I have decided to give a few ships a go with the first being the IJN Mogami. It started off the war as a light cruiser, then was converted to a heavy cruiser, and finally was converted into an aircraft carrier/cruiser.

A few initial critiques of the kit is - No PE railing or degaussing cable were provided. Both are depicted in the artwork. It was a disappointing to discover Tamiya decided to withhold those two items as I was trying to build primarily straight from the box. I was just going to buy the Eduard IJN railing set and a Tamiya degaussing cable set, but by the time you add shipping.. It came out to the same cost as buying the FlyHawk super detail set. The only downside of the FlyHawk set, is that it is coming from China = 2-5 weeks until I get it.




I plan on working on this ship while my other projects are drying etc..

Cheers!

What a wonderful entry, my friend @greenterrorz! Great that you sorted out the railing and degaussing cable "omissions" in an effective manner with the Flyhawk set. It will be a fantastic project, receiving your attention between your other projects.
Looking forward to it!

I can honestly say, I have already had at least 2 mini mental break downs working with this much PE. The Flyhawk PE set I purchased has some of the worst directions I have seen. The included directions only instruct you through images on how 40% of the parts are to be folded and placed. The other 60% of the parts are not even mentioned in the instruction manual at all. Luckily I was able to stumble across another modelers build log I found on ScaleMates.com. The build log isn’t nearly as intuitive as I would like, but still leagues better than what is included from FlyHawk.

I knew the PE parts would be small, so no surprise. Only main frustration is the inadequate instructions

Front decking removed and PE installed -

Removed some of the Tamiya deck supports in favor of the PE parts. In hindsight, there was no increase in detail to remove the original parts. Still a learning curve I am dealing with -

Removed detail from rear upper decking in preparation of apply PE deck -

Rear upper deck replaced by PE deck. Still many smaller PE parts to install onto the deck-

REALLY SUPERLATIVE job, my friend @greenterrorz!

I’m impressed!

Thanks everyone @fiveten @johnb @lis @ssgt

Update:

The long PE rails for the planes are done and my brain can finally relax! I typically don’t mind working with PE… But these long bits that bend and deform if you breath the wrong way were something else. This particular section ended up taking me roughly 2 hours because of how fragile those long pieces were. I’m going to rest easy tonight knowing this step is now complete.

It looks fantastic!

Been going pretty hard on the Mogami this week.

I have completed the plane sleds:

Majority of the Bow is complete. Next up will be turrets: