centennialofflight> I picked up the old Aoshima Nagato and Fujimi centennialofflight> Haruna kits for next to nothing at an IPMS centennialofflight> contest this weekend. These are the first centennialofflight> 1/700 WW II warship kits I've acquired and centennialofflight> have now started to develop an interest in WW centennialofflight> II Japanese warships. The painting centennialofflight> instructions in these kits are a little sparse centennialofflight> and I was wondering where I could find some centennialofflight> good IJN reference websites.
centennialofflight> I fear I may be starting down the slippery and centennialofflight> expensive photo-etch path/resin/White Ensign centennialofflight> path with these kits ;^)
Hehe, with these kits you are more likely to be going down the path of scratch-building (carve, glue, fill, sand, repeat ad inifinitum) with some blurry photographs as references, probably reversed :-)
Seriously though, although much much better kits are nowadays available, there is nothing wrong with having a good time with these older kits. Photo-etch might be nice, but no need to buy the high-grade stuff just yet - some old Eduard IJN weapons set, or the Fine Molds ones will be much easier to handle than WEM parts (which would be a bit of a waste on these kits frankly, unless you plan to spend months correcting all their faults).
For references, I wuold say the best is to go an order a set of books. Although in Japanese, the photos of large-scale models in the series books are superb. Try looking for the Gakken books on Kongo (21) class and Nagato class (15) - they should be available over the internet, or maybe even directly from a Kinokuniya store, though they have been discontinued. Here is a list:
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Cheers, and loads of fun!