If you’re looking to buy the kit, there is good news! There is a faster, less expensive method than trying to get it through Amazon-Japan where I got mine. I found out that manufacturer will sell direct to the USA for a very good price. To buy from the manufacturer,  send an email to the company: info@thermal-kobo.jp. For buyers from other countries. I don’t know what his policy is, but you can always ask.

Price for the kit is 13,000 Yen. Shipping is via EMS (A Chinese Express Mail Service that ends with a USPS delivery) for 2,400 Yen. Payment has to be via Paypal, sending to the email address above.

This is a really good price. Makes the whole thing with express shipping only about $150. I went ahead and ordered a second kit.

The only thing that I’m not so sure about is that the kit is shipped in its own box, but wrapped with a bubblewrap bag. It’s a long box, so it seems like it would be easy to bend in half. But, I received the first kit this way and it was delivered just fine. Then again, I generally have good experiences with the US Postal Service here.

It looks like I might have been their first international sale of this kit, as the owner posted a picture of the kit shipping out to the USA on their Facebook page.

When you order one, please feel free to mention where you heard about it. Ω

Continuing with the detailing now starting with the bow and stern decks.

The bow deck required installation of support beams. The beams are provided pre-cut, but the ends needed to be tapered to fit snugly against the hull planking.

The deck itself is made up of two pre-cut pieces of cedar.

The stern deck is made up of 5 pre-cut boards, but the pieces are of different widths. The instructions don’t show you, but the plans provide the labels, so you can locate the needed pieces. You don’t have to read Japanese, but you do have to match the characters on the plans with those on the parts.

To those familiar with Japanese, the labels are all in the phonetic alphabet known as Katakana. In this case, the parts are:

ウカイ

ウカロ

ウカハ

ウカニ

ウカホ

These characters don’t actually mean anything here – They’re basically no different than labeling parts as A1, C2, etc. Most of the parts in the kit are identified this way.

Something else to note is that the pieces aren’t necessarily placed on the sheets in any order. Efficiency of material was very obviously given precedence here, so related parts may be separated  quite a bit. You can see this by how these deck pieces are located on the laser-cut sheet.

The deck parts were glued up and I then placed them on the hull and traced the edge onto them using a pencil. This was then trimmed by knife and sanded to fit the hull. As I mentioned before, trimming Japanese cedar with a knife can be quite tricky as the wood is soft and the grain is hard, so the knife catches the grain and wants to follow it, so extra care is required.

One thing you’ll notice is that the part labels are etched onto each part, so you have to either hide the labels or sand them off. Or, you could always just ignore them. They’re not that easy to see unless you’re looking closely. In this case, I just glued the boards so that the labels will all be on the underside of the deck.

Adding the Rail

We’ve now come to the stage on the Tosa Wasen model where I became a bit confused about the next step of construction. It involves installing a rail, and I suppose that it may simply be a matter of getting accustomed to traditional Japanese building methods which, as far as I can tell, this kit seems to follow quite closely.

The first problem I ran into was that the ends of the long rail pieces that have to be added first. These are notched to fit to the beams at the bow and stern, but the pieces are too long to fit. So, the notch at one end can be used, but the other end has to be cut to deepen the notch.

More than this, where on a western style ship, we’re accustomed to installing framing and then attaching the rail onto that, with Japanese boats, the process is reversed. The rail is installed to only a few attachment points first, then the supports are added afterwards. This is something that I’ve seen in hull construction of Japanese boats too. The hull planks are edge fastened and bent/clamped into place in the process, and the framing is installed afterwards – Lessons in traditional Japanese boatbuilding!

Of course, this isn’t limited to the Japanese or Asian ship/boat building. Thinking back, I recall local ship modeler and marine archaeologist Ed Von der Porten (he’s written a number of articles that have appeared in Ships in Scale) talk about modeling a Basque whaler and about how frames were added after the planking process had begun.

Anyway, I finally worked it out in my head, and the rail construction progressed.

I completed construction of the rail, adding the pieces that make up the underside. With these in place, it’s a much stronger structure.

To fit the pieces into place, I had to soak the cedar pieces a little bit to impart a slight bend or twist here and there. I took the shortcut of wrapping the pieces with a wet paper towel and putting them in the microwave for about 30 seconds. This was just enough to do the trick.

Along the underside of the rail on the upper hull planks there is a laser-scribed line to help position the underside pieces of the rail.

The pieces glued and clamped into place

After the rail was completed, I went ahead and added the stem and other hull details, including a thick strake located on the upper hull planking, just underneath the recently completed rail.

You may notice that the stem is lighter than the rest of the hull. Like the stern beam, the stem is make of Hinoki or Japanese Cypress instead of Sugi, Japanese Cedar.

Painting the Hull Bottom

Next, it was time to paint the bottom of the hull. The finish of the hull bottoms changed a bit over time. But, what we see as common for the Edo period would be black paint. The kit actually included a roll of narrow yellow masking tape from 3M which worked very well. For paint, I used a model paint sold by Caldercraft as part of their Admiraly Colors line.

There was no particular reason I used this other than to test the paint out. For all other wasen models I’ve built, I used artist’s acrylics Mars Black from Liquitex. In fact, the result using the Caldercraft paint was just a bit shinier than I would have preferred, but it came out fine. I keep trying other hobby paint brands and often end up just coming back to the artist’s acrylics.

While I was at it, I went ahead and added the splash rail, which sits on the bow deck. The joint where the two piece meet and also the bottoms of the pieces had to be beveled to fit properly.

