Steve, those wooden decks and all the PE details are going to be worth your time. Let us know how the hose reels turn out. I know I thought of doing them on a few carrier projects.
Eagle, welcome, that KGV kit is a really good one to start out on. Fit is good and your don't have to build up all the small AA guns out of a dozen pieces (hee hee).
Well, I jinxed myself in my last posting when I praised how well this kit was going together. I got the hull paint issue corrected and after stripping it down and getting a really nice flat, even coat laid on it, the hull slipped off the paint stand, bounced off the deck of my spray booth, and landed on the floor in a pile of cat fur.
I waited for the mess to dry, again stripped the hull of paint (I am really getting tired of the smell of Easy Off), and again laid a perfect coat of red oxide.
Then the fun began. No matter how many times I test fitted the hull top and bottom before I painted, after both sets were painted with the best paint jobs I ever did, they would not fit up!
I trimmed, filed, and sanded until all mated well, then ran my liquid cement from the inside of the hull making sure none of it runs out and onto my paint job.
Everything looked grand, so I put is aside to go get some lunch. When I came back, the seam on the starboard side seperated, then dried as hard as a rock. ARGGH!
So I ended up cutting the two sections apart and using CA, glued them back together with constant pressure on the seams until the CA was cured. I had a good adhesion between the upper and lower hull, but the CA frosted around the seam, so then I had to mask and touch up the areas that frosted. This is a part I really hate because I never seem to get the mask perfectly strait. But for some reason, everything worked out.
Now I am putting the decks on, and typical Trumpeter, they are not fitting and needed a bunch of trimming.
I got the base all stained and ready to mount the hull.
And now I am fitting out all the deck housings and attaching them to the main deck.