Hello everybody,
I hope you are all well. In a somewhat desperate effort to keep myself away from games and in my hobby chamber I have decided to pick up a new build after the Yahagi, I tried my hand at a destroyer the past weeks, the Hamakaze, but that thing was botched and I didn't like the model. It was frustrating and well the ship itself is fine but still meh. it was underwhelming. I had this ship laying in my stash and since I had good experiences with 1/700 I decided to start on this one. 1/700 is massively different from 1/350, it is less refined and in some ways less detailed, but it also has it's charms.
This time I shall build the IJN Hiei, IJN battlecruiser sunk in 1942 after being crippled by some destroyers and a light cruiser. The ship was build as part of the Kongo class before receiving a massive refit in the 1930s. It got an experimental pagoda design which was a prototype for the Yamato class. As said the ship was sunk in 1942 and was, as far as I can remember, the first IJN battleship to go down in the second world war, going down just days before the Kirishima.
It is interesting to note that, while the ship is longer and 9 knots an hour faster than the USS West-Virginia, it weighs only 3000 tons more, which says something about the differences between the armor of both ships.
For this build, I have bought the full-hull kit, with the Fujimi pe and a finemolds set for the IJn Kongo, which has more than enough for both the Hiei and a 1941/2 variant of the IJN Ise which I plan on buying and building at some point this year.
I have put the hull, deck, rudders and screws together already but the fit is meh, not very bad but also not good either, had to remove some flash at several points and the lower halve of the hull was too long or the upper halve too short.
enfin, here are the pictures