These are two built up battleships of the Nichimo 1:500 scale kits Ise and Hyuga. The Ise is a recent purchase and build for me, The Hyuga which is wearing the late war camouflage scheme was a rebuild. Its 25 years old, well before the internet modeling and without the internet it was hard back then to find references when it came to Japanese subjects. After all these years the model remained "mothballed" in a dilapidated state. A few parts lost but mostly all there, Its was torn down to its parts that were still present, cleaned, and rebuilt, painted when I was building the newer Ise. Both ships required a lot of scratch-building and modification from the pagoda tower, smoke stack to the Umbrella mast and its cage structure.

For the Pagoda I used brass photo-etch from the Gold Metal Models 1:500 scale IJN battleships set and a few extras from the Toms Modelworks 1:500 railings/ladders set. The rest I did on my own, replacing or building up the splinter shielding. Painting - I originally intended on doing both ships in the beaten gray but I did not want two identical ships and I don't have any planes for the Hyuga. So I decided on giving the Hyuga the disruptive camouflage job that it was given on February 20 - Sept 1945 at Kure. During that time period it had no fuel, no planes and no flight crews. So it worked out for me. I don't know how close I am with the camouflage blotches. All I had to go with are distant black & white images of a shattered ship & flight deck, deciphering dark gray with wavy dark green curves, and a failing bad eyesight to boot.

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