This is outside of my normal area of expertise, so this is mainly an in-box review of engineering. I bought this as a counterpart for my Mikasa, and while the box does say "1917," it does match the 1904-5 fit details I can see at
her Navsource.narod page.
The box is well packed; each tree is wrapped separately and some fragile pieces have extra foam strips wrapped around them for added protection. There were no broken or warped parts that I could find on my kit.
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File comment: Hull side
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The hull is well rendered. It is split into two halves (port and starboard) with no guide on the inside for waterlining the kit. There are a few internal beams, which will make for a fairly robust hull when complete. While the instructions show these two pieces on a sprue, they were cut loose for packaging. The nubs were still present and were on the inside surface, so take care to remove them for a proper fit. I noticed a slight mold flaw (below, about the same "height" as the anchor hawse exits) on the joining surface of the bow above the waterline - if this is not sanded or cut away you will be left with a noticeable gap.
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File comment: mating surface flaw
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There is a decent amount of slide molding in the kit - the main armament gun barrels, turrets, and several pieces of the superstructure are all slide-molded for better detail with less work. There are some mold seams on the turrets to clean up, but there's no detail nearby that would be destroyed in the process:
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File comment: Turrets
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Small parts are well done as well. I would say it's reached the point where if the AA guns on the New York and Texas kits are as good I may be tempted to just leave them as is. Aftermarket barrels and shields will always be finer, but these look decent when part of a set:
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File comment: Guns.... lots of guns.
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I did go so far as to test fit the main deck pieces and hull. Because of the tumblehome shape, the aft deck piece is trapezoidal and this worried me a bit. Trumpeter did a decent job providing an alignment "shelf" below the deck for it to fit snuggle into, however I found that even with a bit of cleanup I had a hard time getting everything to fit perfectly. If I had the stern halves joined snugly the stern deck piece was pushed forward, and if I pushed the stern piece back into place it kept the hull halves from joining properly. I would advice cleanup and lots of test fitting before committing this area to glue:
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File comment: After deck in the hull - no glue or tape
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_________________
Tracy White -
Researcher@Large"Let the evidence guide the research. Do not have a preconceived agenda which will only distort the result."
-
Barbara Tuchman