refrence photos and websites

Here's the first photo I saw of the J Franklin Bell.

Here's a good shot of the starboard quarter.

and here's her port quarter.

And finally here's a good shot of her stern.
What struck me first was the huge amount of detail that was going to be staring me down, also the amount of guesswork that I'd have to do. It's good to have these few pics available at all, but they are from a distant perspective so I will have to fudge a lot of stuff. There are plenty of more detailed pics of other Harris Class transports, but no two were alike.

Another place I began was with these sites below:
here's the Wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_J._Franklin_Bell_%28APA-16%29
here's the official Navy page on her, with her ribbons and service in the Pacific:
http://www.navsource.org/archives/10/03/03016.htm

From there I got the scale for a 1/350 model. I have the USS Arizona from Mini Hobby Models in 1/350 (thanks Vince!)and I was surprised at how the J. Franklin Bell was only some 30 feet shorter!

here we go!

This project started when I finally found out what ship my grandpa, Harold "Shorty" Beutler served on through the Pacific Campaign in WWII. It was always a mystery which ship it was. I had heard that it was the "Franklin" but that was a carrier. I thought that would be a cool proposition. But I had also hear that it was a troop transport. So that didn't add up.
So this last Christmas, I got my grandpa Shorty's recorded autobiography (thank you aunt Jana & uncle John for that!), among other things we finally got the name and number of his ship.
I wanted to make a model of it and so the odyssey to find a kit began. Well, the ship class (Harris attack transport) is obscure enough to not have a kit. So now I faced the daunting prospect of making a model from scratch. With my brother Benn's help we quickly sounded the depths of the web and found enough pictures to get started.
The most helpful thing Benn found was a plan for her early war camouflage. It was apparently made as a basic tracing over her plans. So we went on from there and the following are the results thus far.