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Here you go...this is Kaba, ready for launching on 27 February 1945. Enjoy!

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MS State Guard, 08 March 2014 - 28 January 2023

Hi everyone, hope all are well with the crazy corona times we are experiencing.

So I've been working on the 1/700 Pit Road Hatsuzakura with the Five Star PE upgrade set. I bought it as a relatively inexpensive starter kit to get me up the learning curve for building plastic ship models, including using PE (I've been doing wooden ship models the past few years). I wouldn't recommend working with PE at the 1/700 scale to learn how to handle PE - not easy at this scale! Definitely need an optivisor.

I'm getting to the point of my build where I will need to start thinking about painting and adding detail. One question I had was regarding ship markings. The Pit Road kit includes decals for what looks like the ship number at the bow, and some Japanese lettering on the middle of the hull sides (I think it says "Kaga" if I remember my Japanese characters correctly). Would it be accurate to include these decals on the model? Most models I've seen do not have numbering or lettering. Then again, I've seen some pictures of Japanese ships with such markings. I guess I'm not as familiar with when and for what purposes the Japanese added markings to their destroyers (or other ships) or removed them.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks in advance.

The writing on the sides of the hulls was used to mark the name of the ship prior to the war in the Katakana type (as opposed to Kanji or the Hiragana type). Once the war began, all those markings were painted out. Some ships completed in the first few months after the start of the war were commissioned into service with the writing present, but this practice eventually stopped as well.

Neither the Matsu or the Tachibanas carried the writing during wartime.

Dan, many thanks for this information. Really appreciate it!

A bit of a surprise - Yamashita Hobby will be releasing new tool versions of both the Matsu and Tachibana in May and July:

https://www.1999.co.jp/eng/10769996

https://www.1999.co.jp/eng/10770003

Nice looking build. To keep these CASF threads as slim as possible, I started to move your pics to the completed forum, but saw you had a thread there. Link is here: viewtopic.php?f=60&t=317775

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Martin

"Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday." John Wayne

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