I make no secret of the fact that I particularly like Japanese warships and among them heavy cruisers. Apart from the U.S. heavy cruisers of the Baltimore Class and the German "Prinz Eugen", those were probably the most powerful heavy cruisers of the 2^nd W.W. The Takao Class heavy cruisers can be considered as the highest point reached by the Japanese naval industry on these kind of vessels.

I decided to build the IJN heavy cruiser MAYA because she was the only cruiser, of the Takao Class, to be converted to an AA cruiser. This happened after she suffered bad damage during a raid on 5^th November 1943 from U.S.S. Saratoga aircraft, at Rabaul IJN naval base. My model depicts the MAYA on 17^th October 1944, at Lingga Roads, just a few days before being sunk on 23^rd October 1944 by four torpedoes launched by U.S. submarine "Dace", in the Palawan Passage, north of Borneo, while MAYA was underway to Philippines with Vice Admiral Kurita’s Fleet. The kit is the 1:700 scale Pit Road version and I’ve improved the model with a lot of scratch-building and tons of photo-etched parts.

It’s quite impossible to me to show how much scratch-building was involved during the construction of the MAYA. I can only say that this model is by far the most scratch-built, detailed and improved ship I have ever done. The original Pit Road kit is composed of about 200 plastic parts but at the end of my work, more then 3500 parts went into the model. I’ve used photo-etched parts from Tom’s Modelworks, Gold Medal Models, Fine Molds, Joe World, White Ensign Models, Hasegawa and Pit Road, together with metal sets from Pit Road (203 mm. gun barrels) and Clipper Models (127 mm. gun barrels and different sizes of mushroom vents). For all of the photo-etch parts not existing and, naturally, not included in the PE sets, I’ve worked and adapted other PE parts taken from my personal "used PE parts bank".

The tripod main mast is made of metal rods of different sizes and rigging is obtained by sprues. The tower bridge structure, funnels, central structure (around the funnels) with its 25 mm triple machine guns, the aft structure under the tripod main mast, 203 mm. gun turrets and rangefinders, 127 mm. AA guns, aircraft deck and all the details on the main deck were heavily improved or scratch-built.

The Aichi E13A1 "Jake" Navy type O reconnaissance floatplane is scratch built and the canopy is open. MAYA was airbrushed with White Ensign Models Colourcoat WEM CC04 – IJN Yokosuka Grey-, referring to Snyder & Short Enterprises information contained in their "Imperial Japanese Navy World War II Ship Colors", and softly dry-brushed with three different shades of grey. The linoleum decks were painted with WEMCC10 – IJN linoleum and dry-brushed with light brown and yellow.

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