Space Battleship Yamato

 FINALLY!!!

Well I finally got around to building it!

I got this for Christmas how many years ago? Plus all the DVDs of the original series...which I still haven't gotten all the way through, although I've watched the first four at least twice each.

This is a really cool kit. Comes with a really cool book too.

Funny story here. As you can see it's all in Japanese. And now being in the 21st century we all have these really cool computing devices everyone refers to as phones but we rarely ever use the phone function. That's not the funny part. What I did was found what I thought was a free app 

that can translate using the camera. So I got the app, and it was really cool the way it worked. And I was able to get all the simple instructions that weren't totally obvious from the pictures but the best use was getting the color recommendations. Here's the funny part. Anyone heard of Columbia House? Well this app was one where you get it for free but if you don't say STOP you automatically get set up on a monthly plan. OOOPS! Six months and something like sixty dollars later we figure this out. Oh well, life tax!

This is my first BanDai model and I didn't really realize that it was pretty much a snap tite.

And it's molded in colors so you really don't even need to paint it if you choose.

But I'm going to paint it anyway.

And then you can disassemble it to work on different details later. Pretty cool feature.

I put the most work on the smallest details again. Not quite the dragon tracks but I did have 32 Cosmo Fighters to paint up.

Primed

Painted

Detailed

Here they all are with the disassembled hangar bay.

 

Then I got the idea to add magnets so they could be removed and shown off a bit.

Here's the back section of the hull for the hangar bay and the wave motion engine.

It required a bit of cutting and sanding to make the fit easier. The hangar bay is removeable but as it was it was a really tight fit.

Here's the finished fleet of Cosmo Fighters and the hangar bay ready to be installed.

Half of these are magnetized and removable for display.

Now on to the rest of the ship.

I didn't get many pictures of the build. I was too involved in the actual build, but the model does have some cool features like individual positioning of the guns and turrets.

All the disassembled pieces, superstructure, gun turrets, secondary bridge.

Primed and ready for painting.

I went with pre-shading and then also went back and used some panel liner as well. The bottom hull is standard red and I still had some panzer grey left from the Balkans project and the ship was kind of blue in the show. It turned out to look really good not being standard ship grey. Can't really tell in these pictures though.

Sorry for the brightness of the pictures. I decided to take the pictures outside on a sunny day for some reason thinking it would be good lighting. I guess I'll take more later with more controlled lighting for a later post.

Here's the model with the back panel assembled covering up the hangar bay and engine.

Another neat thing in the kit was a mystery sprue:

Turns out it is a whole other ship model. 

I really enjoyed building and painting this kit. I'll definitely look in to getting more Ban Dai models. Might try a Gundam later on down the line. 

Incidentally this was a project I finished up in August. I just didn't get around to taking pictures of the finished model until this year. 

Next up will be my February project. I already got pictures of that. No long delay (relatively speaking) on the next one. 

So until next time....

Thanks for stopping by and leave some comments if you like.