by Jose Soca
1/700 IJN Nagato (Aoshima)
I tried to depict Nagato sometime after her last pre-war refit at that time she was the flagship of Vice Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. I think one of the major and most tedious tasks that I encountered was putting the pagoda together. Nothing equals the assembling of the structure if and only if you decide to make it a hybrid with pe and injection level parts but this is something I decided to do after witnessing how crooked or unaligned some of these pe parts looked and even though I had to scratchbuild some of the levels and come up with other ways to finish it up I don't regret it because it came out as I wanted. The second most annoying task will have to be adding the wood deck. KA Models deck is a pretty, delicate, innacurate wood deck however I think you won't get a better one for its price and if you ask me I'd gladly tell you I like these decks waaay better than Shinsengumi's. The ordeal with the deck didn't stop until I removed more than half of all molded deck details and after having done so I thank Guido Hopp in this occasion for giving me the styrofoam water idea. Overall, it was a time consuming buildup I didn't keep an hourly track but if I had to guess I'd say it took me from 100 -120 hours. I want to thank all the guys who followed my build up from the very begining, I hope you enjoyed it I know I did.
