The Ship Model Forum

I’ve been working on the 12.7cm guns, both the enclosed and open mounts. There wasn’t much to add to the enclosed mounts. The open mounts, on the other hand, are extremely detailed. I used the Pontos resin structures and brass barrels, with the photo-etched pieces. I really have to hand it to Pontos - the detail is amazing. I’ve included a picture of one of the mounts with an xacto knife blade in the picture to illustrate this.

The 15.5cm turrets are up next. There’s a lot of little detail that can be added to the kit here. I started with the tripods on each turret. According to Anatomy of the Ship and the Pontos kit, they are different: the forward turret has an isosceles shape tripod and the aft one has a more equilateral shape. The holes in the kit pieces are wrong for this, so I filled and re-drilled them. Putting together the Pontos details, I mounted them on the turrets.

The rear of the forward turret has a small platform on it. Interestingly, this isn’t in any of the PE sets I have, so I scratch built this.

Wow the details are awesome!!!

I don't know why but I think I'll keep the Yamato for last ship to build. It seems to me very difficult to build

A quick update - the 15.5 cm turrets are built, minus the guns themselves. I’m going to paint the barrels and blast bags separately for ease of masking. Next up will be to build the big 46cm gun turrets.

You are doing wonderful work. True inspiration for my 1/700 job I started on. Your posts are very helpful also on details youre fixing.

Can you elaborate on the focsle plating youve added? The diamond plate is covered in styrene, why is that?

And couple of questions as you have access to the book.

1) wonder about Type 94 rangefinders (there should be 4 - 2 forward and 2 back of the smoke stack). Can you clarify if they are identical or there should be some difference in their appearance as sources for 1944 show them different and 1945- same.

2) on AA tripple mount directors (ones with 3 shutters) - are they always 3? Or in earlier versions like 1944 there were 2 shutters? (not to be confused with single shutter ones). I am considering to backdate my Yamato to 1944 and this bit leaves me puzzled on directors and rangefinders.

The black deck looks super btw, glad you went for that look!

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Pavel,

I’ll do my best to answer your questions. First, I have to recommend a couple references to you:
“Anatomy of the Ship: Battleships Yamato and Musashi” by Jamie’s Skulski and Stefan Draminski
“Super Illustration - Imperial Japanese Battleship Yamato” published by ModelArt
Although I have other references, these two are invaluable for this build.

1. The focsle appears to have plates of diamond tread where the seams between them are covered by flat strips of steel. Since the piece I had does not have the junction strips, what you see in the picture is my clumsy attempt to simulate this (see illustration below).

2. There do indeed appear to be two types of the type 94 rangefinders. As far as I can tell, the forward pair have hoods over the protruding rangefinder, and the aft two do not. The explanation in the book is that the forward pair were subject to blast damage, so they were covered (also see picture below)

3. I can only find the 3-shutter AA directors in the 1944 and 1945 versions of Yamato. I don’t have any references that have a 2-shutter version.

I hope this helps. By the way, I looked at your gallery, and your work is great. I can’t wait to see your Yamato when it’s done.

I’ve been working on the main 46cm turrets lately. The kit parts unfortunately required a lot of reworking. I started by removing some molded-on details, such as ladders and the rectangles the represent the ammunition boxes. I ended up removing the molded detail of the front face of the turret as well, as the Pontos blast bags would not fit on it. After a lot of sanding and filling, I added various aftermarket parts. The rangefinder openings needed a lot of work in particular. This was re-formed with strip styrene. I just re-primed what I have so far, and after fixing the errors, I can move on to adding the railings and painting it.

Uao good progresses
You are showing great abilities in building!

Very nice detailing work!

I am in need of some advice. I have been working on adding the PE railings from the Pontos set to the turrets. In past projects, the PE railings I’ve used have a “bottom rail” that actually sits on the deck. This makes it a lot easier to glue down. The railings I’m using here are different - they only have the upright posts to attach the railing to the turret. Since this is not a very large surface, I’ve been having a hard time getting them to stick. I’ve tried both thin and thick CA glue, with or without accelerator, and the results are hit-or-miss. I have ended up re-gluing the small railings on the turrets multiple times. Is there a better way to do this?

The "proper" way to do these kinds of rails is to drill a bunch of holes, or to drill a whole for the first and last stanchion and cutting those a bit longer than the rest so they can go into the hole.

Personally I would start with white glue to position the rails before finishing with CA.

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