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Scratchbuilding A New Deck for IJN Kaga

Step 3…

The last thing I did was cut 1mm off of wood sections 2 and 3 and 2mm off of wood section 5. The cut area was lightly filed to remove irregularities. There are metal dividers between the wood sections and #122 styrene rectangle strips will be used for these. I cut lengths slightly longer than needed and I’ll cut off the excess once the deck gets painted then glued. With that, done I put everything together in the right order and even placed the pieces on top of the kit’s deck. The new deck size was a perfect fit. The elevators were in slightly different positions from what the kits were but I could live with this.

I created the bow and stern flight decks out of the #9020 Plain Styrene I took the 30 degree angle from the kit’s deck for the rear deck. After it was cut out I scored the lines and slightly bent and sanded the rear edge to get a slight slope. The bow deck was much harder. I ended up recreating it as well when painting started to show very uneven score marks I had made. The painted version you see in the finished photos is the recreated one. I cut out the straight sections with the metal ruler but the curves I slowly cut out by freehand. After cut, I carefully scored the piece and also scored the underside lightly to remove the bow cause from scoring. The forward rectangle sections ended up being 3mm by 10mm.