Brengun has come out with a spiffy idea for making your US Navy 1/144 carrier-based aircraft base look even better. It’s a set of PE tie down anchors for the carrier deck.

The tie downs in this set are the “older” cross style. The newer ones, on newer ships are star type. The original tie down anchors on wooden deck carriers looked kind of like a grating which ran from one side of the deck to the other. I found pictures of these with B-25s tied down on the Hornet for the Doolittle Raid.

When the Navy went to angle deck carriers, they had a steel deck. The tie downs were the cross type. They were painted black, and later yellow. There’s a picture below of me standing on the deck of the USS America in 1996, on the ship’s last cruise. The tie downs are cross type, painted black.

Later carriers used the star type, painted yellow, and later white.

The kit is a single PE fret with a large number of tie downs. I painted part of the fret with black, the other end yellow. I brush painted, and there was some problem with the paint filling the holes between the cross arms. An application of thinner on a Q-Tip took care of this.

There are no instructions, but you probably shouldn’t need them anyway, right?

I used two pieces of sheet plastic. I painted them dark gray. If I really wanted to be fancy, I could have also painted a yellow and red dashed line. Maybe next time.

Once the paint had dried, I was ready to install the tie downs.

I used Micro Krystal Kleer, applied with a toothpick to glue the tie downs to the deck. I chose this type of glue because it’s thick, I could apply a tiny drop, and when it dries you can see the deck below the tie down.

This worked pretty well. I did the black first, then the yellow.

After the glue dried, I put an aircraft which I thought would be contemporary with the deck. I put an F-8 on the deck with the black tie downs, and an A-4 with the yellow.

Overall Evaluation

Recommended. This is a little more trouble to use than the pre printed carrier decks, but you can make the deck you need to match what’s shown in a photo. And with all of those tie downs on the fret, you can do many decks.\, so it’s a money saver too.

Many thanks to Hauler/Brengun for the review item, and to IPMS USA for letting me upgrade my carrier aircraft displays.