Building a 1/700 scale hospital ship

Modeling Subjects Ships
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Having just completed an enjoyable plane build, next on my agenda is a ship that I am looking forward to doing. This is the 1/700 scale kit of the Hikawa Maru, part of the Waterline Series from Hasegawa. This was a famous Japanese cruise liner both before and after the war, but during the war was a hospital ship. It’s still afloat, as a friend who spotted the kit in my study told me he has walked all over the Hikawa Maru, which is moored in Yokohama Harbour as an historic tourist attraction. It’s a nice looking ship in any guise.

I also have the 1/700 scale kit of the Hikawa Maru as the cruise liner, and one of these days they will both be in the same diorama together, but that’s only going to happen in 2015, maybe 2016…

Here’s the box and the artwork. I already have several leftovers of the little 1/700 harbour service craft (from another Hasegawa kit) so I think I might just make my diorama for this one look like the box’s very nice cover artwork. I also plan to make my first attempt at weathering anything. Those gleaming white hull sides need some rusty streaks for sure.

The kit itself is rather simple. The little Hasegawa Harbour Craft kit went together very well considering what a small scale this is, so I am expecting the same here.

One very nice little detail already is that they supply a thin red base for the ship to give you an instant plimsoll line. Though it seems a simple kit there’s a stack of tiny portholes and other windows to paint, so I am sure it will take up my time in a very interesting way.

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It is indeed a pretty simple kit, but a nice one - especially for its age. I’m sure it can be turned into a fine model.

Hospital ships aren’t exactly common model subjects, but they make beautiful models - and they’re beautiful ships, in ways that go far beyond mere appearance.

We’ll look forward to watching this project.

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I’d be a tad leery of matching the rustiness of the box art. After all, the deck crews, once the ship reached a forward location, would have plenty of time to keep up the “don’t shoot me” paint.

However, if memory serves, that “Harbor Set” has some square-bowed punts or scows of a size to hold a working party painting the hull side. Which would “dio” up a reason to paint a “clean patch” down by the water line…

That red base always intrigued me a bit, just before it flustered me an equal amount, for being where the black boot topping ought be (plus or minus a bit). Such is life.

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Good idea about the painting parties for the diorama, CapnMac

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Some progress at last, plus useful discoveries…

The model of the Hikawa Maru hospital ship itself is fairly simple to glue together – lots of fiddly little bits, tweezers and toothpicks all round – and this time I made life easier for myself by using Super Glue instead of the poly plastic glue. I have, however, been unsure about painting the thing, but then I made a cool little discovery. As well as having a kit of the Hikawa Maru as a hospital ship, I also have a Hasegawa kit of the same ship as a luxury cruise liner, and when I opened that box it all became a lot clearer how I should proceed.

Here’s the cruise liner box artwork. Nice looking ship.

When I opened its box, a revelation. The hull is black. It comes with the stripes and other markings as decals, so Hasegawa has taken care of the major painting job on both hulls and superstructures.

The hospital ship has its green stripes as decals. And so all I need to do next is paint the decks tan, the lifeboats in some kind of colour (not sure yet) and the inside of the ventilation pipes in red.

It’ll be fiddly, but from this point on I will be hand-painting this little baby.

The good news for me is that in a few weeks’ time I will be relaxing at a friend’s holiday shack down the coast, and so I plan to take both glued together Hikawa Marus with me, plus all my pots of acrylic paint and brushes, and if bad weather sets in, I can amuse myself for a few hours with a bit of fine brushwork.

I’ve decided not to add masts and rigging before I go on holidays, as they are far too likely to be broken off in transit, but I can make good headway on the decking, lifeboats, the zillions of little black windows etc, while I am taking a break from work.

Once I get back to my shed, I’ll attach the remainder, then I have a simple diorama in mind with both Hikawa Marus in the same harbour at the same time.

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I have the same kit so I will be looking forward to further posts.

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Some more progress to report…

I’ve had my share of minor disasters along the way, building two ships at once, but they are starting to come together. I have virtually finished the black-hulled cruise liner of the Hikawa Maru, but the white-hulled hospital ship version of the Hikawa Maru still needs decals, masts and rigging and lots of painting touch-ups here and there. I’m planning on creating a mini diorama of the two ships passing one another at sea, so for this early progress photo they are sitting on the base which I am going to turn into sea, complete with white foamy wakes, etc.

Here’s step one of the “water treatment”. After painting the board in a blobbed on mixture of navy blue, light blue, black, green and white, now I’m applying the first of half a dozen or so layers of Mod Podge craft glue, which dries clear. It’s blobbed on thickly, so after several coats it starts to look quite watery and softly lumpy.

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I’m inching closer to completion with the double build on the Hikawa Marus. The Cruise Liner is complete, the Hospital Ship needs touching up in several places, but they both basically look the part now.

I’ve had major problems doing all the tiny windows/portholes. I soon discovered that paint on either a fine brush or toothpick was hopeless, so I then had to repaint over, and have finally found permanent marker pens do a slightly better job. It all still looks pretty wonky, and I would only give it 3 out of 10 for neatness, but I just don’t have a clue how to do little windows/portholes neatly!

Doesn’t really matter about the portholes, as I am working towards a two-ship diorama, and so I am hoping that people will tend to be distracted by the overall pair of ships on the water and might overlook the many little blemishes that are there in this very tiny, fiddly scale of 1/700.

The major problem I encountered with the black-hulled peacetime cruise liner is that the sides of the hull were all black up to the top of the bridge. Yet the artwork on the box, and all photos I could find of the Hikawa Maru, definitely had the upper third of these sides of the ship in white. So I then had to mask, prime and spray the upper third. The all-white hospital ship is an easier build overall, mostly for that reason. The hardest thing on both ships was all the portholes.

This isn’t the finished diorama by any means. I plan to add wakes etc for each ship, but this is just to show the basic idea.

From this angle you can see how the Mod Podge water effects look decidedly watery.

My biggest mistake with these builds is that I was undecided about whether to paint before or after assembling, and I chose the wrong option when it came to the decks in particular. If I was to build these again I would definitely paint as much as possible first, then assemble the ship much later in the piece. (You live and learn!)

The positives I am taking out of the whole enjoyable experience are that I am now a lot more comfortable with using Super Glue (both thin and medium types) and I do find they helped to make it easier to work with all the extremely tiny, fiddly pieces in these kits.

As for the Hasegawa kits themselves, they are some of the best plastic kits I have worked on so far in my first 20 months of building models. All the problems I encountered were entirely down to my inexperience and general clumsiness. Everything fitted together well, the decals went on very nicely and fitted well (although you do need to take care with the green stripes on the sides of the hospital ship, and the spacing between the two red crosses and the green stripes, so it all fits neatly, without either falling short or being too long). The instructions could be a bit more detailed, and you’re on own when it comes to colours (if you can’t read Japanese) but there are so many reference pix of these kits as build models it wasn’t a problem for me.

I’ll post some final pictures of the two-ship diorama when it’s finished (in a few days from now).

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At last, here’s the pair of finished Hasegawa kits of the Hikawa Maru, steaming past each other, one dressed up as a hospital ship, the other as the cruise liner which it was in both the 1930s and, after WWII, in the 1950s.

The Hasegawa kits are excellent, and all the blemishes you can see are my own work. I made quite a mess of the many tiny portholes but still the overall effect of the two ships and the diorama is a pleasing finish to what has been a few weeks of tricky yet ultimately satisfying work.