Butterfly am I.  Something caught my attention about this kit and now I’m on to it.  I’ll do the Shoho also, but I’m on this for now.  I picked up the Gold Medal upgrade which has way more parts than I will use, but I do intend to use a lot of them.  The hull is mostly done now.

From the Gold Medal upgrade set I used PE attachment points for the torpedo net booms.  There is some detail on those, but I don’t think that’s ever going to be very visible.  At some point, I’ll probably do some weathering on the hull and an oil wash might bring out some of it.  I used the turned brass booms.  These also have some very fine detail on each end.  I think they look better than the plastic parts but the detail is really quite small.  I attached both of those to the hull with diluted white glue.

I didn’t like the plastic anchors in the kit.  The PE ones didn’t build up to something that was really convincing.  On photos of the ships the anchors are quite bulky.  I ordered an IJN anchor set from Nano Dread and used the battleship anchors.  I’m not sure about the details of the shape, but they look big and bulky like the ones in the photographs of the ships.

The only remaining things to be done on the hull will be to add the chains on the torpedo net booms.  I’m not sure what to use for that – stretched sprue or fine caenis line used for rigging.  I’ll not do that until later.  Once I add the deck I’ll attach the rolled up torpedo netting.  I plan to take the torpedo nets from the gold medal upgrade set and roll them up.  We’ll see how that goes.  They include a string in the set you can cut to length.  I’ll figure out what looks best.

After attaching the metal parts, I painted the whole hull with automotive primer and then two coats of Tamiya XF-83.  I spent a lot of time looking at my gray paints trying to figure out something that would be appropriate on the hull and then on the superstructure.  I’ve settled for XF-83 on the hull and Mr Hobby 334 for the upper superstructure.

For now I don’t plan to do a boot topping.  I intend to depict her as at Jutland and the post battle damage photos show the boot topping as quite worn down if not away.