I love Pit Road kits. They are detailed and accurate and fit well and I have a massive collection. Someday I might even finish one.
But their 1/700 kits of the DDG-177 Atago and DDG-178 Ashigara have a really bad problem - the bridge parts just don't fit. It isn't even close. It's badly misaligned on multiple fronts with massive gaps. But plastic is, well, plastic, and there is always a way to fix it. At least that's my philosophy. So I spent hour after hour studying it to figure it out. And I think I did. Here's my attempt:
First, take part B3 (the one with the bridge windows) and carve out two additional windows as shown on the picture. You also need to remove some of the wing walls on part B17 - at least the forward and rear ones on the starboard side and the rear one on the port side.
Second, deepen the window holes on the angled sides, especially towards the bottom. You want the bottom at least a millimeter deeper than it was before. Do this with gentle slow scraping with a sharp pointy blade.
Third, glue the combined B3/B17 part to the completed hull/lower superstructure making sure the front is aligned and the rear is aligned. This isn't as easy as it sounds - you will need to twist it a bit and hold it there while it is drying, and there are few glue points because the fit is so bad. You will notice the structure below the mast on part B3 is narrower than the matching structure below it - just try to keep it centered, and we will take care of that later. You can do the gaps at this stage. They are so big you should fill them with plastic card or at least a two-part putty to help hold all the parts together.
Now that it's glued, we will take care of the front bridge windows. Slice the frames of the windows on the angled sides with a chisel or #17 blade so that the bottoms are flush with the superstructure below it. Now you see why we had to make the holes deeper - if we didn't, the windows would disappear during this process.
Fourth, we are going to take care of that mis-sized structure we talked about before. Take out a slice of both sides of the part below the mast so it is even and straight down to the ledge.
Now we can add new wing walls. Mostly pay attention to aligning the point where it meets the superstructure because excess plastic anywhere else can be easily cut and sanded to shape. You will also be left with ugly holes at the corners (circled) where the two parts had no idea what the other was doing - fill that with square stock or two-part putty because regular putties won't be strong enough.
And after all that detail work we are... only at the point we should be if the kit parts fit. (This looks a little rougher than it actually is because of the multiple kinds of filler I used, but I'm not yet at the point I want to paint it.)
But there are still some things we can do to make this better - for example, the wing walls are actually a slightly different shape, so we need to do some cutting and adding. And we introduced a few knock-on effects, like gaps around part B23. But that's for a different post.
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