Hasegawa's 1:350 IJN Mikasa with Lion Roar

[Bill Livingston]

Hi,

Well, having just received an email from JB asking whether I am building again, I suppose I had better start another WIP... because if I don't, I get stalled. (Like the Elster I picked up at Telford recently... got about halfway through it and then managed to lose the PE in all the drama over Christmas... and then lost interest).

Having bought a Mikasa a while back when it first came out and just left it in my stash of kits for the past three years or so and then over Christmas, got the Lion Roar upgrade set and the Hasegawa wood deck I decided that as I had got SO enthusiastic about the Pontosmodel detail set for Dreadnought, this would be a great partner and 'practice' run on 1:350 scale (I normally build in 700) and with fading eyesight and an obsessive approach to overcomplicating my builds, I decided that this would make the change I need to get back to steady modelling...

Plus the fact I will be at home for the next week or so prior to a business trip to the USA, this seemed like as good a time to start as any... Besides, you guys will keep pressing me for an update and I NEED that...

The starting point is obviously gluing the hull halves together, fitting the braces and then mounting it on its display base. The base itself is one of a batch I had made last year, solid oak, and cut to fit the larger display cases made by Academy (I think!)... anyway, the plastic cover works as a dust cover during the build process and when the model is completed, a glass cover can be made to fit.

I will also make a building stand so I can airbrush the model and work on it during the build process without having to mask the proper base. I just use the oak plinth as a template and make an alternative base with MDF... These can be used several times obviously... and will no doubt make another appearance under Dreadnought should I actually complete this model...

Anyway.. here are some pictures to start and shows today's work...



The model fitted to display base. The brass pedestals are lamp finials I bought in a hardware store in New York several years ago... I couldn't find any here in the UK... not as nice as these anyway..



The underside of the display base. The bolts and large washer are countersunk into the solid oak base. Once the model is complete I will cover the entire underside of the base with green baize to hide this.



The nuts inside the hull are fixed in with Araldite.(I used to make all sorts of complicated fittings inside plastic hulls years ago in case the nuts worked loose... but found it wasn't necessary.. I have never lost a nut on a completed model yet...). I can take the model off this display base and mount it onto the building base so I don't damage or mark the final display... And because the nuts are locked in place, I can remove and refit the hull whenever I want.



The model mounted and adjusted for level and 'squareness'



So this is where I am right now... the Arladite has yet to fully cure, but there is a lot I can get on with tomorrow anyway...



OK... Just in case this is of some interest... here are the parts from the Lion Roar detail set... along with the Hasegawa wooden deck



As well as a LOT of PE... the Lion Roar set includes barrels for the main and secondary armament. Lion Roar do not supply barrels for the entire armament unfortunately, but maybe I will be able to pick up barrels for the remaining guns from another source anyway...



The Hasegawa wooden deck looks pretty good... I have not used one of these before, so this will be fun...! What glue to use for a start... (Gator isn't available here in the UK...)...

[johndon]

What glue to use for a start... (Gator isn't available here in the UK...)...

Good to see you back Bill - for what it's worth, I'm currently fitting a wooden deck to my New Jersey and standard Evostick Wood Adhesive is working just fine for me...

John

[Timmy C]

Looking forward to you build, Bill! I did this exact same thing, minus the wood deck, some years ago - you can find the build thread lurking around some pages back if you're interested.

What guise are you going to do her in?

[drizzt73]

Nice work so far, looking forward to more. How will you attach the wooden deck?

Cheers

Anthony

[roy allen]

Glad your back Bill
Gator glue is available in the UK link below

http://www.scalemodelshop.co.uk

Roy

[Bill Livingston]

Hi Guys, thanks for the comments...

Timmy : I had a look at your build... I'll be stealing some ideas from there... particularly regarding the order to do things! Very nice final model as well...

Johndon and Roy, re. the deck glue... I have Evostik, thats the white glue I usually use... and that was going to be my first try out, but I may well get some Gator glue anyway... have to buy some with a name like that!!

Ok... Had another bit of a play tonight...

First thoughts regarding the Lion Roar PE. It really IS very good, everything fits and folds really accurately, but my god is it soft!!!

I am normally pretty confident with with PE (apart from losing bits!) but this is very very soft and very thin, so it is easy to get things mangled a bit. The railings I have fitted so far are two bar, and this fine, and thick tags holding each piece to the fret, it is very easy to turn a rectangle into a trapezium...

The kit parts fit OK... but I am used to resin and scratchbuilding parts as you can see from Hood or Renown back a few pages on the WIP section, but building in plastic after a long lay off and it feels very crude. The parts breakdown is OK... but the seams for major assemblies are butt joints and with a lot of fine detail shown as raised lines, getting things as clean as I would normally like is proving to be a pain... the funnel deckhouse I am building at the moment is a case in point. I very nearly scratch built the whole thing until I realised that the areas I was most worried about wouldn't be seen anyway...

