by Kieran Griffith
1/700 Kyoto Express, Colombo Express Class (Revell Germany)
The Revell Colombo Express class kit is pretty great but the containers that come with the kit just look so boreing, you would only see containers like that in the kind of miniature you get at a shipbulders or ship owners office, never in real life where they are higeldy-pigeldy, so I did some research and the kit I was able to make has the containers as a mixture of loads of photos from different angles of the Colombo Express Class Ships (used a little bit of imagination as well). I decided to make it as the Kyoto Express container ship. I chose that because my friend, Fiona (who I have made neumerous ship kits for in the past) traveled on it once from Dalian, China to England when the ship was recently launched. She spent the whole time in the engine room with the brand new 69,700 kW engine and falling in love with marine propulsion engineering and after studying it in university she has a career in the field now. The kit was so intricate painting all the containers it took many hours of spare time and also the trimming of the containers to show randomly stacked containers was twice as hard as it should have been because I accidentally trimmed them from the bottom up instead of from the top down and therefore had to do sanding and trimming of the tops and bottoms of the blocks to get them to fit. and I would have given up on it if it was not for my father making a beautiful wooden base for it that I did not want to let go to waste. The photoetch railings and starcases are from the spare parts box. Revell does have a PE railings set for this ship but it does not include the stairways I think.
