has anyone built any of Tamiya’s waterline ships?. i was wondering if anyone has because I cant seem to find any reviews on the following models: the zuikaku, prince of wales, and the yamato. any tips will be appreciated
Do you know of these 4 places?
their older stuff is all at http://www.steelnavy.com/
Model warships dot com has a large review section www.modelwarships.com/index1.html
and Rajendra’s list, now Joe’s list, has comments under the listing of many of the ships they list
www.modelerjoe.net/shipmodellist.html
Rex
Have Enterprise - CV6, but not started her yet. Looked like a pretty clean kit and build in the instruction sheet.
Have one ;
It’s the OLD rendition of the AKAGI .Yup , three decks and all . Weird looking thing . BUT so far even though it’s 1/700 it’s going together well . Little problem with deck supports , but got that worked out .
I may change them out for P.E.
I believe that Akagi kit is made by Hasegawa.
The Tamiya 1/700 ships have always been close to the state of the art. That Enterprise is close to 40 years old, and it has its problems. The newest ones (try the Yamato, Missouri, Indianapolis, or Saratoga) are beautiful.
The story is confused by the company’s habit of releasing revised, improved versions of some - but not all - of its older kits. Buy the Enterprise, Hornet, or Yorktown and you get a kit that was well above the average standard in 1972, but pretty basic (and inaccurate) by the standards of 2015. The Yamato that’s on the market now has almost nothing in common with the one Tamiya released in the seventies.
Tamiya doesn’t make junk. But its products, like those of all other companies, have varied in quality over the years. Unlike those of some other companies, Tamiya’s have pretty consistently gotten better.
You May be right . I’ll check . I know the box was very weak and in bad shape .-------- NOPE - it is a very old ( would you believe 1959 ? ) Tamiya kit . Oh, and not as good as the newer kit by their competiter
Wow, that IS an old one! I stand corrected. The Hasegawa “three-deck Akagi” is a quite recent kit - and by all accounts a fine one.
I don’t know when Tamiya kits started showing up in American hobby shops, but I’m pretty sure it was well after 1959. I’d never heard of a Tamiya Akagi - in any scale. It sounds like you’ve got an extremely rare and valuable kit on your hands, Tankerbuilder!i
Well, Tamiya’s website says the company made is first plastic kit, a 1/800 Yamato, in 1960. (The firm started as a sawmill and lumberyard in 1948. It got into wood model kits a couple of years later.) A kit that was released in 1960 might well have a 1959 copyright date.
Does that info work, Tankerbuilder? Is that Akagi kit maybe on 1/800?
Also built a Tamiya Enterprise CV-6 (for the Hollywood Group Build: “Midway,” the Charlton Heston, Glenn Ford film from the '70’s).
I followed research and instructions from Gordon Bjorklund (he posted here years ago with info on CV-6; and I hope I spelled his name right; he is a master ship builder!) and kit-bashed Tamiya’s Hornet with Enterprise; added aftermarket PE and assorted guns he recommended.
I thought she came out OK, even at my level of accomplishment. No issues with parts fit or anything. I’d like to build Yorktown and Hornet at Midway, too, some day.
Hope you’ll have good results with whatever Tamiya ship you work with.
Interesting trivia tidbit about the Hornet & Enterprise kits. They knew they didn’t have the tooling ability (at the time) to represent the single 20mm guns, so they included a length of copper wire from which to cut the barrels. Unfortunately the gun shields are moulded “in situ” on the catwalks and are excessively thick.
It was an interesting approach to the problem though.
I’m surprised to hear about the 20mm guns because Tamiya did a nice job of them with the 1/700 King George V. I still feel as if the KGV and PoW are among the nicest of all 1/700 kits, even though they are limited to waterline only.
Bill
That’s what I mean when I say Tamiya ships were state-of-the-art when they were released, but aren’t necessarily any more. The 20mm guns on that kit probably were the best on any 1/700 kit at the time. (The Hasegawa, Fujimi, and Aoshima ones were oversized blobs.)
My bigger complain about the Tamiya *Yorktown-*class kit is that its island is too thin. One you know that, it becomes obvious (at least to my eye).
When Tamiya announced a “new” Yorktown a couple of years ago, I drooled; I thought the company had taken the opportunity to revise the old kit and fix it (like it had done with the Yamato). No such luck. The Yorktown kit is just a mishmash of parts from the old Enterprise and Hornet. Dang.
