My name is Xiaowei Li. I’m originally from China, and I now live in Germany with my family.
I built a few 1/350 scale warship models when I was living in China, so I’m not completely new to the hobby. However, this is the first 1/350 warship model I’ve built since moving to Germany.
I’m very happy to be back at the workbench, and I hope you enjoy the build. I look forward to sharing it with you and hearing your comments and suggestions.
The build is based on the Border plastic kit, with a number of aftermarket upgrades.
I replaced the kit-supplied funnels with Horizon 3D-printed replacements. Horizon is a small aftermarket company specializing in 3D-printed accessories for 1/350 scale models. The funnels provided in the Border kit are rather poor in quality, so I decided to replace them with Horizon’s much more detailed parts.
The ship’s boats are from Rainbow’s 3D-printed range, while the seaplanes are 3D-printed parts from YouZi. The build also includes a selection of other 3D-printed aftermarket parts and generic photo-etched (PE) accessories.
Overall, the fit of the kit is very good, but I did run into some difficulties when it came to the final assembly of the bridge structure. I couldn’t get everything to seat completely properly, possibly because the tolerances in some areas are a little too tight. Unfortunately, this also resulted in a few small parts coming loose and disappearing during the assembly process.
One thing I would definitely recommend is attaching the seated crew figures to the twin- and triple-mounted 25 mm AA guns before installing the guns on the ship. I left the figures until the very end, which made the job extremely difficult and resulted in the seats on at least three AA mounts being damaged. In the end, apart from the AA guns mounted on the main gun turrets and those at the very front of the bridge, I more or less gave up on adding crew figures to the remaining AA mounts.
And then there are the two boats hanging outboard on either side of the ship. They have always been my nightmare on ship models, and this build was no exception!
