Hi guys,
I’m struggling real hard with the brass strips on the linoleum deck, and am looking for some advice...
I’m working on the Fujimi 1/700 Atago, and this is my first stab at “advanced” techniques... or maybe it's more accurate to say that this is a practice model for said techniques.
Anyway, I know that the takao-class had brass strips on the deck to hold the linoleum, and in my research, I naively thought I could just simply stick on Flyhawk brass strips onto the deck, paint over it, and then scrape away at the paint to get the brass color to show through.
Boy, how wrong I was in thinking how simple this might be. I spent many, many hours sticking on each brass strips to the deck, and they came out looking just terrible. It was really difficult to keep these strips straight AND properly glued onto the deck. Too many times they would come unpeeled on the edges because of my poor handling.
But in my frustration and exhaustion with this, I decided I’ll just move in and go ahead and paint over it. Once I began the scraping process, though, I noticed that the brass color hardly even shows through; what little does show through, it just doesn’t even look good. I feel utterly defeated with this, and am beginning to think I quite possibly wasted too many hours sticking in these strips in the first place...
Here is what I'm working with Is this still salvageable? I’ve seen some of the 1/700 Takao/Maya builds in the gallery, and a lot of them have really nice, straight brass strips along the deck. How is this achieved? What could I do to produce similar results, what techniques/parts were used? I did find that Flyhawk offers
this really nice looking PE deck for the Takao, and I'm not actually certain this could be used on the Atago deck. It seems like the rectangular molding just in front of the A turret is slightly different (and some deck vents/ammo box layout, but these can be easily worked around).
Still, even if this Takao PE deck could be used on the Atago, how can I get the brass strips to show through? As stated above, I'm not having much luck with scraping the paint off..
Thank you guys!