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1/350 Nagato (1941) with Flyhawk


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This is Hasegawa's Z24 Nagato kit, to which I'm adding the Flyhawk Gold Medal Edition detail set. I got the detail set a few months ago in a 20% off everything on Ebay sale, which made it seem like good value. The actual kit followed a few weeks ago. I fancied the idea of building one of those pagoda masts, although having seen the number of parts required, it's fiendishly complicated. The instructions for the Flyhawk set are really poor - there are whole sheets of photo etch with no mention of where to put them. Just a lot of blurry photos of a completed model with the odd part pointed out.

 

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^ A whole lot of photo etch, which I've sprayed with Mr Metal Primer, probably at the expense of one or two months off my life expectancy.

 

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^ Loads of resin parts and some brass barrels, mast parts, and dozens of little bollards (generally without any indication of where they're meant to go).

 

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^ This is frankly ridiculous. It's a Type 89 AA gun, which you're meant to put together out of seven tiny resin pieces. But the resin is warped in crucial places, so it doesn't go together very well, and as for those PE handholds... How on earth am I meant to cut out something that size, let alone stick them in place? I had a very brief go at unwarping it all in hot water, but the bits are too small to get a grip of. I've ordered some better looking guns from Ebay, these ones can go in the bin.

 

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^ It's a big ship. I'll be painting the deck rather than using Flyhawk's wood sticker. Perhaps I shouldn't have gone for the Flyhawk set.

 

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^ The build quality of the kit is excellent, as it ought to be for the price. The larger parts more or less snap together without any gaps, and those braces are numbered both on the parts and the hull, so it's impossible to put them in the wrong place.

 

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^ There's also this from Flyhawk. The biggest piece of photo etch I've seen so far, replacing the entire flight deck with something that looks identical. I don't see the point, other than for those pinholes where some rails will go, but at least it might be easier to paint if I can just take it off and assemble it away from the plastic parts.

 

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12 hours ago, Michael M said:

Fair play to you man, it'd take me 5 years to build this thing ;) 

Look out for me continuing to add to this thread in 2024.

 

Actually it's not as bad as all that. The bits I'm not looking forward to are painting the workboats/lifeboats and aircraft. If my experience so far is anything to go by (three ships completed, featuring a total of 12 tiny boats and 1 tiny plane) those will be the things I leave until last.

 

I've just done this:

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^ These are the undersides for five of the seven-ish layers of the pagoda mast. Putting all those tiny girders together was incredibly satisfying. As long as the guide rails are correctly placed, which was not easy for the circular one, most of the others just slot in place.

 

I've decided to paint it in a much lighter colour than the regulation IJN Kure grey. That stuff is so dark, details like these are going to be hard to see when it's all assembled.

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13 hours ago, colin said:

That looks very neat, what glue are you using to stick it together

Two types of CA glue (both Expo brand, if it makes a difference). For the freestanding parts it's a bead of thick grade glue, which has a slow enough setting time to allow a bit of wiggling to get things to stand up straight, and for the parts that slot in or to reinforce a joint, a dab of the thin grade glue.

 

These just arrived from BNA Model World in Australia (very fast delivery, they must have teleported it here). Replacements for the rubbish AA guns in the Flyhawk set. There's absolutely no comparison in terms of quality, made from thicker resin that's not warped and the handholds are molded on rather than being PE pieces a quarter of a mm across. I'll do two with the cover over the guns and two without, as there's some really nice detail under there.

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I'm not sure if anyone would be able to offer some advice on this, but here's an issue I've just found. The Flyhawk kit includes replacements for all the clear plastic windows in the bridge structure, except for one annoying omission - piece T2, which is made entirely from transparent plastic. The top and bottom would be painted but it's going to look weird next to all the empty PE windows (and does on most of the pics of similar completed models I've seen online).

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There's a Pontos detail set that does include this part in PE (circled) but it would be foolishness to buy it just for this one piece. What would be the best way of reproducing something like this myself? It's small, about 5x5x4 mm.

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Gidday Calistan, I'd have a go at making the piece out of styrene. Another possibility is cutting the window section out of the original piece. As for the window frames I've seen a model where spare PE ladders were used for window frames. I don't do PE myself, I'm not that good so I speak in ignorance but if I recall it looked quite effective. HTH. Regards, Jeff.

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Thanks chaps, I think I will give all of those suggestions a try and see what works best for me.

 

That Pontos kit that has the PE version of this part also comes with the exact same AA guns from Veteran Models that I had to buy to replace the Flyhawk ones. Then again, it doesn't have the resin boats or any of the lovely girders underneath the bridge platforms, but I'm wondering how visible they're going to be on the completed model. I suppose there's no single add-on kit that does absolutely everything.

