Those of you who are interested in Woody Joe kits in particular, you might like to know that I’m working on a few writing projects now.
Higaki Kaisen
For quite some time, I’ve had an article in the works on building Woody Joe’s Higaki Kaisen. The big hang up for me has been detailing the background of the vessel and making sure that my Japanese history is correct. Nothing worse than invalidating your work with shoddy research. Fortunately, I have some great human resources that have been extremely helpful. In addition, I’ve been piecing together many pieces from the Internet to create for myself a better understanding of Japanese coastal transports.
The target is Seaways’ Ships in Scale magazine, which published my kit review of the Higaki Kaisen, among other things. So, this will be a good follow-up to that article. From the size of this article, I expect it would come out in 3-4 parts.
The article is basically done, but I need to review and do some fine tuning. Then, it’s off for review. Probably, this will be submitted to the editors at Ships in Scale sometime in January. After that, it’s usually many months before it sees print. Maybe Summer time.
Sir Winston Churchill
Woody Joe recently released an update to their British sail training schooner kit and it’s a beautiful kit that looks to be both detailed and quite buildable. I received the kit from Woody Joe and started writing about it immediately. However, I’m considering that the article this time would be much more interesting to readers as an article about building the kit, not just reviewing it.
I’m not quite sure yet. I’ve written three out-of-the-box review articles in Ships in Scale on Woody Joe kits. I’ve tried to make each article a little different in flavor, focusing on reading Japanese characters in one article, discussing the Japanese ship model society The Rope in another, and historical information and construction issues to watch out for in the third.
I don’t know what kind of “extra” I could give the new article, so maybe it should be about building it. There might be some other ideas that I’m going to have to bat around for a bit. For one, Billing Boats makes a kit of the same ship in exactly the same scale, and it would be nice to see how the two compare. But, there are two problems I run into with that. First, I need the Billing Boats kit, and second, being that I’m doing some work for the U.S. importer of Billing Boats products, there then comes a conflict of interests. Especially if the Woody Joe kit puts the Billing Boats kit to shame.
But, the problem with making this a build article is that, I then have yet another project to build, with no article possible until the model is complete. And, I know I have too many projects already and putting off other projects that I want to get to, or need to get back to.
Hacchoro Build Notes
If you recall, I built Woody Joe’s kit of the 8-oared fishing boat some time back. As I went along, I translated the instructions as best I could and recorded them. They’re not complete, but I’m now shoring up the missing translation parts. In addition, I’ve written up my own introduction on the kit and adding some of my own personal notes.
I’m not sure where the Hacchoro document is going, but I did promise I would send my own translations to Woody Joe and to Zootoyz. They may use them in some way. My goal is to make a complete document that could potentially be made available to builders of the kit, either directly by Woody Joe and Zootoyz, or as a download from this site.
This one is pretty close to being done, depending on how much time I set aside from model building. But, I have a couple friends building the kit now who I’m sure would like to see the notes done in time for them to use. We’ll see how it goes. Ω
Ship Modeler 