ModelWarships reveiw

Building the Samek Prinz Eugen
in 1/700 scale Part 1
by Gabor

I have to agree with Timothy's in-box reveiw of this kit. The main weakness of the kit is the assembly instruction sheet. It requires carefull studying altough it’s not as difficult as it seems. The sub-assemblies can be separated well and I think there are four sub-assemblies: the bridge section, the stack, the aft superstructure with the mast and the armament.

Altough the kit represents the ship in her 1945 form if you have enough reference material you can build an earlier version. I’ve modelled the Prinz Eugen as she appeared at the end of 1944 because I’ve already seen several kits showing her in 1941/42 but I hardly saw models showing her at the end of the war.

I started the assembly with the hull. I’d like to show you a method which can be useful if you paint with handbrush. I call this method ’scarving’ and I do it on each kit where the upperwork and deck is molded together. What is this method ?

Take a blade and scarve a small ’canal’ alongside the basic of the upperwork (see picture….., the ’canal’ is marked with a thin red line). Repeat this procedure at the breakwater. Do it slow because if you cut the deck or the upperwork, the scarve can be seen after painting. Why is it good ? Because the colors of the deck and upperwork are different. That small ’canal’ will barrier the mixing of the colors.

click images
to enlarge

The next phase was the painting of the main deck and the basic of the upperwork. Now you can see how useful that ’canal’ was.

The next was the first thing what I didn’t understand. The basics of the bridge section and the aft superstructure are two large parts. I had to cut out a small piece from one of them because the parts are long ! This cutting is marked on the instruction sheet but Samek doesn’t ’explain’to you why. I glued the PE parts to their places and painted the two parts

Then I proceeded to assembly the bridge section. It consists of 6 parts. Fit was superb here. The only modification what I did was building shields from cardboard paper around the target designators ( see picture….). The other thing what I’ve noticed is that do not glue part 1 to 6 (the ladder to the mast) because you can’t push them through that small hole on the top of the bridge section. I would give one general advice only. Always check (from different angles) that the parts fit well and the whole section is straight.

The next was the stack. There is one noticeable difference between the kit and the real stack. The catwalk between the two AA platforms doesn’t have a shield as it can be seen on the kit but it has a one-bar rail, furthermore there’s a smaller catwalk above it.

For an in-box reveiw of this kit click here.

The next will be the building of the aft superstructure and the mast. Coming soon !

Back to menu

On to part 2