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.

So I’ve been working on the 1/700 Aoshima Victorious.  It was to be my first aircraft carrier.  I received some good advice on the model ship forum to start with a smaller one, specifically that the Shoho would be a good one to start with.  I couldn’t find the PE sheet for the Fujimi 1/700 Shoho so tried Victorious.  I have a nice PE set for Victorious, but I’m not that keen on the kit.  There are quite a few fit problems.  The flight deck fit to the hull has lots of seems in strange places.  I’ve filled quite a few and some of them look ok, but some don’t, and some are in places that are really hard to fill because of surrounding detail that would be lost in sanding.  The superstructure isn’t a lot better.  I’ll finish it, but when I saw that Hasegawa released a super detail edition of their Shoho model with extensive PE I decided to jump on it.  I plan here to document the construction of it.

I intend to do a lot of the PE for this kit.  It’s going to be my first serious attempt to put a lot of PE upgrades on a model.  In addition I bought a bunch of Fujimi upgrade sets for Japanese equipment for directors and AA armament.  Will see how much of that I use but I have it for comparison at least.  There are two sheets of PE and a nice instruction set for it.  Looking at the photos on hobby search of the box contents on the regular set, it looks like the sprues are identifical, so I assume this is the old kit with the PE upgrades included here.

That is a photograph of the fold-out that comes for building the PE, full of instructions front and back.  It all looks manageable except perhaps for the ladders.  We’ll see how construction those bits go.

I put together the hull and put the flight deck on just to see how it all fit together (without glueing anything).  It all goes together beautifully and I’m not studying the instructions to anticipate any issues in putting it all together.  There’s a lot of PE for the structures below the flight deck so I anticipate a lot of work before the flight deck goes on.

The flight deck is interesting and brings up my first interesting questions.  The flight deck has a lot of relief in it – not only the wooden deck part but there are recesses that are flat where the white is painted on the flight deck.  So, I guess I could just paint that white and paint the wood deck and not use a decal.  I imagine I’ll paint the wooden parts tan along with the recessed parts and then just put the decals in.  That seems a little strange.  I’m not sure how well this shows up in the following photo.

The rear of the flight deck has relieved detail for the red and white striping on the tail end of the flight deck and the instructions say to shave that smooth if you intend to use the decal.  I would like to use the decal, sanding that smooth sounds like a lot of work.  The area just in front of that is modeled with wooden decking, but I believe that was steel deck.   The steel parts of the flight deck are modeled with an anti-skid surface.  I’m wondering if I should sand the wooden decking smooth and leave it smooth, or replace it with PE anti-skid decking.

More later.

Some of my friends are into a game called Check Your Six.  WW2 plane v plane combat.  For some of their scenarios sinking a ship is part of the victory conditions.  There is a series of scenarios around attacks on the IJN Nisshin – a submarine/seaplane carrier – in 1942.  I’ve been wanting to build a 1/700 ship model so I volunteered to do this.

It’s been 40 years since I made a 1/700 model.  I have to say, “Hats-off” to guys who build 1/700 ships.  It was a lot of fun but all those small parts require an incredible amount of patience and skill.  Guys who do it well impress me tremendously now.

This kit is by Fujimi.  It’s a really nice kit with a couple of criticisms including one word of warning.  I built this kit entirely out-of-the-box.  (Well, I lost a couple of 25mm directors to the carpet monster and had to get after market versions, but I need not replace anything with PE or other after-market parts).  I have two criticisms of it.  The first are the “smoke stacks?” coming out of the midship superstructure.  There are four or five little parts on each side that need to be glued into the superstructure.  There seems to be a lot of variability about where they will end up, so I’m not entirely sure I got it right.  Seems to me it would be a lot easier to cast those as one part that needs to be glued to the superstructure.  But maybe casting that part would be too hard?

The forward mast is really a bit of a mess.  I should have checked before I put it all together but the instructions indicate that you assemble it all then glue it to the superstructure.  THIS WILL NOT WORK.  There is a plate on the bottom that goes under the platform on the superstructure and then you connect the front arm of the tripod mast to it after you have slipped that through the hole.  Having assembled it all, I couldn’t undo it and ended up just cutting the front arm off half way down.  It’s probably fine but pretty annoying.  There are these cross bars connecting the rear legs of the tripod to the front leg.  They seem really overscale and I couldn’t get them to fit in correctly so they kind of bulge out.  Seems like an aftermarket set could help this piece.

Other than that, I was very impressed with the kit.  I really like it a lot!  Everything went together really well.  I really need to practice patience in getting things lined up correctly.  When you look at the rest of the pics you’ll see some things that could be aligned better.

I think I’ll touch up the painting on the planes.  They looked ok through my magnifier but this shows they need a little work around the edges of the wings.