Finally, I built the well area. This was pretty straightforward, though I did start to run into little discrepancies in parts alignment, which is going to happen on kits with pre-cut parts. Also, a reminder that it’s REALLY easy to over sand the kit’s Japanese cedar.

The bottom of the boat will be comprised of covered compartments. So, beams and ledges will be added to seat the deck boards / compartment covers. The well section is the tallest compartment.

Here, I’m adjusting the position of the ledge that I’m gluing into place on one of the well partitions. I used wood from the sheet of deck covers as a guide for exact positioning of the ledge. This assures that the deck covers will be flush with the tops of the partitions.

Here’s the completed well area. Note the ledges glued to the hull.

Before the deck covers can be added, beams and more ledges have to be added. I’ll cover this next time, along with the covers for the bow and stern holds, making the “Ro”, which is the Japanese name for the long sculling oar, and the final accessories such as the anchor and the bailer, etc. The next installment should see the completion of our Tosa Wasen.

With the lower planks in place, there are next two support beams that were glued in place. Like the pair of lower support beams that the lower planks lock into, these upper support beams are notched so that they fit into holes in the upper planks. When the glue on those beams was drying, the upper planks were cleaned up the leading edges were tapered the same way as the lower planks. The lower planks were then glued to the support beams described above.

As with the lower planks, the upper planks were then initially glued only at the transom and at the stem. Fitting the planks was fairly easy at the stern, but was a bit harder at the bow. There, the planks are hard to seat tightly against the stem since there is some overlap between the upper and lower planks.

This definitely took a lot of hand pressure and the use of medium CA glue since I couldn’t get a clamp onto the bow. I just had to hold the planks tight as long as possible until the glue set. At the stern, the planks were much easier to glue. But, I did run into one self-created problem that was actually less of a problem than I’d realized.

The stern edge of the transom should have been lined up with the edge of the notch where you see the rubber bands in the above photo. I cheated a little in order to fix the problem by trimming the leading edge of the notch, effectively moving the notch forward. A beam is supposed to fit precisely into this notch, so I had to sand the stern edge of the planks just enough so the size of that notch was retained.

But, as it turns out, the top of the transom gets sanded flush with the top of the planks and later the whole section gets covered with planks right up agains that beam anyway, so you wouldn’t have been able to tell that the transom didn’t touch the edge of the beam, unless you looked up at it from underneath the boat.

With the planks secured in place, I then ran a thin bead of CA glue all along the inside of the joint between the upper and lower planks. Lots of clamps made sure that the planks were held properly together until the glue set.

After a while, it was safe to then remove the temporary strong-back, which was a nice and satisfying milestone in the build.

With that, the basic hull is complete and we have something that now looks like a boat. There is still the outer stem to add as well as some stern trim that protects the ends of the planks, but aside from that, it’s pretty much time to start detailing.

The next stage of the build is the hull planking.

On a traditional Japanese boat, there are basically only 4 planks, 2 on each side, with the upper planks making a nearly vertical surface. The kit refers to the lower planks as カジキ or Kajiki and the upper planks as タナ or Tana. The term Kajiki is the same term used for the lower planking on the Bekabune as described in Brooks’ book and blog. And in fact, the Tosa term for the upper plank, Tana, is related to that of the Bekabune, which is the compound word Uwa-Tana, but run together the “T” becomes a “D” sound and becomes Uwadana.

Diagrams in the kit show that the leading edge of the lower planks need to be tapered. There are measurements shown in the instructions, but the exactly shape of the tapered area is not precisely defined. It ended up being a matter of getting something to look like the shape shown in the diagram – a shape that reminds me of the tip of a samurai sword.

After tapering the leading edge of the planks, it’s then a matter of fitting the planks on. The laser-cut planks have square openings that line up with square tabs that protrude from the central beams on the model. These are actually located slightly aft of center, but they are at the widest point of the boat.

I found that mating the planks to those notches was a pretty tight fit, but it was good that the fit was snug, as this helps hold things together while gluing. I glued the planks to these notched frames first and let that dry, which seems to be how the instructions want you to do it. Next, the planks were fit to the transom and glued only at the transom.

From what I could tell, it seemed that the top of the planks should be kept low against the frames, so that the planks ended up sticking up above the frames by only a small amount at the stern. On the forward half of the boat, the planks seemed to mostly line up with the top of the frames.

The planks were then glued to the stem, which is called the Miyoshi (mee-yoh-shee). The planks had to be positioned so that the very forward edges were flush with or just barely past the stem. After the glue dried, the rest of the planking was glued to the bottom and the frames using medium CA and the applicator tips supplied in the kit. Those, by the way, were a perfect fit for ZAP brand glue bottles.

I found it a bit of a struggle to hold the boat while trying to glue the lower planks into place. The strong-back in the center is only glued in at the top and bottom of the transom and the stem, so it’s very flexy. It took a while to learn to hold the whole thing while bending the planks and gluing them into place.

I should also mention that the kit never has you soak any of the planking. It’s long and thin enough that it flexes pretty easily. I suppose it might have made sense, as a ship modeler, to try to pre-bend the planks. But, it certainly wasn’t necessary and I managed without soaking or pre-bending the planks.

I left the whole thing to dry and then came back and sanded the upper edges of the lower planks. When dealing with the upper planks, the will overlap the edges of the lower planks, and to make a good bonding surface, or watertight surface in the case of the real boat, the outer edge at the top of the lower plank has to be sanded roughly vertical.

On the real boat, iron nails would be drive into the bottom edge of the upper plank and into this flat edge of the lower plank. Of course, there’s more to it than that, but that’s the basic idea.

The model is just about ready to receive the upper planks or the Uwadana.