The four landing assist light scaffolds were designed and built next. They came out nicely and I sprayed the blue and red paint on one side of clear styrene and then glued them into place with the painted side on the inside. This gives the impression that they are glossy. This saved me from needing to buy entire transparent sheets of red and blue styrene, since I only needed about 2" square of translucent styrene for each of the two colours.

I built the two goniometers out of metal wire / rods and I also built 8 sets of binoculars and their pedestals. All these little features really help to provide the viewer with scale and detail perspectives.

The Aircraft: Next I decided to tackle the 12 x A6M5 52 Zero fighters for the ship. I attempted to build the Zeros using pine. Although the first one came out "good", it was clearly made of wood. No matter what I did I could not get the wooden model to look less "clunky". I did not want the aircraft on the ship to look unrealistic after working so hard to make the Zuiho as realistic as possible. I contacted HLJ.com and ordered the Doyusha 1/100 Zero "medley". This box set had 12 planes of different types (21, 22, 52 etc) in different paint schemes. The kit was back ordered. Long story short, after several months of waiting I found out the kit was discontinued. I was a little disappointed. What was I to do? Doyusha also has a set of six Type 21 Zeros from the carrier Akagi in 1/100. I decided to order two sets and they arrived within two weeks. I now had my air wing for the Zuiho, albeit I needed to repaint them and try to transform them into the type 52 versions of the Zero. Ultimately, I decided there were too many differences between the type 21 and type 52 to successfully convert them (the most blatant difference is that the Type 52's wingspan was 1/2 meter shorter per wing, and the engine cowlings/exhaust are noticeably different). I have left them as Type 21, but they are painted as they would have appeared on the Zuiho in Oct 1944. If ever the Type 52 Zeros are restocked at HLJ.com I will update the air wing completely. For now, the planes on hand will have to suffice. I will say that the Doyusha 1/100 planes are really detailed and easy to build; with no flash and the parts fit together snuggly. Additionally, four of the planes come with motors to have the propellers turn: A nice little feature that I have decided to incorporate into my display case. The 12 planes were painted and the paint was worn on each to different degrees. My thinking was that knowing the poorer quality of the pilots at this stage of the war, there would not be many aircraft that were old enough to have their paint really worn down. A plus of these kits is that each plane came with oil drums which I assembled and placed at specific locations around the ship and in the hangar. Another plus of these two kits is that each aircraft comes with several crewmen and pilots (7 figures * 12 kits). Previously, I had tried to find figures in the 1/100 scale and the only figures I found were HO scale, which were too large.

Click images to enlarge


By mid-January 2018 I was actually running out of things to do, if you can believe it! My "to do" list, which was originally about 2,000 items long, was down to the last 10 items or so. It was pretty exciting and actually a little sad: So much time and effort and the end was suddenly so close. It was a surprising realization.

Next I got down to producing the 7 x triple 25mm open mounts and 10 of the single 25mm mounts. I settled on only 10 because I was not going to depict the portable single 25mm guns, since they would have been attached to the flight deck when there were no aircraft operations underway. Since I am depicting the Zuiho with 12 aircraft on deck, then these 25mm sleighs would have been stowed below. The building of these small guns was time consuming but all 17 of them were completed over the course of 2 days.



I had only completed a single motor launch at this point so I finished the second boat to complete the set under the aft flight deck. I also completed the life rings at this point. I figured on 5 per side of the Zuiho and one for the newly commissioned motor launch. These are easy to construct, but the small size makes filing, sanding and painting a tricky undertaking.



I was left to finish the 3 smoke shielded triple 25mm mounts. These had been left to the bitter end because I didn't know how to easily tackle them. They were small and had curved and rounded tops which would be difficult to construct in styrene and making three of them in wood would be challenging, because they needed to look identical as they were right next to one another. I toyed with the idea of building a mold and then vacuum forming three mounts, but decided against that as I would need to either buy or build a vacuum form table. I decided to work with building a rubber mold and resin cast the three mounts from a model (first time resin casting for me). I also decided to use the same method to redo the two cutters I spoke of earlier in this lengthy dissertation. The cutters I originally built were planned to be covered in canvas (so they didn't need to be hollowed out and detailed), but every single picture of cutters on Japanese ships I had seen since showed that they are open to the elements and never covered when stowed. I must say, being a newcomer to resin casting, using resin was really cool and quick. Although it costs about $40 for both the rubber mold and the resin casting, I was finished all three triple 25mm mounts in about 20 minutes time and they looked really, really good. Building them from scratch would have taken me at least an hour each and they wouldn't have been absolutely identical. Very impressive!