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Scratchbuilding A New Deck for IJN Kaga

Step 7…

Once everything had been painted individually I was ready for assembly. I sanded off the kit’s elevator details and painted them as well. I glued the first two in place on their decks from the underside and used tape to secure the rear elevator piece in case I decided to remove it to model some internals of the ship. I then taped the deck pieces together and added a small amount of glue to the section joints.

Now for the carrier drain. I really wanted this detail but I did not like the photoetch products and I did not want to manually create every hole by hand. I also needed a metal edge around the wood portion of the deck. Again I found a styrene product in a different genre of a local hobby store. The Board and batten styrene sheet was great to work with in many ways. One, it provided perfectly even spacing of the holes. Two, it was fast to add, taking only a few minutes to do the whole deck verses hand placing each hole. Three, these strips could be painted before adding to the ship. The only real downside was cutting the 1mm strips needed which tended to twist and warp slightly. I had to bend them back into a more straight shape for painting and again for gluing. After they were painted Kure gray I placed a piece of tape on the topside of the deck and worked from the underside. I started at the back of the ship and slowly glued the strip moving forward. The strip bent easily around the curves and was easy to cut for the sharp corners. After both sides were done I added the #102 rectangle styrene strips to the outer edge to complete the holes using glue sparingly. I then painted the bottom side of the deck and these outer stripes Kure gray. I removed the tape and brush painted the tops of these edges by brush. The thicker paint helped fill in the gaps and the detail looked really good. All that was left was to paint the white deck markings.