1/700 IJN Mikasa, 1902-4 (Hasegawa)

I have been always a fan of traditional British battleship of the pre-dreadnought error. Hasegawa's Mikasa is one of the few available in plastic and in full hull, and is a contemporary of the Royal Navy's Formidable class battleship.

The kit was build mainly out of the box. I did several small adjustments to the ship in order to get it to look right and fit for the early period in its career, i.e. sometimes between 1902-4 when it was build in England and still carried its smart Victorian livery.

Main changes included the anchor chain (braided wire) and hawsepipes that were drilled out, adding furled fabric around sails, and canvas covers on the upper railings. I also scratch built the funnel cages - unwilling to buy a dedicated PE set I used the one that came with the full hull special in the kit (where parts folded easily, but were all a little over scale perhaps), sadly it lacked funnel cages.

The ship has brass barrels and upper masts were rebuilt using brass tubing also - I did not have the tapered ones at the time which Jim Bauman uses to great effect - in fact his Magnificent as an inspiration for this built. I also (perhaps wrongly) added furled sail cloth on the yard arms as my solution to make the masts look livelier - I saw it on the ship at least during construction phase and thought it looked interesting. The flag was made out of foil and decal was applied over it, a method I'm using for all of my ships with happy results (flag was then washed with grayish diluted enamels).

Lower hull was weathered using salt method and resprayed a bunch of times, with muck line and all. Base was included in the kit and is stained in ebony color.  The whole ship was painted using an airbrush.

I posted the step by step of the built here.

Enjoy the pics!

Gallery updated 7/8/2019

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