by Peter Van Buren
1/350 USS Buchannan DD-484 (DML)
Back a few decades, ship modeling required you to whittle away at a block of wood until it looked like a ship or you gave up. This gave way to the early plastic kits, which required a full tube of plastic cement to be applied until it looked sort of like a specific ship or your older brother arrived with fireworks. Most modelers could see only the most general connection with the highly detailed box art, or the museum models they were lucky enough to view, and the blobby plastic kits they bought (maybe it was the glue fumes). It was somewhere in the recent past that expectations of something more became a reality for most of us, with detailed plastic kits and then, the first real multi-media kits. It was these masterpieces, with resin hulls, detailed photoetch and cast metal parts, plus decent enough instructions, that gave most of us a chance at building a pretty good looking, realistic ship model. Pretty soon the whole game changed again, with a flood of after market stuff made available from all over the world on the web, such that modelers needed to become procurement and international shipping experts, gathering parts from a variety of manufacturers and fitting them all together into a super kit.
Dragon has now taken the next step, of putting pretty much all the stuff you need for a superior model into one box, at a decent price, in a way that does not require the special skills and abundant patience that resin can. The Buchannan comes with over 400 parts for a relatively small finished model, very detailed directions, specialty decals and nice flags, some non-plastic parts and a starter PE set. Plus six 1/350 figures. Prior to this kit you’d have to buy the basic kit, figure out which PE maker to get your photetch from, acquire references to show how it all goes together, source some long out-of-production deck walkway decals, buy flag decals and, if you like figures, purchase the ones you like best from one of a growing handful of manufacturers in plastic, PE or resin. Chances are good these items would come from a variety of vendors and arrive at your mailbox over a period of weeks. After all that, start building. Now, you can buy one box and get it all from one place.
The Buchannan is more however than just a “complete” kit, it is a very well-made kit. Fit of parts was very, very good—I used just a touch of Mr. Surfacer here and there, with no need for filler per se. It is just plain wonderful to have the PE included not only in the kit, but in the detailed instructions. With today’s super-comprehensive PE sets, it is becoming a lot of work to have to bounce between two sets of instructions (kit and PE) of unequal quality, especially if you are one of the 99.9 out of 100 modelers who builds out of instruction sequence.
The other very nice thing was what was included with the kit, by which I mean bulkhead detail. Little things that create the illusion of complexity do matter, and Dragon has included them where others have not. That meant in the past adding them yourself, or doing without and ending up with something “toylike” in appearance. The bottom line is that the completeness of this kit means more modelers at more skill levels can end up with a better looking model with less effort.
Some will say, “I am modeler, not an assembler. It is my skill that sets me apart, so if you can’t handle the detailing stay out of the modeling room.” The response of course is just as simple: one, there is always more detail to be added so dive in and/or two, to really enjoy the challenge, go out and buy a hunk of whalebone and whittle a ship from there. The Dragon kit allows newer modelers to get a good looking ship easier, and allows more experienced modelers to jump ahead to the super details.
Moving on, there are a few things that Dragon might have done differently. Chief among these is the location of connecting points between part and sprue, along with the location of the little pips that come attached to parts to aid in ejecting them from the molding machines. Some of these attachment points could have been better located to make it easier to cut free parts without damage, and some locations could have been “hidden” to save modelers repair work. A few other things: the main mast vertical comes in two parts, creating a weird and weak glue point. The inclusion/exclusion of photo etch is idiosyncratic; you get PE ladders but not a PE radar. You get PE liferaft brackets but not PE for the searchlight platform. PE gunshields but no PE for the depth charge racks. The railings come as a separate item, I guess to save cost, but might have been included. For the purists, Dragon’s PE is a bit thicker than that from Gold Medal Models and WEM.
Dragon’s figures are among the best 3D I have seen (Fujimi’s, Tamiya’s and L’Arsenal). But, you only get six guys in the kit—how much more would another sprue or two have cost? Also, the figures are all wearing helmets, with not a sailor’s cap among them.
As for my model, I did add some additional PE from the GMM Fletcher set, as well as a few details here and there. It is important to note that this kit was very much the child of our own Tim Dike. Tim is a stickler for detail and accuracy, and neither he nor Dragon should be called to task for any inaccurate details and mistakes I made in my build. Like they say in the beginning of books, all the errors are my own, and not Tim’s.
Some of the sprues are marked “1/350 USN,” leaving open the idea that Dragon may produce other USN super kits, and/or market some items as replacement parts for the now-inferior Trumpeter standards. It would be a pleasure to build another 1/350 USN ship from a kit as good as this one.
PS: Peter is aware there are issues with this build. No one's perfect!
