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An ultimate and highly detailed modeler’s guide to building IJN Haruna in late 1944 fit. Targeted to 1/350 scale, but suitable for all other scales.

Kagero has produced over a dozen books on WW2 warships that use computer graphics in 3D to provide superb detail. This latest book on the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) battlecruiser/fast battleship Haruna is once again an ultimate resource for knowing what the ship looked like in late 1944. Other time periods are not depicted. This book is an ideal companion to 1/350 kits of the Haruna (Fujimi), but is also an ultimate guide to other scales.

Airfix is releasing all sorts of interesting/strange subjects in their current burst of productivity and this is one of them. It's an old kit that originally dates from 1972, at one point was motorized, and is now billed as part of their Museum Collection. I selected it thinking it would be a fun diversion from my more "intense" projects. Wrong. This is not a simple build. You need to pay attention to what's going on and what goes where and, because it's a cutaway, what needs to be painted before you do anything. There are leftover parts when you're done that I can only assume were once part of the motorization, and some of the rest of the parts are similar to each other, so you need to pay attention to parts' numbers. Be careful during assembly, as some parts need to go together in a certain order and in particular orientations.