Fairly unsure about the wooden deck now as well. At first glance it looks great, but on closer inspection, there are going to be a few problems. For instance, Hasegawa provide all the steps and ladders as moulded solid plastic with a cut out in the deck to locate them,... those same cut outs appear in the Hasegawa wood deck as well.. great if you are not using PE for the steps... but who isn't going to???

The other thing is that the deck, while being very thin, does have a little gap all the way round each moulded in deck fitting, plus, even as thin as it is, some of the deck fittings are very low anyway... I wish someone would provide a deck WITHOUT cut outs for the smaller deck fittings, so we could remove them all from the original deck and refit them or scratch build new ones direct onto the wooden deck... as long as the planking around barbettes and alongside the edges of superstructure parts are still done, it would be a much better look... especially if all the planks and butt ends were finer.

Anyway... slow but frustrating. Not even finished one of the funnel assemblies this evening... need to fit another four rings and then the funnel cap... Looks like another couple of days just to get that done...



First step on section 6 Funnel Assembly. Some parts modified to allow Lion Roar upgrades.



About a third of the way through the rear funnel and deckhouse.

Ok... ciggie, some TV and then bedtime I think...

PS... noticed the PE was a bit skewed in the photo, the nearside ladders had been tilted too far clockwise making the end of the handrail tilt back, must have been my fingers moving it when I took the photo... so have straightened it... told you it was soft! (It just screamed to be fixed when I saw the photo's on my iMac... the modelling benefit of large screens and close up photo's... )

[roy allen]

Totally agree Bill, the lion Roar is too soft.
One tip with the Gator, it is very easy to knock over the bottle so i would advise a small amount of blue tack at the base
Nearly purchased this kit awhile back but ran out of pennies, i have built the Seals 1/700 kit which if i'm honest is one of the best plastic kits i have ever seen and was a joy to build


Roy

[johndon]

Fairly unsure about the wooden deck now as well. At first glance it looks great, but on closer inspection, there are going to be a few problems. For instance, Hasegawa provide all the steps and ladders as moulded solid plastic with a cut out in the deck to locate them,... those same cut outs appear in the Hasegawa wood deck as well.. great if you are not using PE for the steps... but who isn't going to???

The Scaledeck for the NJ is the same, I've got 4 holes in the deck where the kit steps are supposed to go - I'm going to see if I can cut some filler pieces from a spare section of the deck...

John

[Timmy C]

As I recall, I filled in the deck slots with scrap pieces of plastic. I wasn't very neat with it, as I figured they wouldn't be too visible with the ladder in the way.

[MartinJQuinn]

Bill,

Nice to see you back at it. Great start, will be watching with interest!

[Bill Livingston]

Hi all.. thanks for your comments.

It's been a bit slow as I have been busy with work for the past couple of days, but I have been getting on with things.

I made the MDF baseboard which I will use for assembly and airbrushing so I keep my oak baseboard clean until the model is finished... and then proceeded to the complete the rear funnel assembly.

The funnel rings are PE steel and are consequently very stiff, which makes them considerably easier to work with when sliding them onto the funnel without deforming them. Even so, they are very fine and you still need to be careful. I had to use the panel lines on the kit as a guide as there is no jig supplied to get the spacing correct... but it is relatively easy, although even the slightest error becomes very clear with so many parallel lines evenly spaced. Mine are not perfect but I'm reasonably happy... The fourth one down is a little low and the seventh one down is a little high... the error is less than half a millimetre but that has a massive effect on the look... Trying to move them proved difficult without damaging the funnel panel lines and in the end, most of this area is covered by the boats and cannot be seen, so I am less worried than I would normally have been... although it's still irritating when I see them on photo's... they look a lot less 'wrong' on the actual model. (see Jim... I AM beginning to be able to accept faults that are unlikely to be seen when the model is completed without throwing in the towel!!! ).



Anyway, for those who may build Mikasa in the future, it's worth just putting in a couple of bits about the Lion Roar upgrade kit and the mods that need to be done during assembly. I know I would have loved to have seen these prior to buying the kit and all the extras...

This is the Hasegawa instruction sheet for this stage...



Here is the Lion Roar instruction for the same stage...



As you can see, there are quite a few bits that need to be trimmed prior to replacing with the Lion Roar set... Be careful though. The Lion Roar brass is quite soft and the alignment needs to be accurate and the kit parts are a little 'soft' in detail and, as I have mentioned before, the join seams are in odd places and hard to tidy up.

Anyway... having looked at the kit instructions (This is the "Battle of Japan Sea" or "Battle of Tsushima" version of the kit) I noticed that the instructions called for the solid funnel caps which look really crude and would be replaced by the Lion Roar funnel caps anyway... but had seen on another fret (Eduard?) that there was an internal cap with a pattern of holes just inset into the funnel. With just the PE funnel cap in place as per the Lion Roar instructions, the funnel interiors would look pretty bare and therefore toylike, I thought about buying the extra PE just for this, when I noticed that there were two of these interior caps marked as 'unused' in the parts drawing in the Hasegwawa instruction booklet... So I drilled them out and and used them... pretty pleased with this to be honest... simple things huh



When fully assembled (less the VERY fragile funnel cap. which will be added MUCH later), I have finished the rear funnel assembly. Not perfect, but it's a start.



