A kit of a unique ship that I had issues with. Painting is difficult due to small details on the deck of the ship. Antenna are difficult to attach, and can be easily snapped off if you're not careful. Some holes need to be drilled out on the deck. The rear turret is lower than the middle turret, which causes the middle turret to block the rear guns at a certain elevation when facing directly forward, so take that into consideration before choosing the gun position and gluing. Auxiliary Boats / Lifeboats are placed loosely behind the bridge tower, or on the deck. Some lifeboats are attached on outward-facing davits, which are fragile. Some holes remain on the edge of the ship deck where additional lifeboats would be attached, but were not included in the kit. Overall, this kit seemed poorly designed for being a Tamiya model kit.

This is a quality model kit, but not for a beginner. The detail of the ship is beautiful. Instructions easy to follow, but you will need to have some patience with parts of this, since some are very small, and time needed for some parts to dry before going forward. It is a bit of a challenge but with some small tipped hand tools to help you, it moves along quite nicely. I only wish I had gotten the full hull version, as I'm not really a waterline kind of modeler. None the less, I enjoyed building this model, so will you.

For the price of this ship I would say that it has great detail and would recommend it to any beginner modeler. I have been reading these other reviews and thought that any experienced ship modeler should recognize that the detail on this ship is not that impressive. The details are not sharp at all and the deck is really simplistic.They are really quite disappointing if you compare them to newer kits of any modeling company. I would definitely recommend this for any inexperienced modeler looking to practice their skills or someone who just wants an easy Nelson kit to build.