by Andrew Johnson
1/700 IJN Fubuki (PitRoad)
This is my first ship after a 4-5 year hiatus. I somehow got seduced by armour and aircraft in the intervening years but am now happy to be back on board. After hearing the good reviews on this kit I thought I’d get one, also thought it would be better to break myself in gently with a Destroyer rather than a Battleship.
The positive side of changing to other types of modelling is you can bring over techniques to ship building such as pre-shading (aircraft) and pastels (armour) to help liven things up a little. The good news with small ships is they won’t hurt your pocket, they don’t have many thousands of parts and won’t consume too much of your paint. The bad news is they are very unforgiving! The most obvious areas are that injection molded masts and gun barrels in this scale look like giant Redwood trees! Davits can appear to have been cast from gigantic lumps of steel so they have to go too. Fortunately, this kit comes with an excellent PE set, and together with Voyager IJN boat equipment, Lion Roar 127 mm gun barrels, GMM watertight doors, and Gold Plus railings this can be rectified. I spent quite a lot of time hollowing out the two cutters on the forecastle so that they actually had planks for the rowers to sit on and not steps, adding the oars wasn’t too easy either. That said I feel a little queasy over the mistakes I made too, but the less said about them the better!
