IJN Fuso - In Port

Let me applaud the photo etch and the tight rigging, the grit and grime of the dockside, the number of pieces it took to put together. That tall pagoda in contrast to the buildings is really striking.

Thank you for that - on the dockyard question, this is something I constructed some time ago now, designed purely as a dockyard and being segmented into a the size of a shelf, my idea was simply for people such as myself that suffer from a total lack of space, simple by adding another segment you can encrease the size of the dock yard, each segment is a complete diorama within itself, and yet back to back, side to side, and obviously you can have as many segments as you wish, and when finished, these 30'' X 4.5'' fit straight back inside the cabinet. Click the photo, and it should open the Flickt gallery, also designed for any type of 1-700 surface craft, take the photo and return the model into its cabinet, there is no reason why you can't slight change the segments by adding or taking away buildings etc etc. And not forgetting this little step by step build, although this is a single 1-700 diorama, there's no reason why you could not mirror a left or right and continue this diorama the same as the segmented diorama. There are of course people that have room, and this is never a problem, with myself and I dare say a few others, I have to build a single ship, photo this as a stand on its own, by adding that to a set diorama I intantly create a huge footprint, so I logically thought, why not build a diorama that you can use over and over again, then it accured to me the problem would remain, but then. Why not build one like a shelf, my old display cabinet shelf size is 30'' by 4.5'' now I have a home for my diorama (as big as you like) and for my stand by themselves ships.

Well done Alec...awful amount of work there...beautiful diorama.... congratulations my friend...I really like it...it's alive ! Louis

Excellent work Alec, beautiful details on your dock too. The rigging is magnificent, is it stretched sprue or thread? cheers, Julian

Wow thank you very much indeed. I like to believe I get the best from both wordls when for rigging I use both, long pieces is stretched melted plastic, short pieces holding flag and jumper cable from overhead to stack fly fishing line (flymaster 6/0 waxed Danville's). Although you can quite see clearly, the Fuso has glazed bridge windows, by eye and quite close up, they actually look quite good considering the scale, in the photo's you really can't see them that well.

I have a feature on the Dock Yard coming as well....so stay tuned!!

Talk about a double-whammy! A handsome rendition on an interesting battleship design and now an upcoming feature on the realistic dock yard! --Karl

You're all too kind, with the Fuso, it is such a great looking battleship, with the buildings that in the real world are large shown against the bridge tower give an indication how high out of the water this ship stood, another way of looking at it, how large those hammerhead cranes are, the only one I know of is Cowes on the Isle of White, I'll see if I can find a photo.

Although I haven't been over to see my family for a couple of years, and all my photo's have disappeared somewhere, I did manage to find that one located in Cowes IOW, it look very big and taking a photo is somewhat difficult due to its sheer size, now a grade listed structure.

Many thanks for the reply, the Fuso with her tall stack is well balanced against the sheer size of the hammerhead, while very tempted to populate with several figures, these would be in 2-D and no matter how you place them, in my view they'll never be as good as 3-D figures such as the 1-350, I dare say that someone somewhere is planning to take the model world by storm, but for the time being, I can only dream of such 1-700 figures. Flags - believe it or not, I spent some considerable time debating the question of displaying flags on the dockyard, as the aft flag on a ship, I was going to hang these from tall structures, and some simply on the end of standing pole that could be bamboo. The problem is this. The dockyard is re-usuable, it was not designed for any certain type of ship, 1919 to 2011 would equally be at home within this dockyard, this is neather American nor Japanese, British or any other navy home port, quite simply to build and photograph a ship against the dockyard.