by Lars Juel Mosbaek
1/700 IJN Fuso 1938 (Pit-Road Hi-mold)
Build process:
It was a real joy to assemble this kit there was no hard times in the build process whatsoever.
The kit is my first resin kit and I must say I was impressed wit the details and the way the pieces fit together, one of the things I was afraid of was the high tower of the command bridge - (many levels high and with potential risk of getting it all wrong! - but to my surprise it was easy and fun with no hidden bad surprises. The holes on each deck level are made to fit the tripod mast - A fine feature and it helped a lot on the chances to get it right. It is an expensive kit indeed (130.00 USD $) and I was very thought full about what to expect and also was the kit worth the money spent. A clear answer is YES, only two things is on my wish list - first a big PE set will have been a good thing, because some of the lattice structures on and around the stack is not very realistic in resin and also the right boat-davits and aircraft's would be a nice upgrade in the future.
Actually the kit is so fine made that there a not many things to improve on but a few things that I made is explained here:
Deck:
I made the "Deck planking" by three colors of paint (sand, red-brown and white) first I paint the (Thin) sand paint all over the deck area there after I made a "deck paintbrush" by a bream flat brush and removed some of the hairs in groups by a pair of scissors (now the brush look like a hair comp) then I painted the deck again in small stroke with mixed paint colors to illustrate the different colors in the wood - I continued this process of mixing and apply paint in shades until it came to the effects I desired. At last I used a very soft pencil to apply the dark lines between the planks.
Guns:
The 14in main gun barrels were made of brass and have very fine shapes so I left the inside of the barrels unpainted. All the secondary 6īguns was cast in white metal with the blast bags on so only thing needed was paint.
Superstructure:
As mentioned before the Lattice structures was rebuild with spare parts PE I use the Tom model works Battleship PE. But the height and beam was not right. The PE lattice was cut up and small Cooper wire was added to make the pattern right.
The windows in the tower was on each level moulded very fine, so I decided to leave them as they were instead of "opened the windows up" with the use of PE latters because also none of mine had the right dimension regarding the windows frames. I painted all the windows flat thin black, and before they was totally dry I scratch with a finger nail to remove the paint on the windows frames - hereafter I painted the rest of the individual part Kure Naval Grey (now the vertical window frames was the color of the resin kit!) - but this is hard to notice because of the contrast from the black and grey colors - try to look at the pictures if you can see the the color of the window frames!
The grill on the stack was also moulded so I decided to leave it as it were, but bored the squared holds out with a small drill. Some of the splinter shields around the 25mm AA guns were in my opinion a little to small in height, so I lay a small metal thread around the top to increase the height
Aircraft and catapult:
The catapult on the C turret was in 1938 smaller in length than the standard catapults of the sooner late 1940. I cut one "standard size" down to the right size and added some small "sidewalks" by a piece of silk ribbon. The stringers on the biplane aircraft's was made of invisible tread glued in cross sections before the upper wing was attached (A much more easy way than done after) on the kit there is only three different aircraft (one of each) and the FUSO had 3 Nakajima E8N2 Navy type 95 (DAVE) float planes. So luckily I have some spare from former plastic kits. According to kit instructions the paint scheme was green/brown camouflage, but on all photograph from Anatomy of the ship The Battleship FUSO by Janusz Skulsk The aircraft was in silver/red paint scheme until late 1940. So mine aircraft was as the later.
Water and sky:
My diorama was on an artist frame measured 60 x 40 cm with a black plastic bag on top just curled, to illustrate waves on the water secured with 3M tapes. The white wave tops was painted and cotton wool was added to illustrate bow waves.
The background of the pictures is out on my balcony with the use of an old slide screen. Also a mirror was used as a background (Just to catch the blue sky and help to reduce to hard shadows on the model)
The last picture is made with Photo Shop.
Reference:
A big thanks to the Royal Danish Navy library for lending me the book: Anatomy of the ship The Battleship FUSO by Janusz Skulsk - A fantastic book highly recommended even if you not going to build a model of FUSO.
The building time was fast= approx 2.5 weeks.
