by Claudio Matteini
I make no secrets of the fact that I particularly like Japanese warships and among them heavy cruisers. Apart from the U.S. heavy cruisers of the Baltimore Class and the German “Prinz Eugen”, they were probably the most powerful heavy cruisers of the WWII. The Takao Class heavy cruisers can be considered as the highest point reached by the Japanese naval industry on this kind of vessels.
I decided to build the IJN heavy cruiser Maya because she was the only cruiser of the Takao Class to be converted as an A.A. cruiser, after the 5 November 1943 damage suffered during a raid by USS Saratoga aircraft, at Rabaul IJN naval base.
My model depicts the Maya on 17 October 1944, at Lingga Roads, just a few days before being sunk on 23 October 1944. Maya was sunk by four torpedoes launched by the USS Dace in the Palawan Passage, north of Borneo, while Maya was underway to the Philippines with VADM Kurita’s Fleet.
The kit is the 1/700 Pit Road, and I’ve improved the model with a lot of scratch buildings and tons of photoetch parts. It’s quite impossible to me to show how much scratch building was involved during the construction of the Maya; I can only say that this model is far the most scratch built, detailed and improved ship I have ever done.
The original Pit Road kit composed of about 200 plastic parts was more then 3500 parts in the end. I’ve used PE parts from Tom’s Modelworks, Gold Medal Models, Fine Molds, Joe World, White Ensign Models, Hasegawa and Pit Road, together with metal sets from Pit Road (203 mm. gun barrels) and Clipper Models (127 mm. gun barrels and different sizes of mushroom vents). For all the PE parts not existing and, naturally, not included in PE sets, I’ve worked and adapted other PE parts taken from my personal “used PE parts bank”.
Tripod main mast is made of metal rods of different sizes and rigging is obtained by sprues. Most of the deck superstructure was improved or scratchbuilt,
including;
The Aichi E13A1 “Jake” Navy type O reconnaissance floatplane is scratch built with the canopy open.
Maya was airbrushed with White Ensign Models Colourcoat WEMCC04 – IJN Yokosuka Grey -, referring to Snyder & Short Enterprises' information contained in their “Imperial Japanese Navy World War II Ship Colors” and softly drybrushed with three different shades of grey. The linoleum decks were painted with WEMCC10 – IJN linoleum – drybrushed with light brown and yellow.
Photetch Sets used
Metal Sets
Sources: Books & Magazines
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