The Ship Model Forum

That's a very good reference and i'll say go for what you see on the painting!



Jose

Hi all, took a bit of a hiatus with this one but here we go again with some more progress.
The work shown here are the 18 torpedo booms which has an assembly with some small parts worthy of 1/700 scale.
One issue with the PE kit here is that there are some interference with the catwalk supports near the end of the boom. I marked out below where I had to rip out the last support in order for the booms to fit. I took a closer look at the instruction photos and indeed the supports where I had indicated had disappeared, but its removal were not mentioned anywhere.

Very nice.

Thanks!
More progress was made this week. First the canvas on the front and rear bridge was done simply by brushing heavy white paint across the railings to form a thin film. Once the initial film dries, additional layers can be put on to thicken the canvas. I had done this for 1/700 scale, but this was more challenging for 1/350 because the gaps between the rails are bigger and films tend to pop more.





Next I moved on to the masts. Here unfortunately I made a mistake
With the bare brass provided by Pontos, I first tried to replicate the shape of the mast from the plastic kit. However, it seems in the plastic kit, the main mast does not extend above the search light platform as much as it should. I realized this too late and as a fix, I cut a chunk of plastic mast and appended it to the top of the brass mast.

Wow - nice work. I especially like the mast.

Damn, those are some tiny a$$ photo-etch parts!

As you have seen, I am working on the 1/200 version. I can't imagine the nightmare of working on a smaller scale with the Pontos stuff. Have you run into any problems with their set? I can see that there are huge differences between both sets.
Your ship looks great! I wish I would have gone with the "weathered" look, rather than the "out of the paint booth" look. A real pain in the ass to keep things clean and neat.
Keep on!

Yeah I've had some minor share of issues with the set. Granted overall I think the level of detail provided is great, would still buy again, but there were some fitting issues.
Couples of things I can recall were:

• -The catwalk supports interfered with the torpedo boom placement, which required trimming a few of the supports.
  -Diameter of a couple of ring shaped parts (where the rigging attaches to the main mast) did not fit the diameter of the main mast at the right location.
  -Some parts of the instruction were unclear or unlabelled but still better than most of the instructions out there.

Anyways, I had to go with a weathered look, mostly because I am hand painting the ship, so it is next to impossible to get the smooth out of paint booth look with an airbrush. You can always do some minor weathering after you paint though.

Hey guys, bit of a progress update thus far.
Continuing with the mast, I obtained a roll of this black lycra stuff from infini models and I am using it to see if I can replace part of the PE based rigging on the yard posts provided by the Pontos kit. The PE rigging, when it's all said and done, seems a bit thick. The black lycra seems to be a very stretchy material, I can easily stretch it to 2x length without breaking. The stuff also seems to stick well with CA, in comparison to the UNI-Caenis fishing line I had been using. However, one issue with the lycra is that the ability to stretch easily makes it somewhat difficult to create that sag look in the rigging. In the third picture below you can see the black lycra attached to the very top yard.

The Pontos PE provides turned brass for the mast, but it does not come with any ladders. Each mast on the ship has two sets of ladders, with the individual ladder rungs directly bolted into the mast body. I considered slapping a couple of ladder pieces right onto the mast, but somewhat regrettably I took a dive into the deep end and decided to cut up each ladder rung and attaching it to the mast individually. Thus far I finished one side on one mast, so about 25% in..

As for the ship body, I've finished up all of the 6in guns. The main sub-assemblies (2x bridge, 2x funnel, 2x main guns) are also attached now.
Still some misc parts around the hull left, followed by the rails.

Been a busy half of the year and hasn't had a chance to work on the ship. Finally it is the holidays and I will use this window of time to try to wrap this ship up.
Earlier in June I finished up the ladders on the masts of the ship.



Started to finish up some of the rest of the smaller details of the ship, and all of the rafts.




The last major step is the rigging of the ship.
The rigging about the funnel area are fairly clear and consistent old images and source drawings. The rigging on the masts are less clear and there appear to be many different interpretations. I understand at different times when photos were taken of the ship, it may have been rigged slightly differently as well. I made the best attempt based on the photo from 1905.

From a Japanese source, I found the following references for the layout of wireless telegraph antennas. WIP antenna is shown below and its put together from Modelkasten metal wires. The finished product is shown in later images below.





Next, the riggings between the masts were redone. I was not satisfied with the Lycra material for long sections of the lines since they are stretched under tension and do not show the sagging effect. I used metal wires for the second attempt and the sag effect is nicely shown. Have to add though the Lycra material is much much easier to work with than the metal wires.


Finally, the flags of the ship are hand drawn on very thin translucent tracing paper. The paper when crunched up slightly, gives off a fairly realistic flag look. It's fortunate that IJN flags are fairly simple to drawn on a small scale.




At this point the ship is pretty much completed. Here is some quick pics of the overall ship.

Great work on the masts and rigging.

Dan K wrote:Great work on the masts and rigging.

Thanks very much Dan