by Bill Fu |
I began construction of this ship right after I finished Musashi for which a lot of parts were left unused because I built her with general-purpose parts, not detail-up sets. In order to make use of the parts leftover from Musashi, I decided to build an IJN cruiser, because I thought the workload should be lighter than battleships (which is untrue) and I can finish it quickly before moving on to other projects. But as it turned out, it took me half a year.
I built it with Flyhawk’s detail-up set and many other related IJN parts. Big parts on the ship were not very easy to be aligned accurately; I think perhaps it's not because Aoshima's design is not accurate but because those big parts are so divided (for example, the hull needs to be assembled with more than 10 parts; superstructures too) so that when you gradually put things together, errors accumulated and big gaps appeared. It took a lot of hard-work to correct things.