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12 hours ago, Courageous said:

What! Are you telling me that that deck is made up of strips of dyed masking tape!? Mental...brilliantly mental.:yes:

 

Stuart

Now that would be something! I do keep finding stray strips under the paint, so I suppose if I can’t spot them all it will at least be part masking tape. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I've ground to a halt on the pagoda mast / bridge structure because the amount of tightly packed layers means I'll have to paint it in several stages as I go, but I still can't decide what colour it should be. Until I can get to a model shop to admire their shades of grey, I started on the funnel instead, because this Nagato has an absolute corker of a smokestack.

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Even without the photo etch it's pretty detailed. I feel sorry for whoever designed all that at Hasegawa, only for me to scrape half of it off with a scalpel. Unfortunately I'll have to stop at this point because there are some other parts that don't look like they can be attached until the funnel is permanently fixed to the ship deck.

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4 hours ago, ArnoldAmbrose said:

Gidday Calistan, very impressive, and intricate. All those supports for the funnel platforms. Regards, Jeff.

Cheers! Yes, this Flyhawk set is very strong on girders. The ship is going to look particularly good from a sort of 3/4 below viewpoint.

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Hull primed in white and pre-weathered in splotchy black. I had considered getting rid of those deep grid lines all along the torpedo bulge, but I've grown to like them. They should be good for filling with rust, oil and sea gunk. Also, the one at this link is probably my favourite Nagato I've seen on the internet, and that guy left the grid lines intact. (somebody else's amazing Nagato > http://www.modelshipgallery.com/gallery/bb/ijn/Nagato-350-LKS)

 

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Next, a bit more of the funnel. I thought the Flyhawk kit had supplied the wrong length ladders for the upper walkway, so in a previous pic I'd used some generic ladders from elsewhere. Turns out I was just misreading Flyhawk's dreadful instruction book, so the correct ladders (with folding steps) are installed now. So shiny! Also, doesn't it look like a friendly robot holding up all that brass?

 

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  • 4 months later...

I sort of gave up on this for a while. My attempt at weathering the hull didn't look as good as I'd hoped, and I think I got modelling fatigue. I just couldn't face getting out all that stuff and spending hours folding tiny bits of brass.

Anyway, now that summer is on the way out I'm back on it. I've almost finished the pagoda structure, which was the main reason for choosing this model in the first place.

 

resized_3ac32120-b7c8-41f1-82f4-c291de19^ These pictures make it look a bit rougher than it does with the naked eye, but I'm happy enough with it. Needs some bare spots repainting, plus some eventual shading/weathering. Also, there's a sort of cap thing that goes on the penthouse (technical jargon) which I'll do later since it's going to be white. I don't know what's going on with the colour balance on my camera, these were all taken at the same time. It's Tamiya dark sea grey.

 

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^ I managed to knock off a weather vane from the top while I was fitting it all together, which is really annoying. I'll never find it, maybe I'll just stick a spike on there as a replacement. The wooden floors here are masked with the unwanted wooden deck that came with the PE set, and the linoleum parts are masked with tape. I'll soon find out which is easier to peel off - there are struts passing through the floors, so I cut slits in the mask in the hope that it will pull off in one piece.

 

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^ Another interpretation of the same colour. All of those girders are indeed going to be basically invisible from any sort of normal viewing angle.

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  • 2 weeks later...

A little more progress. I removed the masks from the wood / lino deck parts of the pagoda and glued down some sundries.

 

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^ There's still a hose reel to go on there, bottom right, haven't made any of those yet. The wooden deck sticker did a sterling job of protecting my painted deck. I'm not sure if I should seal and weather it now or do the whole completed ship at once for consistency.

Incidentally, I'm not at all impressed with the quality of Flyhawk's resin stuff. After having to throw away the big AA guns and buy in the superior versions seen above, I've noticed that their little ammo boxes have numerous little voids and bubbles in them. Can't really see it in this pic because they're mostly at the back, but a few of them are almost unusable.

 

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^ Mast primered and almost completed, except for some railings around the wooden parts. That's another of the wood deck stickers used as a mask, and I don't think I'll be able to remove it if the railings are in place. I knocked this over, right onto the crane, hence the slightly warped dangly bit.

 

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^ Mast from the other side. The hole is so I can model the door swinging open - this PE kit has double-sided doors with frames, so I'll make use of them in a few places.

 

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^ Guns, guns, guns. I like the little greenhouses on top, the Japanese navy really thought of everything.

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