¹⁄350

Building The Fujimi 1/350 IJN Kongo, Part 1

The top ladder is unlabeled- it is PE A29 (again, one piece that either must be cut in two to be as shown or installed as one piece after mounting the cap).

The bottom ladder is PE A 28.

The bottom ring is only labeled as A65 for one segment and then the rest strangely becomes A66. Because of the pipe, the ring segments will not mount as in the picture some "fiddling" will be necessary...

The instructions also do not point out the fact that ladders go on BOTH sides of each funnel. Keep this in mind since after your scrape off the molded on ladders, you may forget this without a visual cue.

Here is the fore funnel with molded on detail scraped off and with PE attached. The cap and grill are dry fit.

Here is the aft funnel with molded on detail scraped off and with PE attached. Again, the cap and grill are dry fit.

Midship structure work- molded on aztek stairs removed and with PE stairs added.

This platform and all the PE took a while to assemble but looks really good when done, particularly the structure work. The platform by itself and dry fit to midships...

The PE instructions have a very crucial bit of of information missing: they don't say where to put any of the PE cradles! Luckily I saw this at the beginning of the build and measured the plastic pieces. The PE parts are very close in size so there was still some guesswork here. But this set up has worked out fairly well:

Next came the aft section of the midships. The instructions showed to place the A54 ring on the bottom. This is incorrect- its is second from the bottom.

Here is the structure with molded on detail removed and then PE added. Nice!

The mast gets topped with a PE platform. The platform has PE underside supports. Because of this, the molded on plastic supports have to be removed:

The mast with PE attached.

There is also a PE radar replacement. It hasn't been attached because it won't stay on dry fit. It's important to note that this item is only about a half inch long.

The main crane also can't be dry fit yet...

Here's a closeup of the PE replacement pulleys and hook and the original over-scale plastic item.

Some very delicate pulleys get mounted to the platform.

Finally, here's the whole midships dry fit together.