JMSDF Shirane
by Paul Helfrich

1/700 JMSDF Shirane (Skywave)

I picked up this old Skywave kit of the JMSDF Destroyer Shirane for $5 at a model show. I was very pleasantly suprised with this kit - I found the tooling to be really quite good, and it built up into a nicely detailed model.

I added PE from the GMM USN/JMSDF set. I really like the look of this ship design - I think it's the forward placement for both 5" gun mounts that looks cool. I also like the white painted helos in use in the JMSDF.

I've seen photos of this ship that show a platform added to mount a CIWS just forward of the 2nd stack - but the kit didn't include that, so I played it safe and built the kit straight out of the box.