We get a lot of requests for destroyer plans, which can be hard to locate. But there are a lot of U.S. Navy vessels that went on to serve in the navies of other countries, and sometimes those hard to find plans can be located in those countries’ archives. Such is the case with USS O’Hare DD-889 which went on to serve in the Spanish Navy as the Méndez Núñez (D63). Launched in 1945, this Gearing class destroyer served the U.S. Navy until 1973, when she was transferred to Spain, where she served nearly another 20 years before being scrapped in 1992. Check out her plans.
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Souvenirs de Marine by
François-Edmond Pâris
I want to build a 192:1 or 1/16 inch scale model of a USS Gearing FRAM1 Destroyer and have been looking for plans. Your plans look very accurate, are they available from you in that scale?
Thank You
John A Richter
Thanks for visiting the website! The plans we have are 1/8 inch to the foot, or 1/96 scale. To download them left-click on the plan image to open the full-size file. Then right-click on that image and choose “save image as” and pick a destination on your computer. If you have a USB drive plugged in you can download right to that and take it to a print shop for hard copies. You can have the print shop size them down to 50% when they print them to get 1/192 scale. Please forgive the Spanish additions to the plans, we got them from the Spanish government archive. At the time they were not available from the U.S. National Archives, but that was several years ago, so they may have added them. You can search nara.gov to look for them. Also, since these are original prototype plans there is no information on creating a model. Good luck on your project!
Thanks again, James