by Robert Apfelzweig
1/350 HMS King George V (Tamiya)
I purchased the Tamiya 1:350 King George V kit about 9 years ago from a hobby shop that was going out of business, and stuck it up on a shelf in my closet until I had decided to resume building model warships. I finished this kit, augmented with a Tom's Modelworks photoetch set, about two years ago. The kit depicts the KGV late in her mid-WWII configuration, but I did no research on her exact appearance at any given time in her career, just followed the kit instructions. The Tom's Modelworks photoetch set does not include the degaussing cables that were common on British battleships of this period, but I had some left over from the Trumpeter HMS Hood that I subsequently built and I may add them to this model at some point (though it won't be enough to do both hull sides). This was one of the first 1:350 warships -- along with the SMS Markgraf and Tirpitz -- that I built after resuming a hobby that I had not pursued since high school (back in the 60's), and had not yet decided to modify the secondary gun turrets to rotate in those cases where the kit's design did not allow it. Most of my subsequent models permit such gun mount rotations. I had built an original Aurora KGV way back around 1961 (I always thought those quad gun turrets were so cool), and, of course, the Tamiya kit is infinitely superior.
