The first thing I want to do with the Pola is to check how the decks are going to fit, as I want to paint them and fit the wooden deck before gluing to the hull.
The main decks come in four parts. Two lower parts forming the center and rear deck. And another two forming the higher fore and mid deck. They come off the sprue and clean up quite easily.
Unfortunately, although the decks seem to go on OK, they aren't steady enough to get all in together, The fore deck. This needs to flashy painting, but more on that in a little while.
The rear deck. This will get one of the wooden decks.
The middle decks. The smaller one, upper deck rests on the fore deck. This will get two sections of wooden hull. When using glue, there shouldn't be much of an issue with the deck fit.
The fore deck has red and white stripes, which should be interesting to do. The deck was primed with grey Badger Stynylrez, then sprayed with Basic White from Mr Paint.
This then needs to be masked. I used the deck fittings at the bow to get the first white band masked off. The instructions don't give an indication of the angle or width of the bands, so guess work comes into play. For a first try, I masked the bands with 6mm Tamiya tape, but that didn't want to line up OK, so that was removed. The next plan was to use 2.5mm Aizu tape, then fill in with Tamiya tape. This also didn't work since the 2.5mm tape didn't go over the detail very well. So time for plan C. This was to use 1mm Aizu tape, but this wouldn't stay straight across the detail, so that was removed too. Then I remembered that I had some Tamiya masking sheet, so I decided to give that a go before deciding to model the Pola pre-war when the recognition bands wouldn't have been there. I estimated the bands to be 15mm wide, so cut off a strip of sheet 15mm wide. Using short lengths to give the right separation, then applied strips across the deck. This worked, but half way down the deck I realised the bands were too wide, so off they came again. I then decided to try 13mm wide bands and cut some strips and applied the mask. One thing I did was push the tape over detail suck as pointy things and the anchor chain capstans, keeping the tape as flat as possible. These details need masking again. The tape doesn't suck down perfectly, but good enough considering that I can touch up the white where needed.
The deck was painted with a couple of light coats of MRP-41 Red from Mr Paint, and left to dry.
When dry, the tape was removed, and I'm happy with the result. Some touch up is required of the white, but a lot less than I thought. Some of the deck fittings will need painting and weathering, but that can wait until the painting stages.
When it's time to paint the decks, the stripes will be masked. Next thing is to assemble the superstructure parts ready to paint them.