1:700 Bismarck

White covers on the guns?? Which guns, the main armament or the 150mm, or the 105mm AA guns?

If you're referring to the main (38cm) guns, I can only assume you mean the canvas blast bags at the location where the barrel enters the turret. These are not included on the kit, but can be easily made by applying white glue to the joint and painting once dry.

A major rule of modeling...never expect what you see on the box art to represent what you get in the box.

Jeff

Thank you, are you talking about a thick elmers type glue?

yes

Making blast bags with Elmer's will be even easier if you mix some water-soluble paint in with it. Let the glue/paint mixture thicken till it will go on in a nice, gooey glob. If the mixture wants to run into parts of the turret where it doesn't belong, don't despair. Allot enough time to that particular modeling session so you can keep an eye on its progress as it dries. After an hour or so the "blast bag" will have coagulated into a fairly stiff mass that you can form into a realistic shape with a toothpick.

The brand of paint I normally use for this sort of thing is PolyScale. I imagine Testor's acrylic would work just as well, but I haven't tried it.

Take a look at some photos of the real ship. Some blast bags are light grey, some are canvas-colored, and some are black.

OMG, Jeff ... you mean that boxtop art is just the artist's CONCEPTION?????? Fine, just destroy my known universe.


*chuckles*

Hey! Artists get tired, bored, lazy and sometimes just make stuff up!!

Dan ;-)

When I was a kid, I'd get really ticked off if there was something on the box art that wasn't in the box. Especially those old Revell kits, where the model subject would be in the foreground, and something (usually trailing smoke and on fire) was in the background.

Then I remember seeing photos of built-ups on the box art, and thought "wow, I hope mine comes out looking that nice". Later on in life I'd see them and say, "wow, how could they put such a terrible model on their box art?". Now, I really don't pay much attention, it's what's inside that matters.

Sorry to implode your universe.

Jeff

The most ridiculous example of this sort of thing that I can recall appeared in a Revell ad, in one of the British magazines (Scale Models, I think) quite a few years ago. Must have been in the late seventies - a sad time for Revell. The company had just released its rather sorry 1/125 Type VII U-boat. The kit came with a stand, the nameplates on each side of which were shaped like silhouettes of torpedoes. The stand, if I remember correctly, was about 1/4 or 1/3 the length of the model. Some artist had painted a dramatic picture of an actual U-boat charging, submerged, toward an Allied convoy in the North Atlantic - with a gigantic torpedo hanging underneath. Apparently the artist had worked from a photo of the finished model sitting on the stand. And nobody at Revell noticed.

Right about that same time there was a bit of a scandal when the boxes of several Revell aircraft kits turned up bearing photographs of completed models that had quite obviously originated with Tamiya and Hasegawa. (The first hint was the fact that the models in the pictures had countersunk panel lines; those of the kits inside the boxes were raised.) The official explanation was that the photos were of "prototype models." The kits in question got repackaged shortly thereafter; there were rumors of a lawsuit, but I don't know what actually happened. My suspicion, given the way the management of the company was operating in those days, is that those people genuinely didn't know there was a significant difference between their products and those of the big Japanese firms. An F-16, after all, is an F-16.

That was a Dark Age in the American plastic kit industry. I hope we aren't on the verge of another one.

Speaking of box art; I feel that the better the box art-the better the kit.

Just my 2 scents (phew!)

Dan

Any of the 1/350 clones from ModelHobby or Kangman would classify as having nice box art, but nothing resembling a true replica inside the box.

They do have nice boxes however.