The Ship Model Forum

This is only the 2nd 1/700 ship I've ever built. This one is the old tool Hasegawa IJN Kaga. While this kit is wildly inaccurate in a few key areas, at this point, my focus for now was getting the ship in somewhat decent shape; this isn't even close to the Fujimi offering, but it's still a pretty cool model.

I still have one searchlight to add, but on the whole, it's pretty much done. I'll be moving onto the squadrons in the next couple of months in-between other builds.

Also, my apologies in advance for the lack-luster photos...old camera syndrome.

A few notables:

1. first time I've ever scratchbuilt an entire island, but man, was that necessary! The kit supplied island wasn't even close.
2. PE came from a variety of sources: Tom's, Hasegawa and some left over GMM parts from another build
3. all the guns from the kit were trashed; they're pretty useless. Replaced with Pitroad's W series set
4. the Hasegawa kit had raised outlines all over the flight deck; those were sanded off, re-masked, and airbrushed
5. added tie-downs to the flight deck. Over 1400 tie downs!
6. arresting cables are pieces of very fine wire (afterall, I sanded down the deck to remove all those pesky raised outlines!)
7. tried a new method of dealing w/ the deck planking. Base colors were airbrushed; then I replicated the planking with a mechanical pencil with a very sharp tip; this allowed me to cut through the color coats to reveal the gray base underneath. Deck was sealed and a thin sludge wash of oils were used for additional weathering and pin-washing. When dry, it was hit with dullcoat and weathered a bit more with pastels. Works for me!
8. rigging courtesy of Jim Bauman's method (thanks Jim for providing your tutorial; worked exceptionally well!)

Anyway, enjoy the photos!

Very nicely done! That's a lot of work. Did you drill out the tie-downs? If yes, OMG.

Thanks Dan!

Tie downs: Oh GOD NO!

Briefly: what I did was scan the entire flight deck and assembled the scans in Illustrator. Its a graphic design application (I do a lot of design work in my 'real life') and with it, I was able to put a pattern of "dots" all along the scanned image. Helped to keep things evenly spaced and aligned.

That in turn was printed out and then I taped the printed pattern on top of the flight deck. From there, I chucked a needle in a pin vise and "punched" the needle through the pattern to create the tie downs. With the oil wash I applied to the deck, it helped to further enhance the illusion.

Nice to see someone doing one of the original 70s waterline kits. Are you also going to use the old parts for the airgroup?

Thanks Pieter!

As for the air group, yeah for now. They're still passable but I won't be using any of the Judy's as those were not present during the timeframe that I'm working with. That leaves me with just the Zero's, Val's and Kate's for now. The only problem with that: the kit only comes with 4 planes each, so I'm looking at either casting a bunch to add more to what I already have or potentially purchasing an add-on set from Kajika; from what I've read, their 1/700 WWii set is really good, but man is it pricey!

Haven't committed to either solution at this point, so any suggestions are certainly welcome.

That said, I do have the PE parts from the Tom's set, so that's approx. 16 aircraft accounted for as far as the photoetch is concerned. Not sure at this point how many aircraft I want adorned on the flight deck, so we'll see. Going to be a work in progress I think.

Very nice work.

The older aircraft sets of the waterline consortium are often surprisingly good, with accurate shapes and much less fiddly assembly work. And they are much cheaper. I am using Fujimi Sea Furies with WEM PE on my HMS Glory and they look really nice with some paint on. If you do want to go for superdetailing get one of those older aircraft sets and invest in the Fivestar PE sheet for this airgroup (FS710082).