More than ten years ago, I stopped by a hobby store near Woodbridge that was going out of business. I picked up a 1:1200 model kit of the USS Iowa for cheap but life happened and I never got a chance to build it.
Fast forward to December of 2019. Work sent me to Hawaii to do a presentation so I took an extra day on my own time to visit Pearl Harbor. I took the tour of the USS Missouri, one of the Iowa-class battleships, which was totally worth the money and deserves a page of its own.
A couple of months later, COVID hit so I found myself stuck at home and looking for projects. The tour of the Missouri sparked my interest in battleships and I still had the kit in my hobby bin so I decided to get it out and build it.
I've started many model kits in my life but was always distracted after a while and never followed through well enough to finish one. This one was certainly no exception, I put it down several times and came back to it over the course of the quarantine, but I eventually finished it in late May of 2021.
I decided to take my time, research some techniques, and really try to do it right. The instructions came with instructions for painting but I decided to look online at pictures of the actual Iowa-class battleships and try to paint it as realistically as possible. It came out better than I thought so, when I was finished, I decided to build a base and display for it.
Maybe someday I'll dig up some pictures of it under construction but, for now, here's the finished product:
And a tape measure for scale:
