¹⁄350

Building The Fujimi 1/350 IJN Kongo, Part 1

Part 3: The Bridge…

It's a very good idea to remember to dry fit the parts. Especially with this kit... While the upper decks of the superstructure fit together fairly well, there are nonetheless niggling little items that keep everything from being square. To paraphrase the carpenter's mantra, "dry fit twice, glue once."

While dry fitting the superstructure pieces and the legs of the tripod, this bizarre issue popped up:

As you can see, the closest leg is down as far as it will go, and yet it still sticks up too far to keep the level above from locating where it does without the legs (right picture). The farthest leg will also have to filed down some as well. Note that the glass is only really a "spacer" and will be replaced by the PE.

Now that the offending bits have been taken care of, we can dry fit the superstructure levels together.

On a related note, I recommend that even if you don't get PE, you should still replace the glass with some horizontally mounted PE ladder. The glass is too thick and has some rather unfortunate plastic plugs that will have to be removed and polished to transparency.

Some points of interest:
While all of the "glass" gets replaced with PE frames, for some reason the center glass on the 04 level has no PE replacement, so some PE ladder will have to be used as a replacement. Meanwhile, the side glass pieces on that level are each one panel too wide, so they will have to be trimmed to fit.

The instructions show PE part B2-35 (the main rear structure) plus B2-21. This had me scratching my head for a while until I realized that part B2-21 actually goes farther down (the lowest PE structure on the pictures) and does not attach to part B2-35 in any way. B2-21 will also have to be trimmed slightly at the top to properly fit over the plastic.

The PE ladders that go inside haven't been attached yet as they will go on after the floors have been painted. The same goes for all the binoculars, etc. Remember that this is all dry fit, thus the gaps that will tighten up when glued. The rear structure is supposed to "hug" the main structure more, but since all of this is dry fit, I had to lean it at a less extreme angle to keep from falling over.

The radar hasn't been glued on yet...

This is to better facilitate painting of both the tower and the multi part radar itself (this is also why the radar isn't "closed up").