stupid. The next installment of this thread I will go into more details on how I decided to construct the mast based on wanting to have all the lights, oh and working radar.
Before I close this session I'd like to ask anyone that has built this ship what they used for lighting, where you got it from and what part number is it. The same for the doors, did you buy or build them?
Till next time.
Don