Anyway... that's where I am now. I am now going to start on the more complex fore funnel assembly as this evening's work. I have learnt a bit about working with this kit now and so should be a little quicker. This is the first plastic kit I have built in years... I'm finding this a lot slower than resin due to having to clean all the parts up and the unnecessary joins on sections that would normally be solid on a resin model... and the detail seems a lot cruder than on the very best modern resin kits... but it's enjoyable nevertheless. One obvious thing... the build process is entirely different...



Not much to show so far... but on to the fore funnel and then the rear and fore bridge assemblies... looking forward to them!

[DEBVD]

Hai Bill,

My compliments.

I will follow you on this one......my Mikasa is waiting for parts...;-(

Did yoy had already the wooden deck in place? How do you gleu it?

[Bill Livingston]

Hi Debvd,

No... the wooden deck is not in place. I intend to build all the sub assemblies and airbrush everything before I fit the wooden deck... I am trying to see if I can leave the main deck as late as possible... and then assemble everything all in one go once it is placed. There will still be most of the model to complete after it has been fitted of course... but the more I can do before, the better I will feel about it.

Obviously on the main superstructure/bridge assemblies there are the small wooden decks, so once the main components components on those sub-assemblies have been assembled and airbrushed, I will fit those... and then is when I will test glues and so on... I'd rather try the smaller decks first then carry on lessons from there onto the bigger ones.

[Dan K]

Very nice funnel work, Bill.

[Bill Livingston]

Hi All,

Been very busy lately so haven't had the time to model in the evenings... and next weekend I'm off to New York with work, so that's another week out of circulation too...

Anyway, this is proving to be a bit of a struggle. The Lionroar PE is VERY soft and it's turning this into a bit of a chore to be honest. A new scalpel blade at almost every cut and even then it's next to impossible to remove any piece without bending it... and I'm used to 700 scale PE!

Managed to lose a part too... In fact I lost both... but found one on the carpet after about an hour of searching... I gave up on the other one after another hour! All of which was really annoying... so to start today, I had to make two of the pipes that go up to the platform on the fore funnel.




A bit of brass wire and some plastic sheet and a punch and die set recovered the situation...

Now I could go on and finish the fore funnel...



(Hmmm.. noticed the centre rail on the platform railings was bent... thankfully the photo has helped me spot this and straighten it out )



Hopefully I can now go on and do something a little more interesting. I'd quite like to airbrush something, but I'm a while away from that yet unfortunately...

[Timmy C]

Out of curiosity, how are you handling the PE fret and part as you are cutting it (as in, where are you placing your fingers)? I don't recall experiencing the same type of frustration that you appear to be when I was working on mine.

Looking good though!

[Bill Livingston]

Hi Timmy,

I use a glass plate to cut on and hold the outer fret when cutting. I use a brand new scalpel blade pretty much all the time and just cutting through the brass, it's thick enough and soft enough to bend when it parts...

If I trim the part then its next to impossible... so I have to sand very gently to remove any trace of the PE sprue. In fact, since I have started sanding off the excess rather than try to cut close things are a little better... But I am used to PE from WEM, L'Arsenal, Flyhawk, GMM including the ultra fine, and none are as soft and prone to bending as this...

PS... Just noticed I have made a right mess of the spacing on the funnel rings too... bugger...

[Guido]

Watching you too, Bill!
Good choice to keep the pipes plate on top of the funnel. I think the kit part is even better than the Eduard replacement.
I'll try to get you a PE replacement for the lost Eber set next time I see Peter.
Good work - now keep at it. You'll get used to the softness. I did it - so can you.
Guido

I finished a me a little scratchbuild since November, now I am stuck with a Howitzer (Heller kit veteran - 'nough said!)

Cheers,
Guido

[JIM BAUMANN]

Whoa Bill

progress is indeed speeding along!


but cutting PE...


I use a glass plate to cut on and hold the outer fret when cutting. I use a brand new scalpel blade pretty much all the time and just cutting through the brass, it's thick enough and soft enough to bend when it parts...

If I trim the part then its next to impossible... so I have to sand very gently to remove any trace of the PE sprue. In fact, since I have started sanding off the excess rather than try to cut close things are a little better... But I am used to PE from WEM, L'Arsenal, Flyhawk, GMM including the ultra fine, and none are as soft and prone to bending as this...



why not do what I do and use decent Fiskar scissors...

I can cut GMM gold plus rails in 700 with indecent ease and precison-- never needs trimming-- just cutting along like a guillotine--all with no distortion....


give them a whirl -- about � 10.00-- needlework and embroidery respectively!

http://www.powertoolsdirect.com/media/c ... r-13cm.jpg

http://www.sewandso.co.uk/Images/Produc ... 07-mnb.jpg

[Dino Carancini]

Very nice Bill! I love this ship as well as all the Tsushima warships, hope to be able to see the actual Mikasa soon, perhaps this year

As for PE cutting I use a glass base too, never tryed with scissors, but I should have a try with them in the future.

Dino