M o d e l W a r s h i p s . c o m Aoshima 1/700 Oil Supply Ship Hayasui Photo-etched Parts Set

Reviewed May 2018

As is the trend these days, Aoshima has released a companion set of photo-etch for its 1/700 IJN Hayasui oil tanker kit. Given the uniquity of the offering, it is a most welcome addition. It is a reasonably comprehensive set of relief etched brass. Due to the many multiples of a given part, there are well over 100 parts on the fret.

Included are: main and upper deck railings, the base and trestles for the midships catwalk, aircraft platform trolleys, trolley wheels, rails and turntables, the catapult, aircraft propellers, an RDF antenna, numerous treaded metal platform surfaces including platform bases for the heavy and light AA weapons, a decking for the top of the aft superstructure, access and vertical ladders, the booms and hooks for the aircraft handling cranes, boat and paravane davits, numerous outrigger supports for the columns that support the aircraft handling deck, and several sets of pulleys and lines for the various cargo handling booms.

It’s a well-engineered fret. The main deck railings are correctly of the drooped chain variety and conform to the curvature of the decks. They also appear to be the correct scale height (900mm actual), the correct number of cross bars, and are reasonably fine in thickness. Worth noting is that, as a naval auxiliary constructed as such from the start, the ship came with the standard two bar drooped chain railings typical of warships, and not the rigid three bar railings that the civilian tankers were equipped with.

Most notable is that the access ladders all require turning the individual steps out. This is another detail that conforms favorably to the more recent photo etch versions currently offered by dedicated photo etch companies such as Five Star or Rainbow. The aircraft trolley rails are also very finely rendered. Perhaps my favorite items on the fret are the lines and pulleys for the cargo booms.

In my opinion, merchant ship type cargo handling and rigging lines of this era were far more complicated than the sort of rigging carried by a warship, even those with handling cranes. For merchantmen, cargo handling typically relied on cargo boom arrangements guided by a multitude of lines and winches. A typical boom would have a set of lines or cables mounted underneath and tethered to a deck winch just for lifting cargo. A second set of lines, also hooked up to a second winch, were mounted on top of the boom and used to raise the and lower the boom. And, either a third winch, or manual power, tethered to still more lines, would be used to actually move the end of the boom around.

Aoshima is the first company that I am aware of to actually duplicate the separate upper and lower sets of cargo lines and pulleys for this type arrangement in 1/700 scale, though they did begin this trend with the photo etch fret for their new Kamikawa Maru class kits. They have continued the trend here. Though it would be close to impossible to accurately scale the lines in 1/700, Aoshima has done an admirable job of rendering those lines. Kudos to them. I do suspect that they will be easy to bend, so careful handling is a must.

Brass Rod

Also included is a separate clear bag with twenty brass rod sections of equal length. These are meant to replace the plastic supports for the aircraft handling deck included with the kit. The photo-etch fret has numerous outrigger fins that are meant to be glued to the supports.

Deck

A wood planked deck sticker for the top of the aircraft handling deck is yet another part of the set. It has cutouts for the trolley turntables, and for the trolley rails. It has self-adhesive backing to attach itself to the kit handling deck.

Instructions

The set comes with a two-sided sheet of instructions, consisting of color photograph examples of placement of parts on the kit itself, along with some illustrations of the assembly of selected parts. I think the instructions to be very straightforward, even if my photography makes it seem a little lackluster.

Overall, I find this a very satisfying set of photo etch. The only omission that I can find is the lack of any type of funnel grill, which was typically part of a regular naval auxiliary’s equipment for a steam boilered power plant. It could be that the references are just too unspecific on this detail.

This set was courtesy of my wallet, via HobbyLink Japan. The cost, less shipping, was US$16.00. Note that this is the same fret that was originally offered as part of the original Hayasui Super Detail kit. The original production run of this set was sold separately and soon sold out, but Aoshima recently released a second production run of sets.