Many years ago I came across a liquidation sale and ended up with a whole pile of these kits. I built the Hood, Musashi, Hornet, New Jersey, and Shinano, all of which are long gone due to being destroyed in a move.
I have always been impressed with how clean the molding is on these kits. There is never any flash. The hulls were so crisp and warp free.
Last weekend I decided to do a quick build and started a model of the Gneisenau that I had in the closet for years. After building a few Trumpeter and Dragon kits, I did find the Tamiya kit a little weak in the details, but the fit is still excellent.
That Gneisenau kit is another forty-year-old one. I remember building it when it was new, and being blown away by the amount of detail. Nowadays it doesn’t quite measure up to current standards, but it’s still a good, sound kit - and the only representation of that ship available in 1/700.
The Tamiya Hood, King George V, and Prince of Wales came out at just about the same time, and the same general comments apply to them too. The Prince Eugen and Repulse are much newer. But any of those kits, with a little TLC and some aftermarket photo-etched parts, can be made into an outstanding model.
I just wish Tamiya hadn’t pulled that stunt with the Yorktown…
I have to agree with John about the Tamiya’s Yorktown class carriers, especially when comparing and contrasting them with their depictions of Japanese carriers. Although such a comparison is inappropriate with the later-day Shinano, Zuikaku, and Shokaku, I believe that the kits of the American carriers paled when contrasted against the Junyo and the earlier version of the Shinano.
Bill
I don’t fault Tamiya for making the Hornet and Enterprise kits forty years ago. I DO object to its having cobbled together that Yorktown from forty-year-old parts and releasing it as a “new” kit in the twenty-first century. The hull is undersized, the island is too skinny, and all the guns are, by modern standards, crude.
Just recently Tamiya released a genuinely new 1/700 Saratoga. It’s state-of the art, or close to it. The unsuspecting modeler can’t be blamed for assuming that the “new” Yorktown is of the same quality. I call that low-ball business practice.
As is probably obvious, my fingers are still burning since I got burned by buying that Yorktown kit over the web.
John,
I wouldn’t have expected such a practice from Tamiya, especially given the informed nature of its customer base. I would hate to try to count the volumes of similar comments about other model kits over the years, notably among sailing ship builders. It is a dubious practice that will be quickly identified and published. Tamiya should know better.
I’m sorry to hear that you got burned. Have you contacted them?
Bill
Really, I mean what will they do?
I guess its like buying an Escalade, to find out it’s a Suburban.
But it’s a shame, really.
To paraphrase Group Captain Mandrake, “strange thing is they make such bloody good cameras”.
Bill, I don’t think there’s any point whatever in contacting Tamiya. Those people know what they did.
What really irked me was that the Yorktown was released in the middle of a spate of genuinely revised kits, like the Yamato, and genuinely new ones, like the Missouri, that duplicated, and tremendously improved on, old Fujimi 1/700 kits from the seventies. I assumed the Yorktown was going to be a completely new kit that would fix all the mistakes in the old Enterprise and Hornet. No such luck.
For the record, the “new” Yorktown kit has one genuinely new part: the windbreak at the front of the island. And it has some nice new TBDs (which none of the old Waterline Series consortium kits had). The other aircraft in it are F4Fs and SBDs. I haven’t compared them to the ones that Fujimi used to make, but they’re new to Tamiya.
I don’t think Tamiya’s professional ethics are any different from those of other manufacturers. They pulled similar stunts with their 1/350 American and German battleships. Forty-year-old kits packaged in shiny new boxes at substantially higher prices - while they were releasing a spectacular brand new Yamato.
Caveat emptor, I guess.
John,
The point would be that they would know that they have been caught by their customers. Ideally, in a capitalist economy, corporations take customer complaints seriously. It might not help the immediate situation; your complaint could help prevent a similar problem from arising in the future.
I have no firsthand knowledge about how seriously Tamiya’s businessmen take their customers, but I would imagine that they wish to continue selling their products to such a knowledgeable customer base as ours. I am sure that they are noticing the rise of newer companies such as Trumpeter and Dragon, and are looking over their shoulders.
Besides, it couldn’t hurt.
Bill