1/200 Scale answer Models IJN Akizuki

[eibwarrior]

Nice work. You must have some very refined scratch-building skills.

I look forward to your work on Akizuki. We have some very good IJN subjects going in the forum right now, this one included!

[treadhead1952]

Thanks, but it is mostly just a lot of years of kit bashing and trying to see what I can do. I have to admit in this case, it is a lot of Romans' plans that he puts into his models that enabled me to do as much as I did.

[redhorse]

It looks great! What scale is it?

[Papercut]

treadhead, lets see, the last time I heard that term was while serving w/2nd ACR. You ain't (southern slang we're told not to say by Mom) one of those ole butt kickin, diesel smelling, BIG GUNNIN land battleship crewman are ya! If so I remember the term also Sprockethead as well. I have a passion for things with BIG GUNS. Welcome aboard. You are in good hands with this bunch of salty dogs that will go the tenth mile to help. Follow their advice and your headaches will be few. And yes to go from that ole friend plastic to paper is quite a change, but after so many years of modeling, I have found this to be the most rewarding of the lot. Don't feel too bad about ordering too much from Papermodel Store, heck I need rehab, if my wife knew what I was spending, I be buried at sea. Anyhow welcome and enjoy the adventure of paper modeling. Oh yea, the rest of the fellas have gone over pretty good about lamination of parts, found out the hard way, white glue is not the way to go. I have found this works the best for me: 3M Super 77 Spray, just like you use to mount photo's. Done right, you can cut part from cardboard, finish sand w/o what was attached peeling off and get the part to the shape you want. But I am sure there is more than one way to do it. Look'in forward to your build. 1:700, must have good eyes!

[treadhead1952]

Thanks Guys,

In answer to your question Jim, it is 1/250, just as Roman had intended it to be. I printed out all the plans after downloading and looking at them, decided that I could take sheet styrene and add a few things by scratchbuilding all the rest in stages. After about four months of working at it, I was just about snowblind staring at all that white styrene under bright lights. I took a break for about a week and went back and finished it out. A lot of it is stretched sprue for various parts, shaped styrene in the form of rods, tubes, rectangular and square stock along with a lot of information that I was able to find on the web in the form of photos, crew rememberance sites and a couple of museum sites. To give you an idea of how it looked before I shot some paint on there, here is one of the construction photos.



I finally got a couple of coats of paint on there, one overall and the second by cheating and shooting it straight down over the top without any angles to give it the two tone gray that I had found on a few Navy sites.



My interest in IJN subjects of the floaty variety has been mostly in 1/700 scale as I said. I was fortunate in finding some display cases that our company was not going to use for various reasons that were given to me. I keep my collection in them, being lighted cases is a bonus.



My interests have not always been around ships, I have a lot of planes as well, several of them sort of bridged the gap between ships and planes by being seaplanes, IJN, of course. I make most of my own stuff up like bases from plaster of paris poured into plastic lids from coffee cans and other odd shaped things with tape around the side to hold the liquid while it dries hard.



I have even had cause at times to combine the two subjects, this is A Models tiny Soviet seaplane that was part of their experiments to stow a plane aboard a submarine, in this case on deck in a container lashed to the deck. After I built the tiny plane, I needed someplace to stash it so I poured up a base and scratchbuilt a section of submarine and conjured the planes container from photos that I found online. The figures came from the Revell German Sailor set in 1/72 scale that was released just about that time with conversion to Soviet seamen via some creative painting.





In answer to your question Papercut, I got my screen name years ago when I first got online, at the time I was way into 1/35th scale armor, if it had tracks or a gun, it was fair game for me. At the time we didn't have the variety of things that we do now. After building up Tamiyas' M3 Stuart kit in just about every variant from the M1 Combat Car through the twin turreted Mae Wests' and the latest M3A2 I learned a lot about tinkering with sheet styrene to come up with what I liked.



Actually, I was a Marine from 1968 up until about '72, one thing I learned from my experiences in the late South East Asia war games they had back then, was to stay as far away from anything with tracks, those things draw fire like crazy. Fortunately, aside from a couple of combined operations that they inflicted on us, as a member of 33 and 1/3 Recon we spent most of our time out in the bush far away from things like that. :D

Jay Massey
treadhead1952
Las Vegas, NV

[Papercut]

I understand. I will admit I like the fact bullets bounced off the armour. And when needed, had a really big gun that took care of those who you got their attention. Served with 3 Cav Squadrons to include one that had the Hoff Board Patrol mission. But hey, you were Recon and I think that is cool too. Oh yea, nice models. I had to stop building those, would start w/a kit and by the time I finished buying all the extras I had a small fortune in it. Got too expensive to be accurate. Still looking forward to you build.:D

[treadhead1952]

Hi Papercut,

I too have had some kits where I was spending more on the extras than the original kit, one of the reasons I started doing more scratching and bashing, remember, stretched sprue is your friend.

Well, back to the subject at hand, I spent an enjoyable few hours running DVDs on the 'puter while I smeared contact cement on the appropriate sized 1mm thick cardboard and the backs of the paper parts that I had cut out. After a little wait time and putting them together; I first started with a hobby knife cutting the curvy bits out following the directions from the article I found in the Articles section. Once I got to the parts that were pretty much straight with outside curves, I felt more comfortable with my scissors. As to the full length hull shapes, I just went for it with scissors up to that little curvy bit under the bottom of the fantail on the horizontal part, the hobby knife felt a little more like the tool to use there. So this is where I wound up after 4 episodes of Star Trek Voyager.



Now I have to figure out the best way to get these all together into one piece. Any tips, suggestions, or such are much appreciated. Looking at them all I am considering trying to figure out how to interlock the parts together before glue and then once I get there I can get happy with some more contact cement for a more permanent solution.

[GreMir]

Hope this will help

[Don Boose]

Thanks for sharing the photos of that outstanding collection of models. It's great to see you applying those skills to paper modeling. Looks like Akizuki is well on the way.

Don

[treadhead1952]

Thanks Don and Michael,

I sorta figured it out after looking at the sheets a little closer. I did make a slight fauz pas, made the two long wise hull shapes one piece, it looks like I will have to separate them into their original 3 piece configuration so I can assemble this beastie the way it is supposed to be. Oh well, I am sure that won't be the first thing I mess up this week.