| Those of you who subscribe to the Ship Modeler’s Mailing List (SMML) may remember a series of messages recently about an unknown, true garage manufacturer of resin kits in Japan. The kits are molded in greasy blue resin, and offer such inconveniences as sectioned hulls (in this case, five chunks ‘o resin) that are glued head to tail to create the hull. The kits come with no instructions, just a line drawing, and the molding is so rough that each part becomes part of your life memories, as you spend more time cleaning and re-scribing the parts than you likely do with your kids between ages 6-13. The kits come with no decals, the only PE is two anchors and the color guides apparently give color numbers known only to a discrete sect of tribal leaders living in Atlantis. Every part created a seam (actually, more like a 1/700 canyon) that needed some combination of strip stock, gap filling glue, filler and ready-mix concrete to fill. | |
| The good news is that the kits offer some subjects otherwise not available. Mine, shown here, is the Atlantic Conveyor, the only container ship kit I am aware of in 1/700 scale. Rumor has it that there is a 1/700 Wasp kit out there, as well as some other subjects. I’ve never seen anything but this container ship on the shelves in Japan, and the guy behind the counter said sometimes he gets an order in and most times he does not. I also can’t find any of these kits at HobbyLink Japan. | Click images
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| I’m pretty pleased to be able to add this ship to my 1/700 collection, but in the end it was really w-a-y more work than I normally enjoy doing. | |
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