This is the last of my catch-up postings since joining the forum here this week. It’s a Pit Road 1/700 scale plastic kit model of a 1930s Japanese oil tanker, the ‘Shirya’.
Poor old ‘Shiriya’. If there’s one load you wouldn’t want to be carrying during WWII, when the submarine, the USS ‘Trigger’, fires a torpedo into your sides, it’s aviation gasoline. But that’s what happened, and as expected it was followed by an almighty kaboom-ball-of-fire type demise for the ‘Shiriya’. That all happened in September 1943.
The diorama is a made-up fantasy, as the town in the background is Nice in France, and I don’t think Japanese oil tankers ever visited Nice. The other little ships on the water are 1/700 Hasegawa ‘Harbour kit’ models, and you get a stack of them for about 10 bucks. The buildings dockside are metal PE on the left, and to save money, I made my own buildings on the right, based on the photo-etched originals.
The Pit Road kit is very nice indeed, and everything fitted nicely with a minimum of alterations required, apart from the usual smoothing and sanding. It being 1/700 scale, it’s all tweezers on deck!
Sorry about the photo quality. I pinched a sheet of my wife’s large paper sheets as a background and did the photos in natural light outdoors, with odd looking results.
The one outstanding boo-boo in this model is the ventilation pipe beside the gun near the bow. When I left the model late one afternoon, it was perfectly upright. The next time I visited it was bent forward and set in place. My wife’s theory is that a very large cockroach probably shoulder-charged it late at night. She’s probably right!