by Anthony Kochevar
1/700 IJN Myoko (Hasegawa)
This is Hasegawa's kit that was retooled in 2007. The kit is excellent and when I opened the kit the first time I really thought that the long slender hull and deck looked really cool. The fit of the kit is pretty good but the deck, hull and waterline pieces have a bit of noticeable fit issues. The superstructure is well done and only a few pieces needed replaced or created using photoetch and styrene. The instructions were not the best I've seen, the trouble being the portions that it told you to alter/replace pieces for the different versions of the ship were sometimes hard to find and understand. I was able to also find several good quality photos of this class of cruiser online to use as a reference.
The photoetch sets I choose were Gold Medal's IJN Destroyer/Cruiser set. I was very impressed by Gold Medal's Yamato set but this Cruiser one was very disappointing. It does not have embossed pieces, and the railings are slightly overscale. The 1993 copyright date on the sheet told me when this set was first created. Hopefully Gold medal will redo the sheet with embossed pieces since so many new and retooled IJN cruisers have been released. Next time I'll use the Gold Medal IJN auxiliary set for the catapults. I also used Tom's Modelworks IJN Aircraft Carrier Set A. Why this set you ask? Because it has a excellent variety of parts for any IJN ship. The funnel grills from the set where used and the wind screen was cut down and used as photoetch windows. Several other pieces from this set were used as well to replace or help scratchbuild certain pieces.
