Kit

The kit is produced by Academy, a well-known company who is known for producing quality mid range priced model kits. The box art work in outstanding and shows the USS Missouri at sea. The kit can be built in her WW2 and Korean War configuration. There are no modern weapons provided with this kit for the Desert Storm configuration. This kit belongs to Academy’s 1/700 “Modelers Edition”.

The kit consists of over 140 parts and comes on five gray sprues, four hull red sprues, one photo etch sheet, one masking sheet, and one sheet of decals. The parts are nicely molded with no flash what so ever. All panel lines are engraved and all the sprues have small gates. The instruction manual comes in 2 sections. Manual 1 shows the suggested assembly of the hull and main deck through 10 steps starting with a decision to build either the full hull version or the water line version. If you choose to build the full hull version the, the hull comes as two pieces, the forward half and the aft half molded in hull red. The seam line ends up being located just forward of the main deck main gun. The main deck comes a one piece molded in gray plastic. Manual 2 shows the assembly of the super structure decks, and progressing through the mast and funnel construction.

Assembly

This kit is a high quality designed kit so the fit is outstanding! I chose to build the full hull, which fit together with no filler required. I finished construction of the hull and then decided to use the masks to the paint the decks. The kit is molded in color of hull red and haze gray (except for the main and subsequent upper decks suggested color of deck blue). I chose to try out the deck masks and paint the decks the blue, mask them, and then paint the rest haze gray. The fit of the deck masks was outstanding. It takes some patience to get them to lay down exactly as there are cutouts in the masks for the deck features. Once I had the masks positioned correctly I painted the haze gray and had no problems with the haze gray bleeding under the masks onto the deck blue. I strayed from the instructions by fully finishing a deck and then adding it to model. There is also a photo etched sheet for all the suggested railings. There is a nice diagram on where to bend each section of railing to make them fit. There is also a photo etched radar dish and mast provided instead of the plastic molded one. It’s quite fiddly.

I had no problems with gluing together any of the remaining assemblies and did not have to use any filler at all. But there are many small highly detailed deck, antenna, gun, and radar parts which require the use of tweezers and a large magnifying glass when installing them on the model. The tiny parts are very detailed and fit exactly.

Photoetch

As already stated there is a sheet of photo etch provided for the railings and for the radar dish. The PE for the railings has to be bent into the correct shape, but there are instructions on where to bend exactly. You just need to test fit it to get the proper angle.

Painting

I painted the overall ship with Tamiya Haze Gray, the lower hull with Tamiya Hull Red, and the deck with Testors Dark Sea Blue. The funnel was painted Tamiya Flat Black. The masks provided in the kit work really well and finished kits looks really nice.

Decals

The decals are very nice. The hull number decals are printed in standard white with black shadow for the two hull numbers and stern name. There are also decals provided for the US Flag. The decals are printed within register lay down with no silvering.

Overall the kit is a joy to build and builds into a handsome ship! The fit and detail is outstanding with no filler required.

My thanks to Academy, and IPMS USA for the opportunity to build this great kit. I look forward to building more Academy kits in the future.